When I was about nine years old we rounded up the family, loaded up our American Motors Matador Station Wagon (still a front-runner for one of the ugliest cars ever created) and took a drive to the shores of Georgia. There we boarded a fiberglass fishing boat (that was a big thing to me back then - water, especially something as large as the Atlantic ocean scared the shit out of me and I needed to be assured that we wouldn't sink - somehow, for no particularly good reason, the word "fiberglass" instantly calmed my pre-adolescent, sugar-laden cerebral cortex) that belonged to family friends and we gurgled our way far, far into the Georgia sea to go on our first-ever fishing excursion. Deep sea fishing.
At age nine I thought it was pretty fucking cool (even as a dorky little 9 year old, I was infused with a burning passion for the f-word). Porpoises leaped from the bow of the boat as we trudged our way out to sea. We giggled and squirmed and laughed as they danced in front of the boat just out of our reach. Deep Sea Fishing. (It was my mantra the entire week prior. -DEEP SEA FISHING! WE ARE GOING DEEP SEA FISHING!).
We threw our hooks overboard, fastened our giant fishing poles to the back of the boat and dragged our lines behind.
"Trolling", explained my father's friend, Bob - our Captain and fishing guide.
I AM TROLLING! I AM DEEP SEA FISHING AND TROLLING!
It was pretty fucking cool. I was the first to hook a fish. The thrill of reeling it in was intoxicating.
I am DEEP-SEA-FISHING!
I AM A DEEP! SEA! FISHERMAN!
A strange looking fish neared the surface after about five minutes of reeling. A Triggerfish - a flat, ugly, dinner-plate shaped aquatic object wriggled at the end of my line. Captain Bob grabbed the "gaff" - a long stick with a hook on the end and jabbed it into the side of my fish to keep it from wrestling its way off my hook - and yanked the little Triggerfish aboard.
Pats on the back for a job well-done and my fish was tossed into an open ice chest. It was there that my little Triggerfish lay. Lay on his strange, flat, shiny, scaly side - resting a- top a pile of ice. Blood from the gaffing mixed with salt water and flowed from his gills - now pumping full throttle - in a red, steady ooze. He was gasping terribly. Struggling for breath. I watched in horror as his gills pumped furiously, sucking away for life-giving water that would never, ever come. He flopped around very little - his will broken, my little Triggerfish.
Mostly he just continued to struggle for breath.
Struggling, struggling, struggling.
I imagined that - were it not for my shitty little hook doctored up to look like 'real food' that I 'trolled' through his little, easy-going world - he would be living happy and free. Living the good life: Hanging with friends; Doing his thing; Eating legitimate, non-'hook-hidden' food. Living it up. Not struggling for breath on a pile of ice.
I looked at my parents.
I looked at my brother and sister.
I looked at Captain Bob.
I looked at all the faces on that little, fiberglass fishing boat that day hoping that someone - anyone was seeing the same thing that I was. Surely someone was ready to step in and intervene on my poor little Triggerfish's behalf.
Nada.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
As a matter of fact they were already in the process of dragging more hooks from the back of the boat eager to repeat the whole thing again.
Hook. Reel. Gaff. Repeat.
I snuck silently to the the bow of the boat – the bow where porpoises had danced only minutes earlier. It was there that I sat by myself and cried quietly. I cried and cried for my stupid little Triggerfish. My stupid little insignificant Triggerfish that was helplessly struggling for breath at that moment.
I am in the Mekong Delta - the south of Vietnam. Rumour has it that the U.S. Special Forces used to toss V.C. prisoners unwilling to surrender information from helicopters -hands still bound behind their backs - in this very area.
Here, as smiling faces beckon from crowded vessels in the Floating Market and through the small villages of Can Tho, it is almost impossible to imagine that this could be an area of such cruelty. All manner of sea vessel are present. Some look like remnants from a bygone era - aging but still very sea-worthy . Others appear - as if by decision, the scrap-pile sitting dormant in the back yard was gathered up and simply nailed together. They bob-along clumsily on the brown Mekong water under a sunless sky. Sleeping children lounge in hammocks as their shirtless fathers captain their way through the heavily-traveled waters - cigarettes dangling from their lips....
As I make my way through the Can Tho Fish Market forgotten memories are trickling to the surface. Fuzzy at first. Then, little by little they become more lucid.
There are fish everywhere. Live fish. Dead fish. Fish in a seemingly suspended state - held somewhere between life and death in a large aluminum tub with just enough water to survive. Others struggle and gasp through tortured gills.
Here, at the Can Tho Market the fish are sold about as fresh as they come. Frogs are tied, four or five to a bundle by their legs - live, and bundles are stacked on top of bundles three to four high.
One frog suddenly flops over the side, suspended awkwardly upside down from his one tethered leg.
Suddenly, without warning, I am right back there with my little Triggerfish. All the sadness from that Georgia afternoon flows back in stale, humid succession.
I should have done something.
I should have thrown him back into the sea when nobody was looking.
Maybe pleaded on his behalf.
Something. Anything.
I feel ancient tears welling up in my eyes and I feel foolish.
Now I'm "in it". Fully. I float through the rest of the day in a cloudy haze. Blinders narrow my vision into pin-hole resolve. Everything else is blotted out. I can't look anywhere without seeing "it".
IT: The beautiful sadness of life.
The beautiful sadness of life, death, suffering and survival. I see it everywhere and in everything.
I see it in the dying fish at the market. I see it in the eyes of the lone Vietnamese woman that passes me. I see it in the look on the young boys face at the Floating market - the boy that has just, for the third time - tried, with no success - to sell us bananas and pineapples from his small decaying boat - him peddling goods at his mothers request while she steadies the boat. I imagine them at home later - just the two of them - counting the meager days earnings silently in a dimly lit shack.
No - you won't see it right away.
The look.
You gotta watch for it.
It comes afterward.
It comes when nobody is watching.
This one comes long after our boats have separated and the boy has gone back to cutting pineapples. Pineapples that no one will buy. I am heartbreakingly riveted. I can't pull myself away. He's suffocating. Struggling for breath.
And there's nothing that I can do about it!
I see it in the old mans face.
The gray-haired man with the red baseball cap and overflowing smile. He pokes his head inside our bus trying last minute to try to sell us useless items: Gum, cheap feather dusters, postcards, hats - all loaded into wicker baskets that dangle from his limbs like some kind of circus-performer. He leans into the open bus door to ask me where I'm from.
"Oh!", he says with a smile on his face, "America? I am 77 years old and I....."
His voice gets lost in engine noise and garble as the bus whines to life and readies to leave. He continues to talk anyway, I can only see his mouth moving as he attempts to share the events of his tragic life before the doors close. I watch him as the bus pulls away. I watch and watch and watch. I watch when he doesn't think anybody is watching anymore. I see the look on his face as the smile fades and dissipates like fog into the ozone. Gone and replaced by the pain and sadness of 77 years of hard, heartbreaking life as it creeps to the surface.
I see it all - feel it as if it were my own. I watch as his spirit crumbles before my eyes and dies a tragic death in front of a nameless hotel. I watch it all. I see it all in technicolor brilliance and there is nothing - absolutely nothing that I can do.
I am useless.
I am helpless.
I am right back there with my stupid little Triggerfish and all I wanna do is find a place to disappear and cry. Cry the tears of a nine year old and a fish. Cry endless tears for this beautiful sadness of life.
No comments: