A Man and a River

Here I am, back at the river again, staring at its immensity. I’ve been doing this for years. Let me tell you how it began and why I’m still here…

We leave our little cabin and in a minute are heading along the path many feet have followed. It is nine or ten o’clock in the evening, late August. It might be humid, but it’s no longer stifling like during the day when we were out on the water in our little 14-foot boat, where we got a bit sunburned. It takes but a few minutes to reach our destination, maybe five, but we are careful because we have to pick our way along in the thick black of the evening. We are carrying containers of fish, probably nets, three shapes of scalers, needle-nosed pliers, a very sharp hunting knife, and a Coleman lantern. The lantern is lit, and I may have been the one who inserted the little white sock that glows because there is some sort of fuel lit by my father. Sometimes I carry the Coleman, sometimes Dad does. We walk single file.

We reach the table and lay out all the accoutrements as well as the fish. The table should be fairly clean, but sometimes it is not, if the previous users weren’t considerate. The table is no more than fifty by thirty inches in size, and is ageless. While we use it, the rough, grainy, splintery boards become greasy and slippery with guts, scales, skin, because once they leave the water, the fish acquire new characteristics.

We work efficiently, because ir’s late. What we remove from the fish is tossed with as much strength and accuracy as possible toward the small pocket of the enormous St. Lawrence River. I think the pocket has cattails, but they aren’t really visible. I know it has snapping turtles, although I never see them, can only hear them. Their mouths are clicking because they are hungry. The fish guts will disappear into the clicking mouths. I try to aim properly. Years and years later the clicks will become the teeth of capybaras in the story Carpincheros by the incredible and bilingual (Guaraní-Spanish) Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos, who would be exiled in France.

Beside the table, we work and talk softly as the mosquitoes drone in harmony with the hissing lantern. Sometimes my father adjusts a knob to create more light, more intense illumination. It feels like yellow cotton suspended in the evening hour. Dad and I talk, not too much, and it’s mostly about the fish bodies laid out before us as well as about the hours out on the mile-wide river. We think about the bait that helped us catch the fish: worms (we had picked them up for a week around the neighborhood, using tin cans and flashlights), minnows (it was never easy to pierce their thin, silvery lips with a hook), maybe a small perch (back fin cut off). Or crabs.

We identified the bait by inspecting the stomachs of the fish. It was a lesson in what worked with each species. And at what depth. My father could read the depth of the river and what was on the bottom: rocks, seaweed, mud. I admired his knowledge, and only attributed it to his ability to read the maps he always brought. I didn’t think about how skilled his map reading was, that he had learned during the war, that it was what perhaps had saved his life more than once.

[We are at the westernmost end of the St. Lawrence, near Lake Ontario. The camps belong to Schermerhorn’s Landing and I can recall every part of them, down to the floors painted, then drizzled with random colors like a Jackson Pollack painting I had yet to see. The Thousand Islands are something one has to see to believe. There are really three thousand. I know fewer than twenty, but that’s enough. We never set foot on the Canadian side, but Dad took me close enough in our boat to see the foreign shore. It would be years before I set foot in a foreign country, but I saw one thanks to him.]

I use at least two of the scalers, and one of them is still in my possession. If there are bullheads, black, oily, treacherous, scaleless, I use the knife to cut a circle around the head, then grip the pliers to strip the black skin off, taking care not to rip away the sweet, ruddy flesh. These are my mother’s favorites. There is some skill required, proper angles, force, tight pinch on the cut edge near the head. There is also some danger, because bullheads have spikes in the gill area, so the body must be gripped correctly, perfectly, firmly, spikes between the fingers of the left hand, while stripping the skin away. I am pretty good at it because Dad has explained it all perfectly. I am proud, not of myself but of the father who is an expert teacher.

As we work, I learn: he observes my hands and answers my questions; he teaches me. We look at the entrails to determine what bait each fish consumed, if there are eggs, things like that. I hang on his every word, knowing this is a life skill but not calling it that at the time. From time to time I take handsful of guts to the clacking turtle mouths and toss them into the lapping black water, knowing the hungry reptiles will rush to consume my offering. I know not to get too close, not to slip.

The light creates a gentle orb around the two of us, around our sentences, our fingers splattered with scales and blood, and I never lose my concentration nor the sense of ecstasy at knowing how to do what I’m doing, at knowing he’s proud of me. Perhaps this is where my (feminist?) approach to life began: I am cleaning all sorts of fish, know their names, unafraid to slice them open, spill their guts, scrape the excess off their inside walls. My teacher is gentle, patient, intelligent despite leaving school at sixteen. His education had been the war.

Dad and I are tired, but it has to be done. In the morning we’ll go out again on the river and do everything all over again. There is a rhythm to our task. We take it seriously because this is food and cannot be allowed to spoil. Half of the catch will go to elderly relatives, great aunts, widows. Frozen packages wrapped white butcher paper. I know how to wrap as well - a skill later used when working at my first job, in a deli.

The glow centers around my father, my teacher. It is a womb and he has created it. Patient, gentle, exact, feminine. Gender does not apply here; we are just parent and child, teacher and student. We are not weary because we work to put food (fish) on the table and to give away to those who welcome it. Generosity taught, learned, passed on. A great gift. One should never be too tired to think of others.

I wish this story were longer. I wish I knew about the other rivers. The ones crossed in France, the Ardennes, Nazi Germany, Italy. Ones far away and not caressed by the light of a Coleman lantern. Ones never named yet present on maps.

I am still looking at the great river, the St. Lawrence I never knew would last a lifetime and beyond, grander and longer than I knew while working diligently, honing skills at the greasy table that we always left clean for the next arrivals because that was the right thing to do. I am looking out at the river, my river, and through the lapping waters can make out some numbers: September 3, 1910 - June 11, 1969.

The turtles have come to accompany me, despite the lack of fish guts. They click softly and accept the little river that is all I have to offer because they know the carpinchos cannot come from Paraguay to console me; they are all I have now. Except for the St. Lawrence, so immense in the darkness of the cemetery.