The things we do for love

Like hooking a fish through its eye

This weekend, the grandtwins came to Camp Granny and the grandson brought his new fishing pole.

Let me explain the gospel of fishing, hillbilly version. Of course you fish. You start out with a cheap cane pole that your grandfather hands you as if he’s granting you the keys to the kingdom. And the next day, he wakes you up while it’s still dark and tells you to shake a leg, and then he lets you have a swig from his thermos of coffee.

The coffee tastes like acid — or how you imagine acid would taste — but you choke it down because this is important.

You load into his Chevy, and he drives until you’re on at a bumpy dirt road that takes you to a little stream, and in the dark he shows you how to load a worm onto a hook because he’s not here to by-God do your work for you. You wrestle with the worm and finally get it ready, and you do just as he says. You swing the pole so that the worm lands out a ways and then you sit back on your haunches to wait, just like him. You can talk, but you must be quiet because fish can hear you.

It isn’t long before you feel a tug on your line (only city folks use bobbers, your grandfather tells you, and that’s cheating) and in your enthusiasm, you yank the pole skyward and the fish flies up and over your head and gets trapped in the branches of a catalpa tree overhead.

Until the fish is hanging from the tree, you never realized that your Pentecostal grandfather could cuss, but as he climbs a tree in the goddamn dark to retrieve the goddamn fish, goddammit, you are thrilled. Everyone in the family loves Jesus, and curse words feel like exotic rain.

Other grandpas would have just cut their losses, but hooks don’t grow on trees (you’re smart enough not to crack wise at this) and we’re not a-going to leave it up there, either. You are thrilled you have a grandfather who climbs trees, but sad that you’ve pulled a fish out of its natural environment and tried to turn it into a bird.

You’re not God, and a fish is not a bird.

He climbs down and, good humor restored, hands you the ugliest thing imaginable, a gaping catfish with a hook — your hook — stuck through its mouth and into its eye. He sets the thing on the ground and it doesn’t flop much as he opens his tackle box and pulls out needle nose pliers and by some miracle removes the hook. The fish is strangely quiet, perhaps dead or perhaps simply working its mind around the fact that from here on out, it only has one eye.

There’s no fight left, and your grandpa tosses it back and it appears to swim away or at least that’s what you tell yourself. In your version, post-catch, the fish swims back to its school and tells a hell of a story, by-God, that almost makes up for being half blind.

You do not mention this imagined scenario to your grandpa.

Peer pressure is a difficult thing. For years, when you’re asked to fish you do not allow that you really would rather not interrupt a fish’s day by maiming or blinding it. Instead, you shuffle along and drop line after line into dark water, lest you appear to be the type of person who uses a bobber.

So fishing. Yeah.

The role of a granny is to say yes unless it’s something illegal, so when the grandtwins show up wanting to fish, you buy worms and in the car coming home from the bait shop, you talk to the squirmy little intestines in their styrofoam container: Sorry, guys. This day is not going to end well for you.

And then, at the local pond, you are trying to grab an earthworm who probably knows the jig is up, and as you feed its slithering body onto the hook, you’re reminded just how nasty is this sport. You’re not squeamish about worms (or mice or snakes, come to think of it) but this seems cruel. You don’t need any Swedish researchers to tell you worms feel the jab of the hook. You can tell by the way they writhe.

(You also don’t need Smithsonian magazine to tell you fish feel pain, too.)

But you get the worms loaded onto hooks, and explain to the kids that you don’t have a license, so you can’t fish, per se, but you will be their…by-God sherpa? You don’t know the word for it, but they seem pleased with that.

(We treat our children gently. You learned to swim by being thrown into a creek. The grandchildren took lessons. You will load their hooks until they’re ready to load them because you guess you are here to do their by-God work for them.)

Immediately, the boy snags three little perch. How do you know they’re perches? The same way you can smell coming rain in the air. The same way you can still identify trees by their leaves. It is muscle memory of a girlhood spent outdoors.

The girl snags one fish and it’s biggish, and then she snags your t-shirt when your back is turned trying to see if there are any more worms in the container. She apologizes profusely, but it’s a tear in the fabric and nothing more.

“Coulda been worse,” you say, which is the unofficial family motto. And if things ever hit rock bottom, you have agreed to change the motto to “Coulda been worse, sooner.”

With each catch, you smooth back the sharp dorsal fin because you remember getting stabbed multiple times, and you work that hook out as quickly and efficiently as possible. More muscle memory.

The twins laugh when you tell them a fish has an “anal fin.” You can depend on 10-year olds laughing at “anal.” And you reassure them that once the fish are put back into the water, they are swimming away, a little worse for wear but with an amazing story to tell their friends.

You take videos. You take photos. You applaud but secretly, you’re apologizing to the fish because Jesus if the situation was reversed and you suddenly were yanked by your mouth underwater, you’d expect at least an apology.

The sun is hot and the thunderstorms from the night before have left the air feeling like warm soup. After about a half hour of traumatizing the fish, you pack it in. All the way home, the kids talk about the fish they caught. The boy adds a few to his take and by the time he goes home, he’ll tell his father he caught six. The girl doesn’t inflate her number but she adds six inches of fish to the one she actually caught and when she looks up at you and grins, you shrug. Go ahead, you say. Everybody lies about fishing.