Chain Pickerel
by Susan April
The wooden rowboat was soft gray with rusted oar locks. It held two plank seats: a long one in the stern and a shorter one in the middle. There was also a small, flat triangle of wood at the tip of the bow. At three-and-a-half years old, I could squish my body under that triangle, if we were out on the water and it started to rain, only it never rained, especially not that mid-July week when we took our camp on Long-Sought-For Pond. It was always sunny, with airy mornings, comfortable afternoons, and music-filled nights.
By music, I mean a campfire and my father’s harmonica.
Fishing was serious business for my father, and for the chain of fathers before him. In Canada, they made a poor living on cod and eel but when those fisheries crashed, they moved to Massachusetts and became cobblers. Why? I don’t know. Everyone wears shoes, I suppose. Back then, you didn’t buy a new pair, just fixed up the old. Still, they fished the ponds. Men fished and women cooked the catch.
No need to teach a girl how to fish.
“Can I go with you?” I surprised him one morning at sunrise, as he quietly laid his fishing gear in the gray rowboat.
“What are you doing up?” He was annoyed. “Get back to bed.”
“Can’t sleep. Please, can I go with you?”
He hesitated, then looked to the camp’s screened porch, hoping my mother, sister, or aunt would fill the door frame and call me back. But they were asleep. I’d been out fishing with him before, but with a brother or two. He was teaching them how to fish.
Sometimes, I handled the worms. He was impressed that I wasn’t squeamish about the night crawlers, especially after they’d been sliced in gooey halves. Maybe that’s why he caved.
“All right. But get a coat.”
It was my proudest moment.
Dad was tearing strips from an old t-shirt when I returned. He draped them over the side of the boat, then fished for a green-and-orange tin of sewing machine oil in his tackle box. He squirted long arcs of oil onto the t-shirt ribbons, then tied those ribbons with flat knots around the oars before placing them in the oar locks.
“Don’t want to wake up the fishes,” he said. “Not yet, anyway.”
We pushed off from shore. The boat unstuck itself with a soft whoosh. Dad rowed with noiseless strokes, until the cabin we’d left by the shore looked like a plastic house on a model railroad siding. When we reached the middle, he turned away from the rising sun and headed towards the shadow-listed and reedy outlet of the lake. He called it the foot of the pond. There were fewer camps and more flying bugs. The reeds grew tall and bore spikes of purple flowers. The shallows held cattails and lily pads. It owned its own kind of quiet. He paused in the rowing to lower the brim of his cap.
For a long time, I was confused about rowboats: how they moved away from where the rower was looking. Everything seemed backwards. There was a kind of trust involved that I was too young to understand. Did dad steer the boat through my eyes? I didn’t know how it worked. In case my eyes were needed, I looked straight ahead. The sun felt warm on my back. Swirls of water passed from my father’s dip-and-pull strokes to me, like links in a chain. I trailed my hand in the chains.
“Watch out they don’t bite you,” he said. He meant the fishes.
“I’d like that,” I said.
“You wouldn’t like it if Mr. Pickerel nibbled your fingers. He’s got teeth.”
So we were after pickerel! Dad had caught bass, perch, eel, and horned pout that July, but hadn’t yet caught a pickerel. He’d fished the sand bars on the opposite shore, the pods of glacial boulders at the head of the lake, and the fishing line-dripping tunnels under the spruces. I’d watch as he set out on his pickerel hunts—tiny human in a miniature boat—rowing himself smaller. I’d run down to the sandy beach to keep him in sight, afraid he’d disappear and nothing would remain, not even the swirl of an oar.
But here we were in the boat. If my father melted into the foot-of-the-pond’s dragonfly and sewing needle-filled world, I would too. We’d both disappear.
He raised the oars.
He laid them wet on the keel.
The boat drifted, then stopped.
There were pale pink flowers that smelled like vanilla.
A buzz-hum surrounded us, like a dentist’s drill in another room.
The tackle box opened.
A lure was placed on the line.
Dad chose the shiny silver one that looked like a hammered dime and said, “Hand me a bobber.”
I gave him a red and white globe.
The boat tilted and lurched, almost spitting us out when we shifted seats.
Dad cast the line into a narrow channel with a slight current and no weeds.
I sat on the triangle seat in the bow.
“No worms?” I asked him.
“No worms,” he said.
That was our conversation for an hour, two hours, forever.
I am still there.
*
Thoreau famously wrote about winter pickerel fishing in Walden: “Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come with fishing-reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch.” Walden Pond and Long-Sought-For Pond are Great Ponds. That doesn’t mean that they’re as huge as Lake Winnepesaukee. A Great Pond is a legal construct under English common law, defined as an inland body of water greater than ten acres in size, and held in trust by the state for the public to enjoy. You can’t run a chain-link fence around a Great Pond or block the people from boating or fishing. Well, some do, but that’s a different essay.
Essay means “to try.” Each essay tries to make sense of a difficult something by piecing together ideas and images that explore and craft out the meaning of an experience. Sometimes, it’s a crooked path. You follow it.
Chain pickerel has a golden body, with a dark green chain-like pattern on its flanks. Thoreau in his Journal wrote about its stunning beauty. He remarked on the unusual black tear drop that falls from its eye to its outshot jaw. He noted how the cheek and the gill are completely covered with scales. He admired the pickerel’s cunning ability to remain as still as a stick in the strongest of currents, waiting for the unwary minnow or passing frog. He once cut a pickerel open and found it had swallowed another smaller pickerel, the undigested tail of its younger kin fresh in its mouth. He’d thus caught two pickerels on one hook.
Anglers know pickerel are an aggressive fish and put up a nice fight. Their favorite haunts are weed beds, logs, brush, boulders, and the edges of sand bars or drop-offs, particularly in mid-summer. The Illustrated Manual of Massachusetts Freshwater Fishes suggests the red and white spoon—commonly known as a daredevil—is deadly on pickerel. According to the Manual, anglers for pickerel should “Drift fish the weedy shorelines or edges of other cover, casting this lure right up to the edge, or wherever possible, into the cover.”
The Massachusetts state record for chain pickerel is 9 pounds, 5 ounces, caught in Laurel Lake in the town of Lee in 1954 by a Mrs. James Martin.
That July morning, I knew none of this. I only knew that I loved my father, my father was fishing for pickerel, and I was on board.
*
How many times did dad cast the lure? I didn’t count. Did he cast it overhand or from the side? Always from the side. Did it catch in the weeds? Never. Did he break for a cigarette? Yes, but he sat on the plank seat by the transom and held the smoking cigarette out over the water when he wasn’t puffing. I worried he might fall in. He spit in the water. Dad was big on spitting. I didn’t know why.
I sat on the triangle seat, a hand on each gunwale for balance. The boat rocked whenever dad cast the spinner. He sighed. He spit. He spit. He sighed. My stomach growled. People in the few nearby cabins began to wake up and fry bacon, and it smelled delicious. It could have been that I looked in their direction and stretched out my neck to see what kind of breakfasts were happening. But I didn’t whine.
Still, a dad can tell when their child is hungry.
“Guess I ran out of luck today,” he said and sounded sad. I didn’t know what to say but said something anyway.
“Can we row the long way back?” I loved to mosey along and follow the shore. Often, I’d find treasure: cast-off bobbers and floating popsicle sticks. Also, how often did I get dad to myself?
“You’re not hungry and in a hurry to get home?”
“No.”
“Okay, if you want to,” he said. Then we switched seats and started to pull away from the pickerel reeds and the dragonflies. Dad rigged his fishing pole so the line would trail out behind us. I was to watch the bobber and say if it looked like a fish had struck. Dad guessed we might catch a guppy or a sunfish on our way home.
We had barely begun.
“Oh-oh, Dad. I think the line is caught on the weeds.”
“Well, jiggle it a little.”
I lifted the rod out of its holder and raised the bobber and lure straight out the water, but there were no stringy weeds on the hook.
“That looks fine,” he said. “Now, dip it back in.”
Just then, something flew up and lunged at the lure. It struck and quickly plunged back into the lake, caught up on the hook. It yanked the pole and me with it. Instantly, dad grabbed my jacket. A part of the gray boat hit my forehead. Dad held on to me and I held on to the rod. The oars crashed into the water. I wasn’t thinking, “I caught a fish.” I was thinking, “If I drop dad’s pole in the lake, he’ll kill me!”
So I held on.
I can’t say exactly how we landed the pickerel, but we did. I got a gash on my forehead, the tackle box tackle spilled everywhere, and dad’s cigarettes floated to kingdom come, like so many miniature logs.
The oars were retrieved.
Dad dipped his handkerchief into the lake and pressed it to my forehead.
The fish got unhooked and was very pretty and undamaged.
Dad scooped a metal bucket into the lake and set the pickerel in it.
We rowed not the long way around but directly back to camp.
Dad whistled and repeated under his breath “You son-of-a-gun.”
He meant me.
*
Baxley McQuaig Jr. holds the world record for chain pickerel, a 9-pound, 6-ounce fish caught in 1961 in Homerville, Georgia. A single ounce larger than Mrs. Martin’s, which itself was not without controversy. Seems Mrs. Martin had been ice fishing and her pickerel was caught with a tip-up jig. Did that satisfy the rules? This was taken under advisement by the Fishing Contest Editor for Field and Stream. Also, Mrs. Martin first said the pickerel had come out of Pontoosuc Lake, a fib apparently. Later, she admitted that the record catch came from Laurel Lake, but she was afraid the entire pickerel fishing universe would descend on Laurel and fish it out, so she fibbed.
Fishing and fibbing go together like that.
*
If I said the family welcomed us back with hip-hip-hoorays, I’d be lying. As always, walking into the camp kitchen was like entering a train station and I was the small luggage: a make-up bag, or a clutch purse, left on the ticket counter and hardly missed until one reached for a lipstick to refresh one’s lips. Gone. Where? Oh, well.
Breakfast smells billowed out the flung open windows like fluttering muslin. Aunts, uncles, cousins, friends of friends, and strangers congregated. There were no chairs. The table was pushed to a wall, the whole of it covered with bowls of boiled eggs and plates of cooked bacon, two kinds: crispy burnt ones and barely cooked ones with hanging shreds of chewy fat. Boxes of cereal, all sizes, all types, lined the wall like books in a library. Four or five open boxes of Hostess donuts teetered at the edge of the table. The white powdered ones were always first to go, the plain donuts remained.
I grabbed a plain donut.
Dad had placed the pickerel in its metal bucket in a shallow corner of the beach, under a spruce tree that offered both shade and raindrops of resin.
Although the bucket was metal, it was printed on the outside to look like wood. But it didn’t look much like wood and it was white on the inside. The lake water was clear. Something beautiful and golden swam in the bucket. It swam around and around in a circle. No one noticed the golden pickerel in the fake wood bucket under the spruce tree, or me, feeding it bits of my donut. The screen door of the camp porch creaked and opened, creaked and slammed shut. Kids gathered swimming stuff. Soon the beach would be filled with beach balls and inner tubes.
“Wait half an hour!” Aunt Annabelle called from the porch.
That was so you’d digest your food. You couldn’t drown if you waited a half hour before you went swimming. But if you went into the lake, say above your waist, before the full half hour had passed, you would immediately be seized with leg cramps or an underwater monster would drag you under and in any case you would certainly drown. Everyone waited the half hour. During this time, the young ones would sit with their beach shovels and dig. Older kids fiddled with snorkeling gear.
I watched my pickerel. He, with his black teardrop, watched me.
*
Long-Sought-For Pond. My father pronounced it: Lon-soffer Pond. We did too. We didn’t know the words.
“It’s almost July, Dad. When are we going to Lon-soffer?”
As a city firefighter, he got one week of paid vacation a year, which was so unusual at the time that the local paper did announcements. Lowell Fire Department. Annual Vacation List. The following firefighters will be on paid leave for their annual vacation, July 12 through 18: Engine 7, Charles April.
When he made Lieutenant, he got two weeks.
By then, we’d stopped going to Lon-soffer and begun tent camping. I have no memories of rowboat fishing while tent camping. Only rain, flooded tents, my mother swearing, and once, having to pee in the night, unzipping the tent and meeting a skunk.
We missed the Lon-soffer vacations.
“What do you remember about fishing with dad from the rowboat at Lon-soffer?” I asked my younger brother Chuck recently.
“Fishing? Not a thing.”
“Dad took you fishing all the time,” I insisted.
“You’re dreaming. I’ll tell you what I remember about dad and that rowboat. When I was like maybe three he threw me overboard and said it was time I learned how to swim.”
“No.”
“Yes. And I sunk like a stone.”
“But you’re here.”
“No thanks to Charlie.”
*
In the fake wood bucket, my pickerel was not as long as dad’s eels. He was not short and stocky like the sunfish. He did not have big stingers that poked up from his snout and out from his jaw like horned pout—they swam so mad and brooding. The eels wouldn’t swim; instead, they’d sink and curl themselves up like licorice twirls. Sunfish were silly and flopped around, very dramatic-like, even though they were in a nice bit of water.
My chain pickerel darted and paced. He measured the prison. He planned an escape. The teardrop under his eye pointed backwards. The donut bits floated.
The half hour having passed, everyone jumped in the lake.
My pickerel was thirsty, I decided. He needed more water. Big idea: kick off my flip-flops and use them to scoop water and ladle it into the pail. Well, that turned into a splashy mess. Another idea: use my flip-flops to generate a tidal wave and force the pond water into the bucket. Yup, another splashy mess.
Funny, I didn’t think of simply using my cupped hands.
My pickerel stopped moving—not dead, more like sleeping. His fins swayed softly, back and forth, like weeping willow leaves in a breeze. His mouth yawned and I saw his back-facing teeth. For shade, I laid spruce boughs over the bucket.
I’d never had a pet. Mom was afraid of dogs. Dad had an odd relationship with cats—don’t know how to explain, except we sometimes had cats, but they’d always disappear.
The point of catching a pickerel was to eat it, right? I believe we ate all of the fish that my dad caught. But how do you eat eels? Horned pout? Yick. The pickerel was my first pet, because I loved him. If I loved him, I was not going to eat him. Nor would anyone else. I’d have to set him free.
I looked around. Everyone was busy with other things. I moved the spruce boughs away and placed the flip-flops on my hands like a pair of mittens. I reached in. My pickerel woke with a darting surprise and swam mad in a circle.
I said, “I’m trying to help you, not hurt you!”
He didn’t recognize my hands.
Still, another fail. Here was my last big idea: dig the sand away on one side, so the bucket would sink and pond water flood in and lift my pickerel to safety. I got to work. I dug the sand with my hands and pulled the diggings away with my flip-flops.
I’d finally found a use for them.
The bucket tilted.
Some pond water went in.
But the pickerel stayed in the pail.
I dug deeper.
The bucket sank deeper.
But the pickerel stayed.
I made splashing sounds and urged him: come on pretty pickerel.
Don’t you want to leave?
Don’t you want to go back to the reeds and not be eaten?
I pushed at the bucket with my feet. Stupid fake wooden bucket. I banged on its sides and threw a tantrum—I’d only had a half a donut to eat all day, a plain one at that. The bucket ended up half-in, half-out of the lake and tilted, like some cheap pirate ship in an aquarium.
Was my pickerel gone? Did he leave? No. I looked and saw green chains on a golden body. He’d backed himself into a corner of the bucket—if a bucket has corners—and looked: confused? scared?
I gave up.
When something’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. That was my lesson.
Also this: my father, no matter how long I stare or follow him to the beach, was going to row himself smaller and eventually disappear.
When I think of how I’d like to leave this world—when my time comes—for death to approach me in a welcoming way, it is at the foot of Long-Sought-For Pond, in the belonging of pickerel weeds, my father rows the gray boat, and the pickerel catches me.
*
“I feel there’s not a lot going on, it’s all character development,” a reader of mine once wrote on one of my essays. I know, I know. I struggle to finish the seam. In this essay, the Singer sewing machine tin at the beginning is giving me trouble. I don’t understand its significance of my memory of dad and the torn t-shirts.
Flat knot.
Also called a water knot.
My father tied this knot many times.
He tied it when fishing.
He tied it when quieting the creaky oars.
He tied it when he made a body harness to lower himself down to the bridge jumpers he was called on to rescue when he tied it to save them, to lift them up from the jagged rocks of the Merrimack River.
Engine 7. Lowell Fire Department. Please respond.
*
keer-keer
keer-keer-keer
keer-keer
Having given up on saving my pickerel, I’d fallen asleep and woke to blue jays squabbling in the spruce tree.
The sun was dim like a dish cloth draped on a bulb.
There was a smell of rain, but far away and not near. Someone else’s rain.
I looked and the bucket was gone.
Near the camp, dad had started the campfire. Everyone had collected: brothers, sisters, cousins, Aunt Annabelle, all sitting on lawn chairs, threading marshmallows on sticks.
I saw a cast iron pan and ran to my father’s side.
“Is that for the pickerel?”
“Funny thing,” he said, poking the fire. “While you were sleeping, someone—I don’t know who or how—shifted that pail and it was half underwater. But when I looked, wouldn’t you know it, that son-of-a-gun fish was still there.”
Dad spit into the fire.
“But the minute I lifted the pail, that fish jumped and you’d think it was a flying fish the way he sailed away.”
“So my pickerel’s gone?”
“Never was here.”
*
On Saipan, after the shooting was over, there was no surrender. The remaining Japanese soldiers and women and children threw themselves off Marpi Point.
My father arrived at the end, mid-July. His first action. New dungarees. Second Marines. A patrol boat off the Point. He was handed a gun. Ordered to shoot. Shoot the mothers before they throw in a child. Kill to save. He was never the same.
Dad never talked about the war. After he passed, my three brothers each told me that was the one story he shared with them.
Was that why he rowed at sunrise? Not for the pickerel, but for the darning needles to sew his eyes shut. To stop seeing Marpi Point?
Alcohol helped, for a while.
Drowning cats in brown paper bags helped, for a while.
Starving, because his esophagus was so narrowed and scarred he couldn’t swallow even his own spit, and a doctor would force it open with a sequence of metal tubes—that also helped, for a while.
I remember different camps in different years. The screen door of each creaked and opened, creaked and slammed shut. The last camp was at the head of the lake. By then, he’d stopped fishing. He rowed alone. I’d watch him push off from shore and head the rowboat to the pickerel weeds and darning needles. He rowed towards the outlet.
I couldn’t free the pickerel.
Couldn’t help my father.
Essays like this feel like I’m trying to drown a cat.
Only it never does drown.
Chain. Pickerel.
Susan April has published essays in The Lowell Review, A Tether to this World: Stories and Poems About Recovery, and When Home is Not Safe, among other places. She earned her MFA from Norwich University (Vermont College). Born in Massachusetts, she now lives in Maryland. Her father, a Marine Corps Veteran of World War II, saw action at Saipan, Iwo Jima, Tinian, and Okinawa.
She writes, “‘Chain Pickerel’ is, on its surface, a fishing story, but speaks more to the undiagnosed PTSD and survivor’s guilt that my father suffered from. This trauma transferred in odd and unpredictable ways to the family unit. Like many veterans of his generation, he shared little about the war, but rowed to another shore. In this essay, I accompany him.