Bourbon Lake

My father and I have gone camping. Us two. Together we drive away from the suburbs. Sometimes talking. Sometimes silent. We hike the same trail we hike every year, careful not to catch our fishing poles on branches or bend them on rocks. They are all colors, the rocks: gray, red, dun. They are like the dead with their secrets. Never talking, always silent. Geologists say their lines are a history book in stone. But I know these rocks aren’t telling. They sleep, silent bellies of the mountain rising from the dirt. We climb over them, their cool roughness presses against our hands. I feel them breathing; we keep quiet with them.

The mountain levels and lifts the stream, her finger, to her lips and beckons us to a nearby pond. The little pond bubbles beneath the sky and mountain, her fish untouched for months by passing fisherman looking for the larger lake. Ripples mean the fish are hungry. Again and again we see them risk open air for a fly.

Raising my right arm into the sky, I swish my pole back and forward—watching, hearing the line slide through the air, I pull the yellow cord greedily with my left hand. Amidst a spectrum of green from the deep color of the spindly pines to the just-a-touch green of the grasses reaching past my ankles, I perfect my technique, looking for the perfect “s” shape of the line to swim through the sky before it hits the water.

Secretly, I do not wish to catch any fish. Or if I do, I secretly wish they will get away before I can bring them into shore. I do not like to touch their seizing, panicked bodies. Do not like their eyes on me in confusion, asking why, their gills—how they shudder in the terror of not being able to pull oxygen from the air. I am afraid to touch them.

A few do not get away and I must call out to my father, across the pond, to come remove them from my hook while I hide my eyes.