Writing is the great escape. At least, it is for writers. When my students sit down to write, they feel tortured. The more tortured they feel, the less their sentences make sense. How do I give them the sense of freedom and power that I feel when I write? Or once felt.
I keep wanting to write a story. But when I sit down to write the narrative is bare-bones, the outline of a story. My writing is all bulleted lists and concise sentences. I teach business writing, and I'm often unsure that I know how to write any other way anymore. When I write a story now it's too efficient--all poetry that might make a moment real and beautiful--or ugly, whatever the moment needs--has been stripped away for concise sentences. Like my students, I too am tortured by my writing, ashamed by my own lack of skill.
Last Christmas, I was chatting with the smile-of-a-woman who was my creative non-fiction professor during graduate school. She remembered an essay I had written about ferret spotting (searching for ferret eye-shine with a spotlight while hiking around in the dark) on a population survey with the Colorado Division of Wildlife (now Colorado Parks and Wildlife). I'd gone back to work for them after grad. school, so she wanted to know if I had any new stories. I did.
I'd gone electro-fishing on the Colorado River, but I can't capture the experience. I want to express that those two days of work were the most fullfilling of my life. I can say it, but that doesn't give any other person the vaguest sense of the experience. And the more time put between me and those two days of netting fish, the less real it is for me. The harder it is to explain. The thing that sticks with me is the guilt, the shame.
Somebody, broke the back of a fish, and I suspect it was probably me.
It was two days of the hardest work of my life. My boss and I volunteered to help with population surveys on the Colorado River. We were all hoping to find a few endangered fish--humpback chubs, razorback suckers, bonytails, and the especially elusive Colorado Pikeminnow. We met with the crew at 7am. Netted, weighed, measured, and recorded fish until 7pm. Those two days of work were harder than any work I ever did on my family's farm. It was harder than any workout I ever did for a sport or in a gym.
My back and arms have never been so strong. I stood most of the day, holding a long pole with a net on the end, netting zapped fish as they floated to the surface, scooping them out of the water and lifting them, their weight magnified by their distance down the pole, up towards our boat to dump them in a trough with one quick fluid motion--or at least I sought to be fluid. I was an oaf compared to my companions, clumsily dumping my fish in the tub. Sometimes it took me multiple attempts to swing the net just right, to flip the writhing bag of fish over and dump them into the trough. Several full nets made it into the water, still right-side up, the fish trapped in its bounds. Sometimes the boat operator would help out by reaching in an arm and flipping my net from up close. Sometimes, I just had to keep trying, and fast. My slowness was letting fish slip past the boat uncaptured!
The researchers did this for two or more weeks, depending upon their role in the project. Some of them were volunteers who were between seasonal research positions and relied on the hotel and food stipend from the research fund to feed and house them for a couple weeks. I love biology, but every time I volunteer for a research project, I'm so glad I did not commit myself to a life of underpaid seasonal work, waiting for a permanent position to open up until I'm thirty or forty. Some people wait forever.
Two days was more than enough for me. I was physically exhausted, and yet mentally I felt energized, fully human, significant even, from those two days of hard labor. As each of those two days ended, I felt more fullfilled than I ever have from any other day of work. Physical labor is indeed good for the soul, and I was learning too--learning about the fish that lived in the brown-green water of the Upper Colorado River.
Carp are a fish with which I am initmately familiar. As a kid, I would visit Lake McConaughy in Nebraska to go sailing with my Grandma and her boyfriend. My sisters and I would dangle our toes off the dock and let carp suck on them like popsicles. They came in writhing clusters--unafraid, calm fish looking for a snack, but all they found were our round white toes. We called them trash fish. They ate trash, so we didn't eat them. I guess in the UK, they are a sport fish. Who'd a thunk it?
On the river, I saw carp and all kinds of trout. And we did capture quite a few endangered fish. For every hundred trout, we'd find a bonytail or humpback chub. Once you see one, they're easy to spot. You might think a trout with large back hump is a chub or a fish with a thin tail a bonytail, but when you actually see a true humpback or bonytail, you won't make that mistake again. Their distinctive features are pronounced and bizarre--they genuinely look deformed in that way mysterious sea creatures often do. The chub could be cast as Quasimodo--it's back rises up away from its flat head sharply an inch or more. The bonytail looks like its tail growth is stunted, and you worry you might just brake its thin tail right off--how does it propel its large body with such a tiny tail? We gathered razoback suckers as well--you really have to watch out, those razors will cut you.
But we never captured a pikeminnow. The potential sighting of one had the whole team in an uproar--three boats all focused on trying to find one fish--they are bigger than many of the other fish we caught, so it's possible to see one from the boat and be fairly sure it's not one of the other fish. Pikeminnow are historically one of the major food sources for local people living around the Colorado River. They're also threatened because of historic efforts to stock the river with non-native sport fish--in the mid-twentieth century the fish were even poisoned to clear them out to make room for desirable sport fish. Recovery efforts aren't seeming to make a difference. The Colorado Pikeminnow is probably doomed.
Despite spending two days handling amazing endangered fish, they're slipping away from memory. I have to look them up to remind myself how extreme their appearances are. But I remember the poor carp with a broken back--it's yellow-green scales warped into a swollen hump a few inches down its spine. I think I broke its back. With my clumsy net swinging, more than a few fish hit the side of the trough. I still feel so much shame and sorry for the damage I brought to this thick, grassy-colored, sucker-mouthed fish.
Is this a human adaptation? My brain is wired to remember my faults and mistakes so that I don't make them again? Why is it so hard to remember what's good, to revive the sense of self-brilliance created by those two days of hard labor? Perhaps this is why I can't write. My past sorrows are not what I want to escape to. I want to escape to places of magic and wonder, but I can't find them, and so the writing is as stale as my ability to re-experience the emotions of good.
The broken-backed carp has become me. Because I killed him, I have absorbed him into myself as Zeb absorbs the bear in MaddAdam. I am the wide, round, yellow eyed fish with the gaping mouth, sucking for air, struggling to swim. I am afraid where once I was fearless and calm. Writing is scary because I can't look at the world the same way that I used to. My experiences have changed me, and now it is hard to see the wonder--I'm too busy worrying at other things.
