Fishin’ Lilly

I’m not a recreational fisherman. When I was seven or eight, my grandmother’s next-door neighbor took me with her son, who was about my age, to a lake in south Texas for fishing. I remember disliking the worms and dreading the fishhooks—I’d heard they were painful and hard to remove, if you got one in your finger. I avoided that problem, but sitting around in the heat waiting for the pole to move didn’t seem like much fun. Especially since it never moved.

Much later, after I’d grown up, I tried again. This time I went fishing in a stream in Idaho. Fishing in Idaho. I’d read my Hemmingway. I knew this was supposed to be a fine place to fish. Probably it was. But even sitting around in the shade, waiting for the pole to move, wasn’t much fun. Especially since it never moved.

Lilly may feel differently about fishing someday. Among the sport fishers at the lagoon near our campsite was a middle-aged woman by herself, parked near the water, managing two poles. On Saturday evening, Lilly and Ann spent a lot of time near the water’s edge. Ann especially was fascinated by poking a stick into some of the algae scum. Lilly became fascinated by what the fisherwoman was doing, and started to watch her.

The woman was nice, and we talked to her a little. Eventually she let Lilly hold one of the poles. I didn’t think any harm could come of it, so while Lilly was doing this I went back to our campsite to build the fire. About 10 minutes later, Lilly came to me holding a bucket. She’d caught a fish. A small thing, who knows what kind, but alive in the bucket. “I caught a fish! I caught a fish!” she said, as pleased as could be. There wasn’t anything we could do with it, so she soon threw it back. Still, that’s more luck that I’d ever had fishing.