Paddling down memory lane: Our big fish story

The dip and plunk of paddles, the ripples on the lake. For Dad and me, fishing is a beloved family ritual. Our biggest catch? Time spent together. 

A calm, overcast Saturday morning many Junes ago. A canoe. Two fishing rods.

Myself, a young woman, home from the city, and my dad. A body of water, off-limits to motorboats, that we have fished together for years.

We embark on established rituals: hefting the canoe off the van, trekking the tackle box and night crawler tub and snack cooler off the county road and down the bank, keeping the tops of the rods out of the overhanging branches. He drives the van off a ways and parks it. I set up the seat cushions on our canoe and position the paddles. By the time he’s back, I’m in the front of the canoe, already floating on the water, peering down at the minnows dancing beneath the surface. It’s an easy push from the shore, and in seconds we are out away from land, each paddling clean strokes across the lake.

When I was a girl, these mornings were common. We knew the best spots on the lake for sunfish; the little nooks where large logs had fallen, which we could paddle up to and hook perch on; the deep, wind-whipped water, which every once in a while produced a small northern pike. In between casts, we’d listen for loons, and spotting them, would follow their black bodies until, skittish, they dove. And then the game became predicting the spot in both water and time in which these otherworldly creatures would reemerge.

Many loons have dove down and reemerged since our last time fishing together. There are many hours and miles between us now. Busy schedules. Excuses, mostly on my part. So it’s good to feel the rhythms again, the dip and plunk of the paddle as it pulls toward a distant shore. We spend the entire morning fishing the old spots, watching for eagles high up in the oak trees, talking in low voices about what’s right in front of us.

It’s later, just before we are about to turn toward home with our pail full of sunfish, that he sends his line out toward one warm spot in the weeds.

“Let’s see what’s down there,” he says, a phrase so familiar to me I hardly hear it.

But moments after the lure lands and sinks, we both hear the zip. Resistance. “Caught on weeds?”

But it’s more than that. Even the canoe senses it. We are both suddenly tense, leaning back, muscles and aluminum and chests clenched, so much focus on the circle of water wrinkling between the lily pads.

He labors the rod’s tip up and down, reels the line taut, then lets it out. I am almost 30 years old, but I start to giggle and – eventually – shriek.

“Dad! What is it?”

For 10 liquid minutes, 20 – we lose track – he fights a force we cannot see. I maneuver the canoe. Slice away at weeds. “The line,” he says, his body a sight of bright angles, “we can’t break it.” So we’re careful, he’s focused, I’m shrieking.

In all our years of fishing together, we have never had a battle like this.

A decade or so later, I am sitting next to him on a porch swing, a different lake shimmering in front of us. My own children are splashing in the water, a ways out from the pontoon where a mess of rods he’d earlier baited with worms rests drying in a corner. He has slung his arm around my shoulder. His face, when I look up at him, is tanned and content, watching grandkids now instead of bobbers. He is older. Sometimes I’ll allow myself to see it: his white hair, the increasing repetition of certain questions and anecdotes, his drifting, my worry. More often, though, I’ll let that line go slack – catch, release.

What I’ll see is my dad, lit up by a sunbeam.

“Hey, remember that day?” I’ll say.

The minutes are again liquid. Neither he nor I can speak with any exactness as to time. How long does he hold the rod? How fast do the moments pass? What was happening back in the city, in the world? How did any of it begin and how would it end? There are no answers. Just the moment when, finally, after we maneuver the canoe or line just right, or the fish tires, or the gods of the water decide enough is enough, the fish breaks the surface as if it were a piece of dark, buoyant bread, flying. I can’t help it: I scream, though it comes out as a laugh, and he is laughing too, and panting, his face spread into a wide smile, and we are looking both at the fish and at each other.

A 6-pound largemouth bass.

An amateur take in some sportsmen’s eyes.

But to us it is our big fish story.

And we tell it to each other over and over.