Gone fishing

Many of you may know that my greatest fear in life is fish. The living ones, of course. The dead ones are just tasty. It´s an irrational fear at best, but I´ve spent all my life with one foot planted firmly in a world of my imagination, and there? Fish pose a big threat.

You can imagine, then, why I was less-than-thrilled to accept an invitation to go fishing with Seña, my beloved neighbor who has already declared me her other daughter. But as my Proyecto Amistad (Project Friendship) rolls on, I try never to turn down an invitation.

You can also imagine my horror when Seña arrived at my doorstep and I saw what they fish with here: nothing more than fishing line wrapped around a discarded water bottle. While I´d never been a fan of stateside fishing, the pole always offered a comforting distance between predator and prey. What we had here seemed like a decidedly more contact-heavy endeavor.

No matter. I sallied forth, knowing Seña would be patient and forgiving, even though we were fishing for her family´s dinner. We walked down narrow paths in the direction of the Carribean, surrounded on both sides by cacao trees. We spent an hour wading through the river, gently overturning rocks and hoping to find shrimp to use for bait. I failed greatly in this task, managing to collect only a half-dozen babies, with a net. Seña, the expert, found dozens and was able to snatch most of them before they scurried away among slimy leaves and mini-caves formed by rocks too large to move.

Carrying our bait in a bucket, we made our way upstream and got to work. Standing on the banks of the river in my rubber waders, I hopelessly cast my line into the shallow waters. I stood by helplessly as Seña jerked fish after fish out of the water. The fish she caught were small, but she caught many, digging her thumb into the gills of each one, and snapping its head back to break its spine. A slight trickle of blood would drip down its scales as she unceremoniously tossed it into the bucket.

After several hours of this, and me with several bites and no hooks, Seña thought it was time to kick it up a notch. She wanted me to see the ocean up close. Despite the many beautiful ocean views my community offers, I´d never been taken down to the shore. We waded through the putrid, sand-fly infested mangroves in the direction of the ocean.

Please note, at this time I was rather thirsty and hungry. Having not realized that fishing was a day-long endeavor, I left the house at 7a.m. without my water bottle. I tried to disguise my displeasure with the malodorous mangroves as Seña paused occasionally, dangling her hook into impossibly small pockets of water. She snatched up a black, two-to-four-inch fishes within seconds, and threw them on top of the other dead ones in her happy yellow bucket.

So on we marched until suddenly, the mangroves came to an abrupt hault and we stood with an unobstructed view of the crystalline Caribbean ocean. I wedged my machete into a tree branch, and was prepared to take a rest and enjoy the view.

"Cati, let´s go!" Seña said in Ngobere, smiling, waving her arm in the direction of the ocean.

We were standing on the edge of the mangroves. Fish were flopping in the water below, and men in dugout canoes were paddling in from their own morning of fishing. I´d recently read baracudas love the shallow waters around mangroves, and was trying to push the idea out of my mind.

"Um, where are we going?"

"We´re going fishing!"

This happens a lot. People half-answer a question without really answering it. Before I had time to rephrase, Seña, pregnant no less, was thigh-deep in the water, holding out an outstreched hand. We were going to fish in the ocean. Now this is a contact sport, I thought. And so we waded, and waded, and waded, until we were a few hundred feed from the shore, though the water never reached much past our hips. In the shallower areas, I saw a fish flirt with my bait, watched him steal it, and then vowed to think twice before I accepted a fishing invitation again. Seña caught a few more fish, bemoaned my bad luck, and we waded back to shore, where we drank some sugary coffee and ate a couple of pieces of bread that she´d been carrying in her bag.

All in all, the day turned out all right. I went fishing again this week, where I was allowed the sole responsiblity of guarding the fish we (read: Seña and two of her six children) caught. This time, she stored them on a stick, threading them through the kills and mouth and leaving them there to dangle. As I extracted a set of teeth that had become lodged in the bloody stick, and felt the weight of the carcasses hanging below, I thought perhaps I´m getting used to this. Maybe one day I´ll catch one. And until I do, I know Seña will still call to me from her kitchen, inviting me over for the surprisingly delicious fish soup she makes, or the cocount rice she serves with the catch of the day.