Fishing
At the seams of the coastland where cratered mud roams the pathways and the truculence of certain near amphibious bird species is met with laughing intrigue and breadcrumbs they sojourned, the two. On a task called exile or leisure or vocation. Marked on their schedules a dedication to step off the wheel on which they trudged and abscond together to a thing near sacramental in its colloquial reputation. That banded rite as old almost as mankind itself. Once it had been performed for subsistence only but now it was the relaxation of many who pine for the stringent customs of a bygone era reprised. For unfiltered air and sun and stinking shore. Reacquainting themselves with a discipline they might not ever have to know, a luxury that can abrade a man's contentment the way the leak of a busted faucet can set his mind to ruin. An itch. The single, small yearning of a muscle so atrophied it could scarcely be said to still be in the body at all. It was there, a remnant instinctual, but not in everyone. And he wasn't sure if it was in him, though he'd done it on several occasions before and gathered a rubric from them at least positive overall. Enjoying more than not enjoying it. No regrets for having gone; appreciating its value even if it would never sit atop the itinerary of things he most liked to do. The boredom of it was an aspect inescapable as much he would deny and fight against it. He did not want to think of it so. He wanted a passion for it. He wanted to love it as the man loved it. But he would instead have to consign to holding the time between them alone and engaged itself as the jewel most paramount, regardless of what activity lay inside it. For as uncomfortable and necessary as it equally was.
They carried fiberglass accoutrements and a chest of munitions; old purchases dusted from a storage cavern whose single light bulb not so much illuminated its contents as revealed the number of shadows there. An abundance of cobwebs impervious to habitual cleaning regimen and the breach where flood runoff drained from mulched earth onto ancestral valuables and had destroyed them. He had patched the fissure, the man. And he worked alone. Meticulous painting with an expensive sealant after others had proven failures. A gaudy vomit of blue on his t-shirt and the perforated concrete vowed to be painted over. He taught that the one who lays his claim to a piece of land sentences himself to combat with nature continuously. That he must route it from the sidewalk cracks and the gutters and the crawl spaces and does so with the exertion of his own strength. This more than anything else the heraldry of manhood. Burden. The shelving was left alone. Watching from them were artifacts of the child's seasons passed. The crumpled, blackened hide of papermache on the volcano that had once erupted red with the alchemy of food coloring, vinegar, and baking soda. The replica of the Empire State Building he made for him with cardboard and graphing paper, the Lego's on its peak the child's one contribution. The ingenuity and instruction of the man in every corner, in every record of his life paved for eventual independence. For a life of resourcefulness, well versed and well handled. A life like the man's own, gone out and made ahead of him. And the task before them now was much the same. Lessons of the physical in its toil and of the mind in its lethargy. The passing of the torch one spark at a time.
They had left the car with a styrofoam box like a jail cell thrown in with live bait to be tortured and killed thereafter. Drowned, skewered. Ideally eaten. He was apprehensive with the metal barb and the sacrificial bug but he didn't want to show it. Hesitation behind the rifle scope. Mercy even for this writhing, alien pest soon to expire anyway. The man did it for him, perhaps knowing his fear or just in an eager confidence to do it right. The hook flew slack into jade glistened surf wearing the cricket with its thorax impaled completely through. The man had chosen the buoy with the thin tail and the red top and its heaviness sunk the bait further down. He had chosen with an aim for experimentation. If not this one then another, so that even his failures could yield a profit. The munition chest was furnished with a raucous slur of bait, tackle, and lure in a myriad of caliber and designation. Fake worms and fake crawdads and fake minnows in their spangled pile. Marshmallows once used to entice trout, apparently unsuccessful. There were extra spools of line and grappled hooks of various shape and diameter and the onus was on the practitioner to discern of them and attach the right ones to the rod, like so. He showed him how to thread the line through the needle's eye, to allot a certain length after for the bobber. Not too long that you'd risk catching the sharp point in the sediment hidden below, but not too short that it had nowhere to go if it discovered a home inside the puckered lips of a trout or a bluegill. But it never went so fortunately for him. He considered it a historic victory just to get a single puny sliver of metallic scale, fin, and eyeball up and out of the shoal. Caught, or perhaps given, and then thrown back. Its vertebra flopping about the air's shallow descent in weightless proximity above the water.
The man was by no means an expert and as he had gotten older the child came to know this. But by comparison he would always be a master of the craft, always with answers and illustrations, and it was by comparison that he'd always see him. The inerrant form of his cast and the supple metric of his reel. Pull up and to the side. Gentle; easy now. The line invisible but for the divot at the membrane where the lure danced below the surface and the rippled quake of every agitation diffused no matter how infinitesimal. Unending movement in spite of their stillness, their tranquil protest. The silence supplanted between them a precarious truce stewed with monosyllabic call and response like Morse code carried over the task and whatever topics of import came to them. Searching the brick wall for any gap of compromised mortar and pushing it. Tactfully measured in timing, parlance, and transparency as they negotiated. Negotiating what? When he did talk the man tended to lecture in a rambling redundancy that left the child bereft. Do you want me to talk to you or do you want me to listen to you? He took in, he observed. He saw often in the man shadows of himself revolving. The way he spoke, walked. The deductive passageways of his reasoning. He struggled against them in some rebellious unease as though he were not already his own person, as though he could be anything but. A reflection and an individual. To the child the father is the first man and, for a time, the only. The man by which all others are measured for good and for ill. The man that even in his absence creates a silhouette demanding to be filled with shrunken, phantom expectation. His own father had been a hard and bitter man. A cold stolid boulder of sedentary granite. Who had taught prejudice and stubborn pride that remained like the afterimage of a photograph flashed. The mirage fading, fading over time.
What had it looked like when he went as a boy himself? Did he pierce the live bait with his own fingers and kill the prize once he wrangled it inevitably to shore? Surely so, if his father had ever taken him. Better at this even then. His daughter had been too when she'd gone. The skinny dark haired girl triumphant over a bounty of bass and crappie she'd excoriate and feast upon. The man never had a proclivity for hunting, the child knew, and the aversion was a point of concurrence for them both. They were too soft hearted, they surmised. But not enough for this, hunting just by another name. This prey seemed hardly alive, at least not in the way mammalian game was. Its fur and vocal facility. The sentient gaze and the size of its body a furnace burning with some semblance of soul, lesser but not unfamiliar. These creatures were practically made to be eaten, the man thought. They could safely be consumed raw, after all. Plucked right out of the white stream and chomped into like manna from heaven. Providence made nevertheless to be haggled and fought for. Pull the tooth with the pliers wracking around for the chance at a meal if your skill is articulate and your patience absolute. God the gamesman. The amberjack's lidless eyes daubed the two opposing halves of its face and the moist plop of its maw choked aghast in the atmosphere. Dumb, brainless creature. But it had a mind enough to know its dying and to throw itself away if it could. The slapping of its dorsal fin on the deck, torsional musculature in furious rapture. Until the knife was brought through its temple and it settled and whatever force stirred inside it departed in the redness that mixed with the saltwater. Silken ribbons in the brine. The blood the life and the currency with which it is purchased.
The wake behind their canoe fanned like a feathered pass of cement beneath a gray autumnal reticence. Quiet mist on the river bow. Cold. Sleet of deciduous leaves in the folds of their rowing. Rowing in attempted unison but ramshackle, mismatched. Northeastern country near the mountains; this a single thread of tributary from the Smokies' runoff, one of many. There they had eaten a trough-full of good country cookin and set upon the river alone. A laconic, easy course. Making him want almost for the tempestuous rapids of some channels where you have to wear helmets and sign wavers. Maybe next time. After procuring your tools the first step taken is always in finding the right spot, whether you walk or row to it. At the lakeside you want an area that is open, relatively, but vacant and sequestered enough that you aren't bothered. This can be difficult, depending on the day and the crowd. Fourth of July weekend. Boats on the Percy Priest late into the night. Through the night entire, their neon luminance smeared gemstones on the waves underneath them. Aflame with the thrum of party anthems and laughter and drinking. Waking sunburned, hungover, seasick. No, not then. A summer's wanton Saturday afternoon. An alcove not too far from the parking lot mostly devoid of mud and with a slope comfortable to sit on. Humps in the grass and rooted outgrowths. The stench of the lake was unavoidable. Some odor of rotting fish abounding unseen. The dog had once ground its back into a skeletal corpse on the trail, the black curtain of its mane glinted with oil slick and rancid. There's a coolness to any body of water even in the heat. Brisk splashes on your fingertips in undulant surf mirroring the sun, reflecting and refracting kaleidoscopic. The ocean's seamless horizon the perfect double of the sky, seeming to spit out the sun amid cushioned aurorae at dawn. They had driven to the Atlantic and awoken hours before daybreak and boarded a ship that sent them into exhausted nausea and injury. Time, money burned. Worthwhile, still. Worthwhile always. Not in spite of the unpleasantries but because of them. They are all apart of the test, and beyond anything else that is its nature. A test of one's perseverance. For father, for son. When the afternoon had begun to wane they called it and packed up their things, leaving empty-handed and no poorer.
They carried fiberglass accoutrements and a chest of munitions; old purchases dusted from a storage cavern whose single light bulb not so much illuminated its contents as revealed the number of shadows there. An abundance of cobwebs impervious to habitual cleaning regimen and the breach where flood runoff drained from mulched earth onto ancestral valuables and had destroyed them. He had patched the fissure, the man. And he worked alone. Meticulous painting with an expensive sealant after others had proven failures. A gaudy vomit of blue on his t-shirt and the perforated concrete vowed to be painted over. He taught that the one who lays his claim to a piece of land sentences himself to combat with nature continuously. That he must route it from the sidewalk cracks and the gutters and the crawl spaces and does so with the exertion of his own strength. This more than anything else the heraldry of manhood. Burden. The shelving was left alone. Watching from them were artifacts of the child's seasons passed. The crumpled, blackened hide of papermache on the volcano that had once erupted red with the alchemy of food coloring, vinegar, and baking soda. The replica of the Empire State Building he made for him with cardboard and graphing paper, the Lego's on its peak the child's one contribution. The ingenuity and instruction of the man in every corner, in every record of his life paved for eventual independence. For a life of resourcefulness, well versed and well handled. A life like the man's own, gone out and made ahead of him. And the task before them now was much the same. Lessons of the physical in its toil and of the mind in its lethargy. The passing of the torch one spark at a time.
They had left the car with a styrofoam box like a jail cell thrown in with live bait to be tortured and killed thereafter. Drowned, skewered. Ideally eaten. He was apprehensive with the metal barb and the sacrificial bug but he didn't want to show it. Hesitation behind the rifle scope. Mercy even for this writhing, alien pest soon to expire anyway. The man did it for him, perhaps knowing his fear or just in an eager confidence to do it right. The hook flew slack into jade glistened surf wearing the cricket with its thorax impaled completely through. The man had chosen the buoy with the thin tail and the red top and its heaviness sunk the bait further down. He had chosen with an aim for experimentation. If not this one then another, so that even his failures could yield a profit. The munition chest was furnished with a raucous slur of bait, tackle, and lure in a myriad of caliber and designation. Fake worms and fake crawdads and fake minnows in their spangled pile. Marshmallows once used to entice trout, apparently unsuccessful. There were extra spools of line and grappled hooks of various shape and diameter and the onus was on the practitioner to discern of them and attach the right ones to the rod, like so. He showed him how to thread the line through the needle's eye, to allot a certain length after for the bobber. Not too long that you'd risk catching the sharp point in the sediment hidden below, but not too short that it had nowhere to go if it discovered a home inside the puckered lips of a trout or a bluegill. But it never went so fortunately for him. He considered it a historic victory just to get a single puny sliver of metallic scale, fin, and eyeball up and out of the shoal. Caught, or perhaps given, and then thrown back. Its vertebra flopping about the air's shallow descent in weightless proximity above the water.
The man was by no means an expert and as he had gotten older the child came to know this. But by comparison he would always be a master of the craft, always with answers and illustrations, and it was by comparison that he'd always see him. The inerrant form of his cast and the supple metric of his reel. Pull up and to the side. Gentle; easy now. The line invisible but for the divot at the membrane where the lure danced below the surface and the rippled quake of every agitation diffused no matter how infinitesimal. Unending movement in spite of their stillness, their tranquil protest. The silence supplanted between them a precarious truce stewed with monosyllabic call and response like Morse code carried over the task and whatever topics of import came to them. Searching the brick wall for any gap of compromised mortar and pushing it. Tactfully measured in timing, parlance, and transparency as they negotiated. Negotiating what? When he did talk the man tended to lecture in a rambling redundancy that left the child bereft. Do you want me to talk to you or do you want me to listen to you? He took in, he observed. He saw often in the man shadows of himself revolving. The way he spoke, walked. The deductive passageways of his reasoning. He struggled against them in some rebellious unease as though he were not already his own person, as though he could be anything but. A reflection and an individual. To the child the father is the first man and, for a time, the only. The man by which all others are measured for good and for ill. The man that even in his absence creates a silhouette demanding to be filled with shrunken, phantom expectation. His own father had been a hard and bitter man. A cold stolid boulder of sedentary granite. Who had taught prejudice and stubborn pride that remained like the afterimage of a photograph flashed. The mirage fading, fading over time.
What had it looked like when he went as a boy himself? Did he pierce the live bait with his own fingers and kill the prize once he wrangled it inevitably to shore? Surely so, if his father had ever taken him. Better at this even then. His daughter had been too when she'd gone. The skinny dark haired girl triumphant over a bounty of bass and crappie she'd excoriate and feast upon. The man never had a proclivity for hunting, the child knew, and the aversion was a point of concurrence for them both. They were too soft hearted, they surmised. But not enough for this, hunting just by another name. This prey seemed hardly alive, at least not in the way mammalian game was. Its fur and vocal facility. The sentient gaze and the size of its body a furnace burning with some semblance of soul, lesser but not unfamiliar. These creatures were practically made to be eaten, the man thought. They could safely be consumed raw, after all. Plucked right out of the white stream and chomped into like manna from heaven. Providence made nevertheless to be haggled and fought for. Pull the tooth with the pliers wracking around for the chance at a meal if your skill is articulate and your patience absolute. God the gamesman. The amberjack's lidless eyes daubed the two opposing halves of its face and the moist plop of its maw choked aghast in the atmosphere. Dumb, brainless creature. But it had a mind enough to know its dying and to throw itself away if it could. The slapping of its dorsal fin on the deck, torsional musculature in furious rapture. Until the knife was brought through its temple and it settled and whatever force stirred inside it departed in the redness that mixed with the saltwater. Silken ribbons in the brine. The blood the life and the currency with which it is purchased.
The wake behind their canoe fanned like a feathered pass of cement beneath a gray autumnal reticence. Quiet mist on the river bow. Cold. Sleet of deciduous leaves in the folds of their rowing. Rowing in attempted unison but ramshackle, mismatched. Northeastern country near the mountains; this a single thread of tributary from the Smokies' runoff, one of many. There they had eaten a trough-full of good country cookin and set upon the river alone. A laconic, easy course. Making him want almost for the tempestuous rapids of some channels where you have to wear helmets and sign wavers. Maybe next time. After procuring your tools the first step taken is always in finding the right spot, whether you walk or row to it. At the lakeside you want an area that is open, relatively, but vacant and sequestered enough that you aren't bothered. This can be difficult, depending on the day and the crowd. Fourth of July weekend. Boats on the Percy Priest late into the night. Through the night entire, their neon luminance smeared gemstones on the waves underneath them. Aflame with the thrum of party anthems and laughter and drinking. Waking sunburned, hungover, seasick. No, not then. A summer's wanton Saturday afternoon. An alcove not too far from the parking lot mostly devoid of mud and with a slope comfortable to sit on. Humps in the grass and rooted outgrowths. The stench of the lake was unavoidable. Some odor of rotting fish abounding unseen. The dog had once ground its back into a skeletal corpse on the trail, the black curtain of its mane glinted with oil slick and rancid. There's a coolness to any body of water even in the heat. Brisk splashes on your fingertips in undulant surf mirroring the sun, reflecting and refracting kaleidoscopic. The ocean's seamless horizon the perfect double of the sky, seeming to spit out the sun amid cushioned aurorae at dawn. They had driven to the Atlantic and awoken hours before daybreak and boarded a ship that sent them into exhausted nausea and injury. Time, money burned. Worthwhile, still. Worthwhile always. Not in spite of the unpleasantries but because of them. They are all apart of the test, and beyond anything else that is its nature. A test of one's perseverance. For father, for son. When the afternoon had begun to wane they called it and packed up their things, leaving empty-handed and no poorer.
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