"The point of the essay is to change things."
- Edward Tufte
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- Edward Tufte
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essays
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Published in Fat City, 2004
Fishing Gesture
I stand in the stern, holding buoy and lead line. The skipper is in the cabin on the radio. I can hear the voices of the other fishermen in our group, barking excited static from tinny deck speakers: “Three in the air at once!” “Fish everywhere!” “…looked better a little south of me.”
I watch for jumpers and wonder at this fishing enterprise I am engaged in so intimately. In minutes, hundreds of us will cast our nets into the skin of the planet, fishing a surface sliver of deeper water to catch the salmon swimming there. In their frenzy to return to the river of their birth and spawn, schools of them have risen from the depths under us and seemingly want to fly part of the way home.
The boat idles in the choppy sea, drifting. I await the opening with building anxiety. What if they move past us? What if the tide takes us out of the school? What if another boat pulls in just south of us and corks us off? What if…
I suddenly notice the boat closest to us. We are far enough apart to not be in each other’s way when we set the gear, but I see my counterpart on the other vessel, standing in the picking well, waiting like me, and my mind drifts…
* * *
I am above the boats, seeing deckhand after deckhand, each holding a buoy, waiting. Waiting for the surge of the throttle, and over that, the skipper’s shout, “Let her go!”
The boats lurch forward, and together we toss the moment into the air; hundreds of bright orange buoys soar through the morning light in one fluid motion, bound like salmon jumping to return to the water; yet weightless, fishing the air for the sea. The noise of engines recedes as the fishing gesture echoes its way into the past, connecting all these tossed nets to all other nets ever thrown into the ocean. We have done this before, not always like this, but always like this, with an arc of net and line that laces its way through the sky to the water, to the fish, to the planet.
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Published in Swimming with Fish and Other Animals, 2008
June 30
You are fishing today.
I wonder: what’s the weather like?
Here by the bay, it's warm and sunny, and a light breeze carries the salt haze in with the tide. The Olympics are lost in the mist. Two elderly women are sitting across from me in the shade of a green umbrella, discussing polar bears and the melting Arctic ice.
I imagine you on the back deck in a choppy sea, head down, bent to the work of fishing: you pull the cork and lead lines apart to reach down and lift a sockeye out of the bag. Your orange-gloved hands strip the web from its gills, and it drops to the deck, slides backwards and spins like a coin until it bumps against another and softly stops. One unblinking eye stares upward at your hooded face, dark against the brightest sky it has ever seen - with no water filtering the light - the last images it will ever transmit to an uncomprehending brain.
"There's 40,000 extinct species in the United States," says the woman in the flowered dress. I think she must mean insects, plants and animals all combined. I wonder how many times I may have looked at a single bug, giving it no thought at all, only to have that one tiny life be the last of its kind. Or the bat that we chose not to kill last night after it got into the house - herding the dogs and cat into the office and closing the door before throwing a blanket over it and carrying it outside to set it free - how many of that particular species are left? If I don't have a way of knowing, then aren't I obliged to act as if every species is endangered? Aren't they?
Aren't we?
I imagine you at the wheel, running west looking for jumpers. You’re on the bridge, and your coat flaps in the wind. You reach back and pull it forward, snapping it closed as the bow slams into a wave, and you duck your head, hiding your face under the bill of your cap as the wave ascends and washes past you. You look up, and in the distance a small splash among the whitecaps and the scattered kelp signals a school of fish is moving through. You turn hard to starboard to get ahead of them.
#
Fishing Gesture
I stand in the stern, holding buoy and lead line. The skipper is in the cabin on the radio. I can hear the voices of the other fishermen in our group, barking excited static from tinny deck speakers: “Three in the air at once!” “Fish everywhere!” “…looked better a little south of me.”
I watch for jumpers and wonder at this fishing enterprise I am engaged in so intimately. In minutes, hundreds of us will cast our nets into the skin of the planet, fishing a surface sliver of deeper water to catch the salmon swimming there. In their frenzy to return to the river of their birth and spawn, schools of them have risen from the depths under us and seemingly want to fly part of the way home.
The boat idles in the choppy sea, drifting. I await the opening with building anxiety. What if they move past us? What if the tide takes us out of the school? What if another boat pulls in just south of us and corks us off? What if…
I suddenly notice the boat closest to us. We are far enough apart to not be in each other’s way when we set the gear, but I see my counterpart on the other vessel, standing in the picking well, waiting like me, and my mind drifts…
* * *
I am above the boats, seeing deckhand after deckhand, each holding a buoy, waiting. Waiting for the surge of the throttle, and over that, the skipper’s shout, “Let her go!”
The boats lurch forward, and together we toss the moment into the air; hundreds of bright orange buoys soar through the morning light in one fluid motion, bound like salmon jumping to return to the water; yet weightless, fishing the air for the sea. The noise of engines recedes as the fishing gesture echoes its way into the past, connecting all these tossed nets to all other nets ever thrown into the ocean. We have done this before, not always like this, but always like this, with an arc of net and line that laces its way through the sky to the water, to the fish, to the planet.
#
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Published in Swimming with Fish and Other Animals, 2008
June 30
You are fishing today.
I wonder: what’s the weather like?
Here by the bay, it's warm and sunny, and a light breeze carries the salt haze in with the tide. The Olympics are lost in the mist. Two elderly women are sitting across from me in the shade of a green umbrella, discussing polar bears and the melting Arctic ice.
I imagine you on the back deck in a choppy sea, head down, bent to the work of fishing: you pull the cork and lead lines apart to reach down and lift a sockeye out of the bag. Your orange-gloved hands strip the web from its gills, and it drops to the deck, slides backwards and spins like a coin until it bumps against another and softly stops. One unblinking eye stares upward at your hooded face, dark against the brightest sky it has ever seen - with no water filtering the light - the last images it will ever transmit to an uncomprehending brain.
"There's 40,000 extinct species in the United States," says the woman in the flowered dress. I think she must mean insects, plants and animals all combined. I wonder how many times I may have looked at a single bug, giving it no thought at all, only to have that one tiny life be the last of its kind. Or the bat that we chose not to kill last night after it got into the house - herding the dogs and cat into the office and closing the door before throwing a blanket over it and carrying it outside to set it free - how many of that particular species are left? If I don't have a way of knowing, then aren't I obliged to act as if every species is endangered? Aren't they?
Aren't we?
I imagine you at the wheel, running west looking for jumpers. You’re on the bridge, and your coat flaps in the wind. You reach back and pull it forward, snapping it closed as the bow slams into a wave, and you duck your head, hiding your face under the bill of your cap as the wave ascends and washes past you. You look up, and in the distance a small splash among the whitecaps and the scattered kelp signals a school of fish is moving through. You turn hard to starboard to get ahead of them.
#