I loved fishing, but not with my father. I didn't like doing anything with him, and not just because I was 13. I'd only seen him about a dozen times since the divorce, but I had heard the tales, told bitterly by the women on my mother's side of the family. The story line was always the same. He was a good-looking man, with his reddish hair and startling green eyes, but he was also a drunk, lazy and a liar who more than once looked responsibility in the eye and executed an about-face. Could have gone to Oregon State on a football scholarship, if he had made grades. Could have owned the first Volvo dealership in Portland. Could have stayed around when my mom was pregnant with my younger brother Tom. Could have helped us avoid the humiliation of government-issued peanut butter, cheese and powdered milk.
The marriage ended in my fifth year. I remember the fight. He ripped the phone out of the wall, raised his fist in the air above my defiant mother, then turned and stalked out the front door. A few steps later I heard the garage-door window shatter. The next morning, I found spots of blood trailing down the driveway. I didn't see him for a long time after that. Nowadays, he showed up every year or so.
He cut the engine and the skiff settled into the gray river. "Alright, buddy. This is the spot."
I had my own rod and reel, but he had borrowed everything else, including this skiff. Some drinking buddy loaned it to him occasionally, poles and tackle included. We trailered it up into the mountains the year before. I brought two 11-inch lake trout back to my mom, who met us on the front steps. After the long car ride home, they hung from my stringer like a dirty pair of Converse low-tops.
"There's dinner," my father had told her, standing with me in the driveway.
"There's your car," she had answered.
Today, I was planning to bring home a much bigger prize. I tied on a six-ounce lead, a 25-pound leader and a pair of sliding single hooks. I slipped the first hook through the head of a nearly frozen whole herring and pulled the second through its tiny spine, just up from the tail. With a gentle pull, I curled the herring slightly, just enough for it to roll through the water wounded-looking, vulnerable, deadly.
My father was still digging through the tackle box.
"Death from above," I said, tossing my line overboard and watching the slow, steady flash of the spinning baitfish.
"Huh?"
"Death from above. That's what we call this set-up."
He looked into the water at the flashing herring. "Where'd you learn that?"
"This kid I know, Dave, his dad has a boat and we go out with him."
"Looks like it's spinning too fast," he said. "You'll never catch a chinookie on that."
"Dave's dad catches 'em all the time."
"You ever catch one?"
"No. I mean not yet. Had one on once, for about 15 minutes. Lost it."
"Your knot must have slipped." He looked at me and winked.
"No, the line broke."
"Yeah, sure," he said, dangling a rigged-up, bright-pink Spin-N-Glo off his side of the skiff and pulling line from his clicking reel. "Must've been a fifty-pounder."
"We never saw it, but it was big."
"They always seem bigger, until you get 'em into the boat. Things aren't always what you think."
The promise of a big fish to come is intoxicating. Over all the decades since that day on the river with my father, and long after he died, I finally came to appreciate that every fishing trip is a steady stream of tiny nuisances leading to spare but precious moments of perfect anticipation. Cleaning the boat. Filling the gas tanks. Sharpening your hooks. Waiting your turn to back down the launch ramp, hoping you'll get it right the first time. Then, finally, you're on the water. You drop your line, and the nervous wait begins.
Was that a bite? Strip off a little more line, maybe the fish is still following.
Come on, come on. Hit it. Take it. Don't wait. Now, goddamn it.
You imagine the fish below. Thick chinook salmon. Bright silver on the sides and black on top, with hints of shimmering, iridescent purple. From your biology classes, you remember all that these big river fish have survived to get here, everything that had to happen in the North Pacific for them to grow and flourish.
The biggest Willamette River salmon, after five or six years in the ocean, will hit sixty-five pounds. They hatch in shallow gravel beds then navigate a ninety-mile swim to saltwater, down the Willamette, past the industrial docks of Portland, into the mighty Columbia and on out to the Pacific. The saltwater journey can take them as far north as Bristol Bay in Alaska, as far west as the waters off Russian Siberia. Thousands of miles. They eat plankton, herring, small squid, crustaceans. They survive winner-take-all chases by seals, sea lions, sharks.
Part of the perfect anticipation of fishing is calculating the odds. From the thousands of eggs laid in the gravel beds by a single spawning female, only a handful of fish will return, answering a genetic homecoming call built into their fins and flesh and scales. Over the choppy bar of the Columbia, back into freshwater, past the pulp mills, through the sheen from drainage pipes, dodging bobbing plastic coffee cups, half-submerged beer cans and floating cigarette butts, the fish keep coming. Then, just as they get closest to their destination in the familiar gravel below the falls, there you sit, waiting silently above. How much of what happens next is the skill of the fisherman? What part is preordained? How much is just plain dumb luck?
