Angling for Transcendence

Angling for Transcendence Jonathan Brooks Professor Angela Lohr Humanities and Technology HUM 202-0-10795 Portland Community College Cascade Campus 02/28/2013 Angling for Transcendence On Kodiak Island, Alaska reside my maternal grandparents, Val and Lloyd; they’ve been there for about forty years. Its tourist shops sell t-shirts detailing its character as “a small drinking village with a big fishing problem;” howbeit, my mother Valinda’s parents say they never even once were drunk at all in their lifetimes. After bearing her first son (my only sibling), our mother left his father and moved to Durango, Colorado, and there met my father, Ron. He and my paternal grandfather, Eugene, frequented the mountainous wilderness of the Rocky Mountains, returning seasonally to their favorite secluded fishing estuaries and hunting grounds. Ron’s mother, Beverly, was taken by cancer when I was a teen; he and I flew out and borrowed a truck to visit his family, friends and fishing spots. Before I was born my family moved from Durango to Phoenix, an unlivable city, in Valinda’s view. Our family relocated to Kodiak when I was just an infant. Some of the first memories I can recall are walks on the dark beaches along Kodiak’s shores. From my Grandparents house at the time, and my temporary childhood home, Mill Bay’s beach is only ten minutes away, a short walk along a streamside trail that crosses a small marsh—whereupon, enormous leafy green rafts buoy up brightly colored lilies—Pink (or “Humpies” for Humpback) and Silver (or Coho) salmon run up that little stream to spawn in the marsh, and in the much larger aquatic habitat of Lily Lake, upstream several hundred feet farther. My brother Jeremy, Bandit (our Malamute), Fausta Dawn Shadow (our Husky), some other neighborhood kids and I loved exploring the waters’ edge in the summertime, stalking and touching the salmon as they ventured inland. We later lived in a townhouse next to a lake, which float-planes considered a runway, and there were small docks outside our back door. There is a vivid memory of netting little minnows, some beige- white and some darker with speckles. Without having yet developed a sense of empathy, I found it amusing to squeeze them, as one does to a tube of toothpaste, until their innards were expelled. My diet on Kodiak consisted largely of Halibut, King and Coho salmon, Steelhead and Rainbow trout, King and Dungeness crab, Blacktail deer and other creatures of the wild. Fishing was among my most cherished priorities, and I vividly remember the very first fish I landed, a Dolly Varden trout; I was certain it was a whopper of a salmon right up until it was flopping feebly upon the black sand at Mill Bay. We always released them, as much larger salmon were as likely to take our bait and feed us. During the summer when I was turning seven years old, we moved to Lititz, Pennsylvania, just a short drive away from my maternal grandmother’s sister in Manheim. On fair weather days, when school let us out I was frequently en route to a stream or patch of woods to fish or explore. There are still pristine areas of Appalachia. We once visited cathedral virgin forests in northern central Pennsylvania, and I fished for trout in those headwater estuaries; inland the healthiest fish are in mountainous wilderness. The natural areas bordering farmland in the immediate vicinity of Lititz are quite comparable to the splotches of unclumped fur on a dog with mange gone too long untreated. Several miles south are forests around Speedwell Forge Reservoir, and trout were stocked there. We moved back to Phoenix the summer when I was turning fifteen and I lost interest in fishing; I rather suddenly lost interest in nearly all that is extraneous to skateboarding, sex, punk rock, alcohol and other drug experimentation. My mom insisted on moving to Flagstaff the next summer, and there the allure of fishing continued to diminish. I returned to Alaska at age twenty two, and resided there through age twenty six. Initially, I was intending to walk the vegan path which I had practiced for three years prior to landing in the small jet at Kodiak airport. My conviction didn’t survive long. Within a few months I was fishing, and rationalizing my nonattribution of pain sensations to fish because, though they do fight to get free, their eyes never blink and their facial expressions are so different from what we recognize as sentience in ourselves and other animals we’re more similar to. After getting hired and fired at a construction company, then getting a job at Mill Bay Coffee & Pastry—owned and operated by the innumerably awarded, classically trained French culinary wizards, Joel & Martine Chenet—then quitting when offered a job on the f/v Tiffany Lee (a fifty-nine foot fishing vessel), I began fishing for materialistic gain. Our first voyage was replete with desperate, earnest supplication; as I lay on the bunk in the hull of the ship, I told whatever is out there that I accept my fate and then practiced the steadfast focus of coping with the nauseating motion of a small boat on a big ocean. A lot of work deckhands do involves preparation; I took the role of: assistant mechanic, carpenter, radar unit installer and fabricator of a plastic housing around its control and readout panel, fork-lift and front-end-loader operator, welding assistant, buoy inflator and painter, line coiler, fish gaffer, gill stabber, assassin of octopi, whale watcher, sea lion feeder, sea otter imitator, admirer and envier of Bald Eagles, hydraulics maintainer and operator, epic vista appreciator; and, at this point I’m a memoire narrator. Upon the deck we loaded four-hundred-pound pots (cages of welded steel rebar) and hauled them to the fishing grounds where they sank into the shadowy depths. When docked we slept decently and worked on the gear or the boat. After bucking the waves in transit to the grounds, we’d bait and drop twenty pots at a time until we had sixty set. We ran through—surfacing, emptying, baiting, returning—the pots thrice daily, only stopping for meals between runs, for about sixteen hours of continuous, and often vigorous activity daily. The sleep schedule when we were on anchor was hellacious; we slept for two hours and watched the wheel for an hour, and after we each slept as much as six quick hours, we returned to work. I endured through the first season and quit in the middle of the second because the skipper (owner/captain) was certifiably insane from fifteen years of that living, and my insanity was reflecting his. He claimed I owed him a bunch of money: crazy! Throughout that working experience, I hated my life a little more every day. Various, though similarly moral, nuances of trouble came on three other commercial fishing jobs and I left Kodiak with a longer rap sheet than the one I had arrived with; the offenses are unworthy of reconstructing neither excuses for, nor glorifications of. Before leaving I helped a guy named Ryan, as his gear porter for an expedition to a cabin in the bush built by Grandpa Lloyd, and Guy Powell, his long time friend, a few decades ago. It served as their outpost through many hunting seasons. At an approximate halfway point we parted, and free of the pack I bounded back through waist high grasses with Lloyd’s pit bull, Nelly, trotting along. Ryan took Lloyd’s rifle along in case of encounters with Kodiak grizzly bears or meals-on-hooves grazing opportunely. He never located the cabin; the bush can be quite disorienting. The adventurer returned to civilization a few days later with his gear soaked through; Kodiak has a relentless wet season from September ‘til June, as well as sporadic showers in the interim months. Nelly and I saw a lot of evidence of grizzly activity, such as a large bear bed where salmon skeletons were piled up with the skins and flesh stripped off. It was frightening, yet we didn’t encounter any bears and I presume they are wisely cautious about people. Kodiak bears are some of the largest grizzlies anywhere on Earth, due to the immense salmon runs and absence of competing predators, foxes and eagles aside. They are adapted to fish for salmon, forage on berries, and fight to the death; ironically, the greatest (nonhuman) threat to bears are larger or fiercer bears. They also hunt and eat various terrestrial species—unconfined by the enclosing banks of a watery grave, behooved creatures can be more adept at escape than salmon—and size has a reproductive advantage also. Analogizing my own best possible wellness as a grizzly bear, watching mental formations enter my field of thought, lying low to observe whether or neigh the volition has a thunder stick of fear/harm, if yes staying low, otherwise, I respectfully encounter the volitions which reciprocate the intelligence of respecting their place in Life, and I ask about a fishing lesson.