Teach a Girl to Fish

Lessons in survival, and determining your own happiness

I was eight years old when I first impressed my Dad. He was a salmon biologist, and we joked that, unless you were talking about salmon or trout with him, he didn’t hear you. He’d moved our family to Newfoundland after a decade of running a remote field station in Quebec as a research scientist for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. My sister Caroline grew up at Matamek, and spent 10 summers of her young life in the woods and rivers around the station. It was her happiest place.

Caroline with her first salmon (a grilse, I think?) at Matamek

Years later, when Caroline got sick, she told me she’d go back to Matamek when she was having a bad day. She’d travel back to the sweet smell of the woods, the warm feeling of stone under the back of her thighs as she sat perched on a boulder, waiting for Dad to finish taking samples from the river so they could eat lunch together. Dad taught her how to fish, and swim, how to forge a river and paddle a canoe. They were wild and free together on those long summer days. I think it was a little unnerving for my mother, who was bookish, and not inclined to spend a lot of time outside.

I came along a few years later. I took my first steps at Matamek. I remember our cedar-shingled house that stood in a field of blazing purple fireweed. I remember dinner parties with grad students, beer and whiskey being handed around, someone playing the fiddle. I remember the whale carcass that washed up on the beach at the mouth of the river — I think it was a minke whale. Dad took us down to marvel at it, and Caroline was out of her mind with excitement to see such a creature up close. They both loved dead things; a cool dead thing was better than any gold or diamonds.

By the time I was eight, we’d been living in St. John’s, Newfoundland for a few years, and things were very different at home. Caroline, who was then 19, was working with famed shark biologist Sonny Gruber in the Red Sea on the shark repellent secretions of an unassuming little flatfish known as the Moses sole. Dad, meanwhile, was buried in bureaucratic bullshit in his job at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, a government agency that liked to hogtie research scientists with red tape. I learned to hate bureaucrats at my father’s knee. He’d come home from work with a headache, go for a jog, shower, work until dinner was on the table, eat with a faraway look in his eye, and then head up to his study to work until the 10 o’clock news came on. My mother and he weren’t doing great — she was mad most of the time, and he just seemed tired. I knew he missed my sister. We all did.

One day, Dad was at work, and I had the day off from school. Maybe it was summer. I decided to go to Rennie’s River and catch a brown trout. I’d never caught one by myself before, but I’d gone trout fishing with Dad so many times that I knew I could figure it out. I got a fishing rod from his closet full of gear and strapped on his wicker creel. I pulled on my rubber boots, stopped in the backyard to dig up a few worms, and walked the half mile up Carpasian Road to Rennie’s River, which runs right through the heart of the city. 

Dad had been deeply involved in restoring the river, which was polluted by sewage and runoff when he had arrived in St. John’s. It was soon back to historic trout production levels. Dad called it “a gold mine.” When I got to the riverbank, I did all the things he’d taught me: I weighted my fishing line, put a worm on the hook, and cast it into a spot I knew would be trout-rich, because he had shown me where they liked to be, in the shade of overhanging trees. I remember the thrill of doing it all by myself. After a few minutes, I felt a tug on the line. I tugged back to set the hook, and reeled in a fat brown trout. I gave the trout a rap on the noggin with the Swiss Army knife from Dad’s creel to stun it. I did everything Dad had shown me how to do.

When he came home from work that evening, looking worn out, I ran to greet him with my prize, and he absolutely lit up. “Miss G. Minor, how marvelous,” he said, his enormous eyebrows going up and down. “A brown trout! Let’s dissect it, shall we?” We went into the kitchen, and he put down a piece of newspaper on the counter and pulled up a chair for me to stand on next to him. He made me repeat the Latin name for brown trout: Salmo trutta. He guided my hand with his knife to cut into its belly. It was a female, full of orange eggs! We cut into its stomach to see what it had been eating - mayflies! We looked at the trout’s beautiful red and orange spots with silver halos, and its fins, which he made me name: caudal, adipose, dorsal, anal, pelvic, pectoral. We marveled at the fish together. I could feel how happy my father was, which made me so proud. He asked my mother to fry it up, and the three of us ate trout for dinner with potatoes and peas.

Seventeen years later, I was on a flight to Montreal from Paris, clutching a ham sandwich and sobbing my heart out. I’d spent a romantic year living with my Irish boyfriend in the City of Lights, but we’d decided to go our separate ways — he was off to Malaysia for an engineering project, and I was going home to Canada for the first time in three years. He drove me to the airport and we said a sweet goodbye at the gate (this was in 2000, a year before 9/11 changed kissing goodbye at the gate forever). He told me Mo Ghrá thú, which means “you are my love” in Gaelic, and handed me the sandwich he’d made for me in a brown paper bag. Proper thing.

I was forced to choke down the sandwich when I landed in Montreal. The customs agent refused to allow me to keep it as a relic of my one true love because I hadn’t declared it on my entry form. Despite all of my theater-school trained tears, I wasn’t going to get into Canada with a random ham sammy, so I ate it over a garbage can in a grubby room under buzzing overhead fluorescent lights, weeping as the customs agent watched. I was DRAMATIC, friends.

I spent the next week in my best friend Alison’s spare room watching sad movies, smoking cigarettes, and feeling sorry for myself. One night, my sister called and asked if I could get to Seattle for the summer. I wanted to be with her more than anything, so I hopped on a plane to British Columbia and enlisted an old friend to drive me south of the border. We pulled into Seattle on a Friday night and met Caroline at a pizza joint (RIP Piecora’s!) on Capitol Hill, where she was waiting for us with two enormous pies and a pitcher of beer. As soon as I’d had a sip of frothy amber ale, Caroline said, “Ragget [her pet name for me], I think you should work on a fishing boat this summer.”

As it turned out, Caroline had a plan; she always did. She told me there was an opening to work on a salmon tender going north to Alaska that week, and that she’d secured me a job as deckhand-slash-cook. “It’s the best thing for a broken heart,” she said. “You need to go to sea, work hard, see beautiful places, and make money.” I was supposed to get on the boat the very next day. What could I say other than Yes, and thank you? 

Holding up a King salmon on the M/V Angie (Watson to my left!!)

I got on the boat. It was the best job I’ve ever had. After that first summer, I went back for three more seasons. In Alaska, I learned how to drive a truck, run a pallet jack and hydraulic crane, check oil levels in the engine room, sort fish (there are five species of Pacific salmon!), shovel ice, and cook for a hungry crew. I wrote checks, and balanced books. I learned how to bake a batch of 12 dozen cookies for a hungry fishing fleet. I learned how to talk to fishermen who’ve been out on the water by themselves for days or weeks at a time. When I went home to Newfoundland for Christmas, my father and sister and I would share stories of salmon fishing, and the people who spend their lives on the water, as we sipped eggnog around our Christmas tree, which was always full of twinkly lights and ornamented with cool dead things — like the dried-up ratfish skull Caroline had brought home, or a knuckle bone from a harbor seal that Dad found on a beach. I felt at ease in their company as we chatted about marine conservation; they had both given me something they believed in. 

Last week, in a session with my EMDR therapist, we touched on things that men (all of them depressed artists, yesihaveatype) who I’ve loved have said to hurt me, e.g. that I’m not talented, or funny; that I’m fat, or that I got drunk sometimes because I was grieving. Deep into our session, my therapist asked me, “What do you know about those men, given what you’ve learned?” That they’re liars, I said. “Ok,” she said. “And what do you know about yourself?” 

I know that I have everything that I need, I replied. A long time ago, my father and my sister and my friend Nicole taught me how to be whole, wild, and free.

This is a story about teaching myself to fish again, and remembering that I already know how.

The My Sandwich, My Choice project is a bright thread that’s unraveling to lead me forward. I’m going to keep writing, and I’m grateful to you if you’ve read this far.

More soon, with much love.
Mary Jane ❤️