It was a hot spring day today and now I’m watching Henry throw a buzzbait up against the bank. His casts are almost all pinpoint accurate. He lays the lure down where the water runs up into the cut reeds; he starts reeling before it even lands, just like I taught him. A largemouth slaps at Henry’s offering/ we both watch the V in the water where its dorsal fin approaches like a shark keying in on a seal. There’s not much difference. Bass and sharks are both killing machines. They both live for the smash and grab of attacking the innocent. They both destroy because it’s how things go.
Henry misses that one but a few casts later he connects/ and when a bulge of water surrounds his bait skimming across the surface he hollers out. There he is! His rod bends and the fight is on. I try to notice the sky (so blue) and the grass (lush and green) as my son narrates his own experience. As he tells me that the thing is fighting way more than it ought to be for such a small fish, I work at soaking it all in. Mindfulness crosses my mind. Be here now and all that.
There’s a red-winged blackbird hanging around barking at us. I think she must have a nest here somewhere. They love to build in the cattails, perching on the tippy tops so they can yell at other creatures that come close. But I like it. I like how they are so protective of their small claims on Earth. Fuck off, they announce to people strolling by with their styrofoam nightcrawler containers and their energy drinks and their weed or cigs.
FUCK.
THE.
FUCK.
OFF.
When that doesn’t work they’ll sometimes swoop you. And that’s where they really gain my love because I like when nature swoops. I like when other critters come at me in a way that makes me insane with fear and anxiety. I don’t like it because I think it’s neat or whatever/ I like it because I admire the attitude. They are protecting what they have/ all they have, probably. Their nest, their eggs, their tiny helpless blind-ass babies with their mouths agape and their feeble minds all blanker than shit. What’s not to dig when a mama goes mama bear, you know?
My eyes are on Henry as he tosses the small bass back into the pond. It lands with a weak splash and probably swims down to the mud of the bottom to figure out what the hell just happened. Trauma must be big with bass. They’re all targets and they’re all aggressive so they’re bound to be super damaged in a world where the dominant species (me and Henry) want to slap their pretty little faces with our Walmart buzzbaits all goddamn summer long if we can.
I think about my son. He’s 14. He’s sharp, smart even. He’s got interests like video games and football. He loves playing his Telecaster guitar and he’s gotten damn good at it too. He walks through a mist of Guess cologne every morning and he smells fine. Like a young man who might have his shit together. Or more together than I had when I was his age. I didn’t walk through any impressive store-bought mists when I was 14. There was nothing much my dad would have seen in me either, not like I see in Henry.
By the time I was my son’s age, my dad had vanished into the thin air, into the dark night. He missed out on fishing with me when I was growing up then. I don’t know if he ever came to terms with that either. I was never able to get much out of him later on in life, after he showed back up and wanted me to just accept him as he was/ as if nothing had ever gone wrong in our world together.
Henry stares at the inky water and a woodpecker hammers at a tree back in the woods. I chew on one of my toothpicks and sit in the grass. Right over there is where me and Arle got married years ago. It was the right place for us because we both love it here. We came here for our first dates, back before some kind of something evil clung to the feet of ducks or geese and brought a disease that wiped out every fish in this small pond. The farmer has restocked it now but it will be years before it gets as glorious as it once was. There were massive bass in this hole in the ground; they were magnificent specimens of violence and beauty. They’re all gone now though and I hate that in a selfish way because I don’t have much in this world and so an invite to bring my kids and my wife to fish a private pond loaded with monsters was something valuable to me. Maybe even more valuable than it would be to a lot of other people if they had that same permission.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
