Ocean Fishing
When I write these posts, I try to start with some sort of creative spark, some kind of transcendent nudge that pushes me toward a certain piece of content. For this one it happened to be a description of the creative spark itself. Very meta.
I was in my basement late last night painting quarter-round molding, which is a curiously soothing activity, while listening to one of my favorite podcasts on writing, The Habit, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. His guest was talking about the creative process and pulled out this GK Chesterton phrase, "the wild whisper of something originally wise", which he spent the next fifteen minutes unfolding like an intricate piece of origami.
Here's how it landed with me: the creative process is wild because the source, God himself, is mysterious and sometimes surprising. To paraphrase John the Apostle, the wind blows but you don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going. But God is not just transdendent, he’s also imminent and available to his creation. And if you can learn to tap into that source, into God, there is boundless wisdom and beauty to be found there. Nature does this perfectly and effortlessly, as Christ taught us: “See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these." The wisest man in history didn't measure up to the embedded wisdom of wildflowers. But Van Gogh can paint a flower that points toward that beauty and wisdom and captures something of the transcendent within the imminent, intimate here and now.
A dozen years ago I was living with my parents, newly returned from a year-long adventure around the world with a head full of ideas about the future and no clue what was next. For a couple of months I entertained the idea of getting an MFA in writing and I committed to waking up very early and writing every day. I sat on a hard wooden chair at my old workbench in the shed and sipped bitter espresso and wrote reams and reams of bad stories that will never see the light of day.
But for some reason this odd little story about going fishing in Australia stuck with me. I think I wrote it quickly and impulsively wihout a lot of editing, which usually gets me closer to where I want to go (oh, to get that perfectionism monster off my back!) Admittedly there is a lot of Hemingway in it — the subject matter, the second-person-present tense, the staccato plot points and dialogue — but peeking through that immature writer's voice is the "wild whisper of something originally wise". It makes me want to go back there and look into that deep ocean. I'm still not really sure what it's about, but I know it's about something important I can't quite name, only wonder at, and that's enough.
You have been invited to go fishing in the ocean with an old Australian and a middle-aged Scotsman. You have never fished in the ocean before, except once when you and your brother stopped to throw some line in the water at a beach in Maine, but you had no way of casting the line far enough in the wind and no hope of catching fish. Today you have the right equipment - a sturdy ten foot, fiberglass fishing pole; one hundred yards of fifty-pound-test line; a lure with three clusters of barbed hooks. You are twenty-seven and you are on vacation in Australia and you know nothing about ocean fishing.
You meet the Australian and the Scotsman at 7 am at the Australian’s house. He’s finishing his first cigarette and offers you some coffee. You accept and follow him into the house where his wife, a large woman with a hairstyle that went out of fashion years ago in your country, fills your mug. The Scotsman arrives and you squash into the front seat of his truck with the Australian. The truck is equipped with radio gear, a spare fuel tank, a heavy bull-bar, and off-road tires.
You drive fifteen minutes on the main road, then turn off onto a bumpy road made of sand. The older men talk about their trucks and the times they got stuck. You bounce down a long hill to the ocean and park under the trees. You get out and take a short walk to explore the area and relieve yourself. Then you walk back to the truck and get ready. Get the rods, tackle boxes, coolers, knives, and cutting boards; walk down to the rocks and learn to cast from the Australian, who is patient; catch a whiting in the first fifteen minutes by sheer luck.
“The yank knows more about fishing than you do!” the Australian says to the Scotsman. As you practice casting, you watch the Australian and the Scotsman throw out hundreds of yards of line with heavy sinkers into the thrashing sea. When the Australian catches a fish he grabs it with his bare hands and pulls its head back to kill it quickly. He used to be a butcher and he has heavy butcher hands and a heavy butcher face.
After a while the Australian goes back to the truck to prepare lunch and you are left with the Scotsman, who doesn’t speak much. You rig up for squid and to your surprise you catch one, but it comes up on the rocks clawing horribly with its tentacles and you don’t know what to do. The Scotsman rushes down to grab it with his hands but it slides back into the ocean. He doesn’t blame you. Ten minutes later he declares that “the squid have flown the coop” and the way he says the last word sounds wonderful.
Then the Australian comes back and says it’s time for tea, which means lunch. He has put sausages and potatoes and onions into a pan and cooked them over a bunsen burner. He made the sausages himself. Sausages and onions and potatoes have never tasted so good eaten under the trees by the ocean. Then he offers you some coffee and you accept it even though it’s all he has left. He produces a carrying case with cups, sugar, creamer, and instant coffee in separate pouches and mixes up the coffee for you with still-hot water from a metal thermos. You have enough time to drink the coffee in large gulps while the men put things away and go out for a second round of fishing.
The weather has turned dark and windy, but this only spurs the men on to throw greater casts into the ocean and pull out still more fish. You learn to grab fish with your hands and break their necks, like the Australian does, and you cut some of them into pieces for bait. The flesh is as white and clean as supermarket tilapia. When a squid is caught the Australian pulls it apart efficiently and uses the tentacles for bait and sets the fluke aside to make calimari.
At four o’clock the day is done and you pack up and bounce over the uneven roads back to the Australian’s house. He provides you and the Scotsman with cans of beer, and stories, and eventually smoked whiting that he has made in his own smoker. His wife stays inside and watches a program about Australian teenagers from the city who go on a camping trip in the outback to learn about teamwork.