When my son and I arrive in northern California, it’s early May and pouring rain. We are here with specific duties — to help my parents move, still. We aren’t here to play and my son knows this: He stacks and boxes his grandmother’s teacups without any attitude or whine.
But, oh, to know this child is to know he loves to fish.
His uncle and his grandfather are dismantling a walrus-sized desk and trying to fit it, piece by piece, out a very small door. They’ve said to him, “We’ll go down with you if it stops raining.” And, woe is me, and woe is my mother, when we spy him mournfully looking out the window trying to will the rain to stop.
He watches the giant puddles in the driveway as they buck and ping with movement. Each hour they swell bigger, tip closer toward one another, threaten to become a blacktop lake. We know it’s not going to stop raining.
He cuts shelf paper for her new cupboards. His fishy wistfulness is understated and private. He doesn’t know that we know how badly he wants to go. Perhaps this is what finally gets to us, the sweetness of his private longing.
My mother and I meet accidentally in the hall, looking like we’re dressed to bathe a whale. “Where are you going?” I ask. “Where are you going?” she responds. We eye each other — the Gore-Tex and ineffective rain hats — then we turn to him by the window. He’s just noticed our get-ups and shines. “Only an hour,” I say.
By the time we walk down to the wharf, even my ankles are wet. Water trickles down my neck like slow bugs crawling. I itch and jump and want to be anywhere but outside. I try to muster some positive attitude but am flat out of muster. I try lecturing myself;
“Take a breath,” I think. “Look up, unscrunch your neck even if the cold slices in. What’s here to discover? What good can come from this?” Since such sentiments are easier to make fun of than to live up to, I mentally mock my positive-attitude self-talk.
Once the poles are baited and in the water, we stand, growing increasingly wet and cold.
Then his pole bends. And bends, and flicks and jumps. Then it’s a large arch at the top; he grabs it just in time and reels in. We peer 40 feet down, over the wharf railing, and see a large frying pan swishing in the sea — a sting- ray twice the size of a Frisbee, hooked and going nowhere. The only way to help it is to pull it up. The people to our left give us room, and my son heaves the animal onto the wharf. It’s copper and silver and smooth as a coin. The tail, half the size and probably equal in heft to a baseball bat, flicks like the leg of a strong dancer.
None of us knows what to do next. I glance around for an elderly Italian man because they always know what to do. I see none but note a youngish- looking guy who is duly unimpressed with our stingray; he turns back to his own line and I figure his boredom as a sign of expertise. I ask him if he’ll teach us what to do and with a shrug, he comes over.
The stingray has by now drawn a bigger crowd. The bored guy backs them up and shows us how to gently step down on the dangerous tail before reaching forward to clear the hook. The fish tolerates all this by staying still, grounded, almost patient. And as quick as that, it’s back in the water, graceful and fluttering; we see the two pectoral fins undulates like wings, once, twice, and it’s gone.
Before we even turn around the crowd has dispersed. We are soaked. My son shivers. “Wow. Now we know how to release a stingray,” I say.
“Cool,” says my cold son. “Yes,” says my cold mother. We are quiet then, and powerful with what we know. Later, and all night, we hold this unplanned thing, this new learning, like a piece of red beach glass — rare, unsought, a treasure happened upon, grabbed at, caught.
