got me thinking about my first fishing trip with my friend Agatha. That was the first time things got totally out of hand and bloody with me and Mother Nature.
My freshman year of college, just a week or so in to the semester, I became friends with a Michigan girl who was fleeing from the post traumatic stress she suffered when, being asleep in her dorm room, her slutty pageant queen roommate decided to come home drunk and bang some random guy 4 feet from Agatha's head. All the while, reminding the guy banging her that she had a boyfriend back home on the farm named "Jimbo" that she loved deeply. Agatha showed up at my door and pleaded for asylum from the whore of Chapman Hall. She probably recognized a kindred spirit in me. I spent all my free time lounging around in my grandmother's old nightgowns and matching housecoats. And reading and crying a lot. We have been friends ever since.
 |
| I'm the dumpy one on the right, with the sullen look on my face. Agatha's the pretty one. Damn it. |
Agatha grew up on a majestic hill in a hundred year old house, with orchards and tennis courts and dogs, surrounded by books and a bracing north wind. She had her very own pet cemetery. I mean, yeah, she swears nothing ever reanimated, but still. I grew up hiding in my bedroom closet in Ohio, where I avoided my 3 brothers and suggestions that I make some "real friends." I made a nest in the darkness with a stack of books, a bag of bread and my flashlight.
Over the years, Agatha and I have:
~attended concerts with black market Romanian mob tickets in downtown Detroit.
~taken pornographic photos of our teddy bears. Back when you had to drop them off to be developed.
~stolen every single U2 concert promotion sign we have laid eyes on. (we should donate the collection to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. it's impressive)
~taught ourselves to smoke in a graveyard late at night.
~accidentally set our driving directions on fire while driving on a road trip in Michigan because we were trying to "antique" them so they looked prettier.
~stoned a blue gill to death as a mercy killing.
This is by no means a comprehensive list. For the list to be complete, I would need to be hypnotized into remembering what happened every time we got drunk on cheap vodka and Crystal Lite. For example: the morning we staggered hungover to a Tim Horton's in Adrian, MI and noticed, after pounding coffee and donuts, that we were covered in red blotches from the Crystal Lite, and that I had torn the knees completely out of my jeans. (With the benefit of hindsight, there's some foreshadowing here, people.)
Agatha: What's all over your hands? They're all red and blotchy.
Me: What's all over your face?
Agatha: What's all over your face? It looks burned! What happened to us?
Me: What happened to my pants!
All we know for sure is that a week later, Agatha learned we had rather graphically defaced a wall in a fraternity house, and that someone claimed to have seen me crawling across campus on my hands and knees. The rest is lost in a haze. Vodka and Crystal Lite is a shady mistress.
It was summertime... and Agatha had come to Ohio for a visit. I thought it would be fun to meet up with some friends and spend a day on a lake and go fishing. My friend J.T. said his Aunt Stinky (no, really) had a beautiful lake with swans and everything and we could have a picnic. So, you can see how two dreamy innocents like Agatha and myself would immediately envision twirling about a scenic pond on a white row boat with our parasols while the men fished in elegant suits. Obviously, I had never been fishing in Ohio.
Aunt Stinky's pond was fine, but like most waterholes it was also smelly and bubbling with algae. There was no row boat and even if there was, no way were Agatha and I willing to risk getting capsized in that stagnant water. Also, it was hot and there were lots of bugs. Neither of us really wanted to sit in the grass, because it was itchy. And the swans? If you so much as looked at them and cooed, "Pretty swan baby, I love you. Let me pet you!", they would run at you and try to beak you to death. So, within about 5 minutes we were ready to leave. It did not even come close to our expectations of a day in the country.
But we were there with some other couples, and of course Winston. (The husband and I have been together since the dawn of time.) The other couples all had plans to get drunk and bang in the woods. I tried to talk Winston into leaving...
Me: (hissing in his ear) Agatha and I would like to leave this place and have our picnic in the car. At home.
Winston: We just got here! I haven't fished at all!
Me: This is gross. And we're hot. Please????
Winston: You dragged me out here. We are going to fish and have our picnic. Toughen up.
Winston had been kind enough to bring an extra fishing pole for Agatha and I to share. So he set about teaching us to do whatever it is you do with a fishing pole. He talked a lot. I am sure he said something about the hook and the line and how to cast and what to do with the fish once you caught it. I have no clue. Agatha and I were transfixed, cutting up worms. He had set a bucket of bait worms out and a knife and told us to cut the worms in half for the hooks. It's safe to say this was the first time anyone had every handed us a knife and suggested we do anything. We got very carried away. We had read that if you cut a worm in half, it doesn't kill it. So we silently agreed to continue cutting each worm into bits until they stopped wiggling so we could get a rough estimate of how many worms you can get out of 1 worm. It is very similar to "how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie pop?" question.
Winston: What are you doing?!?! You can't get those little worm bits on a hook! Just cut them in half! Once!
Anyway, he soon settled us with our pole and we patiently took turns holding it while nothing happened. When he wasn't looking, we took turns playing with the knife. Winston is a southern boy, and he seemed to calmly settle in like Huck Finn, relaxing in the sun. Agatha and I grew impatient after 3 minutes. When we complained that we weren't catching anything, his response was, "Well no, you can't catch anything if you check the damn hook every 10 seconds. Leave the damn line in the water."
It was so hot. The air was perfectly still, and all we could hear was the sound of angry swans and drunk couples laughing and flies buzzing. I remember fantasizing about a bath, a book and a frothy cappuccino when I got out of this nightmare. We tried to get an estimate out of Winston as to how long this whole day of fishing would take (1 hour? 10 more minutes?) and he seemed irritated with the question. We laid our pole down on the dock and wandered off, which was when we discovered exactly how not charming swans are.
When we came sprinting back and he stopped laughing at us, Winston announced he was going into the woods to take a leak.
AND HE LEFT US ALONE ON THE DOCK WITH THE FISHING ROD.
At first, it was fine. We had a quick, terse conversation, agreeing that we couldn't drink anything in case it made us have to pee. (I am not peeing on anything but porcelain.) Then we went back to taking turns holding the pole. And then...
And then the line jerked! And we squealed with joy and yanked the hook out of the water and saw we had caught a fish! It was flat and plump, about the size of my palm. We danced around, swinging the fish like a maypole ribbon and celebrated our first fish. After a few moments, we stopped and...
Agatha: I don't really want the fish, do you?
Me: Eeeeeww. No. It was fun but now it's gross.
Agatha: What do we do with it?
Me: I don't know! Where is Winston? What do we do? Oh my God!
Agatha: It's freaking out! The fish! Look!
Sure enough, in the hot sun, the fish was twitching and gasping as it dangled on the line.
Me: Maybe the hook hurts and we should lay it down on the dock so it can rest.
Agatha: Yeah. Let's put it on the dock in the shade. Should we take the hook out?
Me: I'm not touching it.
Agatha: I don't know how to get the hook out.
(silence)
From this moment on, every single word that came out of our mouths was pitched in a banshee scream of horror.
Agatha: Oh my God! He's dying! Look at him! The poor fish is gonna die! We have to do something right now!! OK, I'll wrap it in a towel and you try to get the hook out. Hurry!
Me: Oh my God! I am hurrying! He's dying! Where is Winston???
(For those of you wondering, Winston was not peeing for the whole 10 minutes he was gone. He bumped into one of the other guys on the way back and they were pounding beers and bitching about taking girls fishing.)
Agatha: Just yank it out! Pull! He's dying!
Me: I am! I can't get it out! He's screaming! I think that's a fish scream! Look at his poor face!
Agatha: He's suffering! I can't stand it! This is so wrong! We were so wrong to come here!
Me: We have to do something! This is awful!
In the mists of time and the remembered horror at what happened next, I could not tell you in any certainty who decided:
"WE HAVE TO KILL THE FISH! WE HAVE TO STONE IT TO DEATH!
We scrambled off the dock and frantically clawed through the grasses until we both found large hand sized rocks. Then we collapsed in tears of desperate horror beside the gasping fish. Locking eyes, we both held our rocks high over our heads, determined to end its suffering; righteous in our certainty that only we could give mercy to this poor doomed creature.
I can't tell you much about the next few moments. I don't know who swung first. In my memory, all I hear is pounding and crying and a horrible squishing noise, sounds of a damned fish being released from it's earthly bonds.
As our frantic stoning slowed, and our eyes began to clear of the tears we sobbed for the poor tragic fish, I looked across the dock at my lovely friend and saw she was covered with blood.
Me: Agatha! There's blood all over you!
Agatha: There's blood all over you!
Me: Fish bleed?!?!
And that's how Winston found us. Screaming and covered in fish blood, holding bloody rocks over a mangled fish.
Winston: What. The. Fuck?
We both started sobbing and babbling at the same time, about how we had no choice, he had left us and it was dying and we had to stone it to put it out of it's misery! He looked at us. Then looked at the fish, all pummeled and still stuck to the line and said:
"Why the hell didn't you just drop it back in the water?"
~dana
Note: You want, at this point, to believe that this is an elaborate retelling. The only fabrication in this event is that I am way taller than Agatha.
