Fish Tales

Day 103: There was a time when my fishing buddy and I inventoried the waters at least once each week every week of the year. Whether we were pulling put-and-take trout out of Mineral Lake, netting smelt in the Cowlitz, dragging silvers up through 80 feet of free air at Riffe fishing bridge, wrestling with king and coho salmon in the Tilton River or casting mud shrimp up against an ocean jetty hoping for surf perch or cabezon, we purposed to catch fish and did so most successfully. However, Sande had one great weakness in his piscatorial skills, and that was that his reflexes were not quite fast enough to set the hook reliably in the mouth of a salmon. He missed more than he caught, much to his frustration as I stood beside him pulling them in one after another. I coached him repeatedly, not realizing then that the problem was deeper than age. He was in the first phases of Parkinson's disease and his motor control was diminishing.

On one particular morning, my phone rang and I was surprised to hear him open the conversation with the statement that he had gone fishing without me on the Puyallup. Referring to one of our favorite spots, he said, "You know the blue building? I went down there. And you know what? I caught a nice big salmon!"

I wasn't sure which part of that statement shocked me the most, that he'd gone fishing without me or that he'd hooked and landed a salmon unaided. Since the latter wasn't a total impossibility, I began asking stupid questions as I tried to absorb the information. "You went fishing without me? All by yourself?" Already I was making plans to show up on his doorstep the following morning.

"And guess what else?" he continued. "I waded out..."

"You waded out?" I interrupted. "You? In the Puyallup? On those slippery rocks?" He never liked to wade. This was unthinkable!

He continued his narrative over the top of my blithering. "I waded out right where that one big branch sticks out, and in about five minutes, I got another bite." A significant pause ensued, during which I made assorted incomprehensible choking sounds and just as I was getting my breath, he added, "...and I caught another nice fish."

This was more than I could bear. "TWO??? You caught TWO SALMON??? Without ME?" I was horrified, aghast, shocked to the very core of my being. I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that he hadn't even invited me along! He hadn't even told me he was going!

Then, much to my increasing consternation, he added the final insult, "And then I said to myself, 'What do I need HER for?'" It was playfully put, but the truth of it wounded me deeply. He really didn't need me there to offer my usual commentary on where to cast, how long to let the bait sink, how to govern its bounce along the rocks on the river bottom without getting snagged up. Visions of being outfished began running through my head. He'd never caught as many salmon as I reeled in during the season.

At this point, I was reduced to sputtering the same phrases repeatedly. "You went without me and you caught two fish?" I was still jabbering when he added quietly,

"And then I woke up."

A full thirty seconds elapsed before the revelation soaked in. Sande is a Norwegian. He is a consummate storyteller and can keep his face so straight even after he's delivered the punchline that sometimes it's two weeks before you realize you've been had. When it finally hit me that he'd been relating a dream, I howled with laughter. Oh, he'd suckered me in on that one beautifully! He didn't need to catch fish. He'd caught a fisherman!

These days, we only fish together a couple of times each year. He has trouble walking and controlling the trembling in his hands. But when we get together as we did for today's football game, we talk about the good times and the adventures, and remember all the big ones that didn't get away. There were a lot of those.