Fish on

octopus

The odd, unexplainable headaches are the most fulfilling, because you can very easily imagine the worst and most beautiful symptoms possible. At this very moment I’m convinced a 3 carat diamond is being created by the fiery heat of my worries and intense pressure of my paranasal sinuses. I imagine Stage 2 jala neti is all that stands between baby and a new car.

Other times I imagine the unusual head pains are nothing more than old memories, stored on the top shelf of a closet I had completely forgotten, jarred suddenly loose by recent near hits. Or perhaps they were near misses, which would seem to me a misnomer. Wouldn’t a near miss imply a hit? In any case, I open the door and there is junk lying at my feet.

It’s a photograph of me at 12-years-old, holding my hand to the sun, the magical properties of which can destroy e. coli if left in the light, bottled for 6 hours or more. This is my second expiation of the day, the first measured in humiliation and not blood. I have been taken to task by a Dungeness crab, the only one I was able to keep caged as I pulled, hand over hand the yellow nylon until the trap surfaced. I’m sure no one told me that the animal would punish my curiosity, and in kinder circumstances they might have laughed gently at the lesson learned. They shook their heads. There are children left behind, and children taken to the front on the shoulders of giants, but really, most are just standing around in the middle rocking in the boat, drifting to shore. Picking up scraps from men who take that knowledge for granted. There are a lot of things these men never tell you, including where babies come from, and more importantly, where babies go.

I was thinking about this crab today, suddenly finding himself in Ascension, and I can very well believe the simpler of the sea creatures truly do imagine a heaven above their world, an angry prism that occasionally drops low into the water and takes his sacrifice. Only the fish that swim near the surface ever seem to really fight the line. I hooked a King salmon on the second to last day, and I regretted hauling it in. At the first call of Fish On!, the salmon leapt 5 feet into the air, and repeated the acrobatics until there was nothing left but to club the back of its head until its scales and blood decorated our boots.

The ling cod surfaced without so much as offering the resistance of his considerable weight. When his great round head broke the surface of the water, the line was limp. He had offered himself to this heaven faster than I could reel. I could sense his matter-of-fact laconism.

Murky water down below, into weightless clarity, I once felt myself lifted from similarly roiled currents, and I held my breath a little longer, thoughts of safety secondary to a child filled with the wonders of rising and what might possibly come next.