New West Fiction

Catch and Release

By Sheila Scobba Banning, Guest Writer, 5-27-11

I don’t know when I will see Nathan again, and so I am taking him fishing.  This is the best way I know to make the few hours we have today tangible, something that will last. Time will expand and distort and finally lose all its power in the focus on the cast and the fish and the flies.

Tomorrow my boy will take his new degree and pack his meager belongings into his graduation wheels and drive two thousand miles away.  My boy, as if he were a simple possession, as if he ever really belonged to me.  His leaving evolved slowly, in the usual pattern of children, yet I am caught unaware, unprepared.  Tomorrow is muddy run-off, hard to read, but today we will fish.

The summer he was five years old, I took my son fishing for the first time.  Nate was about to start school, and while I knew he would be gone for only half a day at first, it was a four-hour absence that was the first point on a line of infinite separation.  No matter how close we were, how many games we played, how many secrets he might choose to share, part of his life would no longer include me.  He would begin to create his own universe, one in which his mother could be no more than a minor constellation.  The budding independence brought out in me an ambivalence I had expected intellectually, but for which I was viscerally unprepared.

So I taught him to fish.

We sat beside the river and watched the trout feed on a hatch of caddis flies.  Nate was quiet and thoughtful even at that age, so much like the father he would never know. Leaning against me and watching my hands, he listened while I talked about insects and feeding patterns and choosing the right fly.  I showed him how to cast, guiding his little arm in a short arc from shoulder height to straight over his head.  His hazel eyes opened wide when the fly finally landed lightly like a real insect, with no telltale puddle of line slapping a warning to the fish.  After a few missed strikes, Nate set his hook in a tiny rainbow.  In his exuberance, he yanked the miniature trout right out of the water and into the tall grass behind him.

“We serious fishermen call those ‘flying fish’,” I told my son in a grave voice as I searched for the elusive catch.  He laughed out loud when the wriggling fish darted away upon its release, deeper into the cool water.

Academic life was easy for Nate as he grew, but the social side of school was not so simple.  He had my easy laugh and the beginnings of a sharp wit, but he also had an overzealous blush response.  He would speak only if spoken to and tried to avoid being the focus of any group’s attention.  It was his wiry agility and quickness in games that saved Nate from isolation.  He was rarely the first one picked for a team, that honor reserved for the extroverts, but he was always an early choice.

At ten he could spend hours wading along the bank by my side, silently casting and watching.  I taught him about using the face of the clock and the pause at the top of the cast.  Keep your arm between ten o’clock and two o’clock.  Let the rod do the work.  The rod is an extension of your arm.  Only when we stopped in a shady spot and settled in for lunch did we talk about other things:  our week, vacation plans, the little details of the daily shared experiences that build a relationship.  And sometimes the big details. 

“Would people like me better if I pretended to be dumb?” he asked casually, between halfhearted nibbles at his sandwich.

I felt my face grow hot. I will march down to that school and smack every one of those nasty illmannered little brats and all their ignorant parents, too! But my first thoughts did not answer the question.  I hoped more rational words would eventually filter through the cloud of emotion.  What was the best response to being singled out, subject to a potent mixture of awe and resentment from you peers?  We tend to forget the toll extracted from children for gifts bestsuited to adults.  Maybe I had blocked out the hurtful struggle behind my own choices or maybe they had faded, replaced by the complicated losses of adulthood.  But he was decades away from the comfort of historical perspective.

“What kind of people do you like?”

I gave the problem back to him, biting off the tirade looping eloquently through my brain.  Why don’t they send you home from the hospital with a self-mute button instead of free diapers for your newborn?  I would have settled for an automatic three-second delay.  It would have saved me years of practice.

He stared, unseeing, at the water and did not respond.  I could almost hear the whirring of his mental machinery, and as I watched, his profile aged, became his father’s.  For an instant, Nate was already gone.  I blinked hard.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t like fakers.” He tore off a big mouthful of bologna and cheese.  “And the most fun people are usually pretty smart.”

The light shifted on the river as we watched, from the sharp sequin flashes of midday to a muted green glow mottled by stretching patches of gray.  We were comfortable in the silence, each with our own thoughts.  The breeze shifted, and a cool gust from the shadowed bank told us when to pack up our gear and go home.  I snatched a grasshopper from the waving blade of grass it clutched and tossed it onto the river as we turned to go.  It barely touched the surface of the water before being gobbled from below.

“Fish come easier to bait,” I said on the way back to the car, “but easy isn’t what makes a good catch.”

His coordination and strength increased with adolescence, and Nathan acquired an admiration from his peers that is reserved for those with physical prowess - the jocks.  This allowed him the freedom to excel academically without being labeled conveniently dismissed as a “nerd” or “brain.” Granted as much three-dimensionally as teenagers can concede to one another, he grew more comfortable with himself.

At fifteen his long cast was better than mine, a thing of beauty and precision.  A great billowing arc of line would hover above him before the fly shot across the river, and his rolling cast sent perfect hoops of line spinning across the surface of the river like a rodeo rope trick.  He still got hung up in the growth behind him sometimes, but then again, so did I.

We fished separately now, walking upstream and down, meeting only accidentally when the water was low enough for one of us to wade across and fish the other side.  We’d gesture to each other, hands apart, to show the size of the enormous fighter the other had just missed seeing. Lunch often passed with little conversation, but we were always together.

“Eric’s going to spend this summer working at his uncle’s dude ranch in Montana.  His uncle said he could bring along another hired hand.”

I had to smile at the adolescent gift for making a request without ever asking the question.  Throwing out the topic for a reaction before you actually take the risk of getting your hopes up. An interesting strategy.  Do they teach this to each other, or is it innate, activated by the same hormones that produce their insecurity?

“That’s a lot of hard work,” I said.  Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go. “and probably a lot of girls your age?” Go, go, go.

Nathan smiled and blushed a red so intense the tips of his ears were nearly purple.

And it’s a very long way from home.

“Maybe you can get in a little fishing while you’re there.  Maybe teach some of the guests.”

“I thought about that!” He grinned and wove the details of the ranch, the rivers nearby, the riding opportunities, and the responsibilities of the hired hands into a story.  He sat up straighter as he talked, his hands describing the summer for me.  It was a longer continuous stream of words and more enthusiasm than I had heard from him in months.

“Sounds like you’re going to have a busy summer.”

Braced for disappointment, he did not respond immediately.  When he understood what my statement meant, he got to his knees and gave me a hug.  Wrapping both arms around me tight, he took my breath away.

“I promise I’ll write, Mom.” He offered a sideways smile.  “Or maybe you better come visit.”

We retrieved our rods and switched directions for the afternoon.  Nathan did not see me pause and turn to watch him walk away.  I stood there until all I could see was the space he had occupied just before turning to follow the bend of the river.

He came home every summer during college, but our fishing trips were fewer and fewer each year.  Nathan worked full-time and had a girlfriend and still played ball whenever he could.  These months he existed for me mostly in the ripe discarded gym clothes on this floor and the car’s uneven humming fading into the night.  His life had many facets, and fishing was only one of them.  I was only one of them.  Petulance and irrational jealousy lurked just beneath my eversupportive surface.  I longed to make unreasonable demands on his time, to reassert a priority status to which I could no longer lay claim.

Last summer my fishing was solitary.  At season’s end I stood alone in the icy river facing a deep green pool and feeling my son’s absence just as surely as I felt the presence of the big brown watching the riffle.  I longed to see that lemon-yellow flash of belly as it cleared the surface to take my fly.  But anticipation is not a strike, timing is crucial.  Jerk too soon and the fish is spooked and gone.

“If we don’t leave now, we’re not going to make the river before it heats up.”

Nathan appears in the doorway, dispersing my reverie.  I look up into the familiar face of my boy, a face now bearded and angular but with the same mosaic eyes in all the colors of the river.  A fisherman.

“I want to try that new fly you tied last night.”

Nathan pulls a barbless hook wrapped with deer hair and a touch of bright red silk out of his fly box and sets it firmly in the patch of sheepskin on his vest.  His movements have a graceful economy, fingers nimble despite the size of his hands.  A man.

“You ready, Mom?”

We stand side-by-side at the water’s edge in the rosy glow of early morning.  Feeding ripples are visible all along the bank, and a big rainbow breaks the surface not twenty feet from us.  Nate grins at me, his eyes eager.  I know just what he is thinking:  an embarrassment of options and the whole day before us.  I return the smile and point toward the jumper.  “You want that one?”

He winks at me and says, “Nah, too easy.” Nate instead sends his first cast into a dark pocket tight against the bank, hoping the wily old man in the deep water will look up.  I shake my head and laugh.

“That’s my boy!”

Cast, refloat, refloat, cast again, mend the line, watch him rise, set the hook, keep your tip up, watch him jump, let him run, give him line if he needs it, put him on the reel, bring him close, bring him in, admire his colors, praise his fight . . . let him go.

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Sheila Scobba Banning lives in California with her husband, sons and menagerie of pets where she writes fiction and essays and creates fascinators and outlandish hats.  Her work has appeared in literary journals, The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and the book Intersections.  Sheila throws fabulous parties, wears vintage dresses, and laughs until she cries every day. Her superpower is catalysis.  “Catch and Release” is part of her self-published collection, “Intersections.” Learn more at www.scobba.com.

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Russell Rowland is serving as New West’s fiction editor.

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