Pop 89: A good catch

By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com

There’s a lovely little lake at the bottom of a hill that leads to a campsite somewhere in the Cypress Hills. (I resist sharing the name because I selfishly want to keep it a secret.) This past week my sisters and sisters-in-law, six in all, spent our days paddle-boarding during the day and laying on the deck at night, watching The Persiads blaze and sprinkle across the sky. Throughout the night fish leapt from below the surface, catching hovering insects, or maybe just wanting a glimpse of the star show.

All week young men and old men, husbands and wives, launched rowboats and canoes into the middle of the motorboat-less lake to catch trout. “Here is an activity blending silence and stillness with immersion in nature and anticipation of supper,” I thought. At night, in my tent, I dipped into a book called “Your Inner Fish”, by paleontologist Neil Shubin. By examining fossils and DNA Shubin discovered that our hands resemble fish fins. Our head is organized like that of a long extinct fish. In fact, the simplest way to teach students the nerves of the human head is to show them the state of affairs in sharks.

For a while now I’ve been wanting to take up fishing. I remember a disastrous fishing trip we took as children. My father bought rods for all six of us kids, but ended up spending most of his time unhooking lures from a rock and trees, or tangled in hair, and occasionally, gingerly, from a crying child’s bare shoulder. I can still hear my mother’s refrain as we left the house, a warning left unheeded, yet issued no less than a hundred times, by her and every mother worth her weight in band aids: “Don’t go putting someone’s eye out with that thing!” (I noted that she chose to stay home and read.)

I’ve fished at the end of a couple of wharves in my life. In the Carmanah Valley on a lake surrounded by first growth trees my beau and I sat mirrored in a lake so still we saw our own bodies in the water catching ourselves. In fact, never caught a thing. Which seems strange when you consider the only way anyone can get to the lake was by float plane. We strapped our canoe to the plane, stayed for a week, then paddled out along a river that led to the sea.

We considered ourselves fairly adept at wilderness living, but we could not fish to save our lives. It might have something to do with bait. The truth is, I was half-hearted about catching anything. I did not want to be responsible for hooking the inside of a happily swimming creature’s cheek, in the same way I did not like having a jagged hook snag my bare shoulder as a child.

I’m not sure why I’m considering giving fishing another chance. Perhaps it has something to do with living in ranch country, where it’s harder to dismiss local meat-eaters as heartless anthropocentrists. Over the last seven years I’ve participated in a few herdings, nudging cows and calves along in an ATV. I’ve attended half a dozen brandings, where the consumption of “prairie oysters” is a serious rite of passage. I could see why city gals, working for the park, fell for cowboys adept at roping and riding, leaping on and off their horses as if they were couches.

I once watched a father and son negotiate a complicated calving. My friend and I were warned to stay out of eye-view and ear-shot of the anxious mom. I offered a towel for the baby but was refused because the mother would be confused by the strange scent in the cloth, not something I considered.

I’ve seen men head out in thirty below temperatures to a search for a calf in a snowstorm. Thanks to my patient friend Ervin, who took me under his wing as sort of a public service, I have learned about the behaviours of critters great and small. Ranchers are aware of the joys and sorrows of not just mothering cows, but nesting owls, sick pigs, scared chickens and wounded coyotes. Animals are cared for, witnessed, understood and above all, respected. I have stood on the other side of a fence, the only barrier between myself and a bull, and felt the animals’ presence. His energy is palpable, the density of his muscle unfathomable, respectable.

Children out here see a lot of death. They lose horses, dogs, cats and rabbits to predators, accidents, and disease. Some have had to kill their own animals. I’ve come to understand that the lives of ranching people are intertwined and entangled with the animals with whom they live.

Last night I literally walked into a dead Bambi. The poor speckled creature was either hit by a vehicle or attacked by a coyote. Or both. One of its legs was chewed off and half its body cleaned to the ribs. I’ve walked the grasslands and come across more than one dead bison, thousands of maggots busily devouring his hide, doing what maggots do. The poor fella lost out to a stronger and probably younger male while battling over a female.

“If you could catch one of them boys you’d do well,” I was told recently by someone who persists in the belief that a single woman is always on the lookout for a man. And, as an artist of simple means, I would not only do well- read: come into money- but be wise to cast my line in the direction of a member of the visiting highway road crew. It’s the advice of ages; we are herd animals and meant to pair off.

But I do not heed the unasked-for advice. No doubt I’m perceived as either too picky, too troublesome, or just not appealing enough. Still, if I tried harder, used the right lure, pursued with more earnestness, well, I just might get lucky. Christ was a fisher of men, I wanted to say. Not me. I am here for the silence and the stillness, I’m here to find my “inner fish”.