Ghost Fish (Part 1 of a Story for my Son)

Full moon rising over the Salmon River,
less than 2 miles upstream from
where it pours into Lake Ontario
at Port Ontario, NY. This photo
was taken a few yards from where
I caught Ghost Fish – and Ghost Fish
hooked me – more than 40 years ago.

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

The dream always begins the same. The moon has risen barely above the horizon, turning the gently riffled current a soft, undulating gold. The fish materializes, wraithlike, mouth agape, moonlight reflecting from its broad sides; it appears huge and menacing as it surges through the shallow water directly at me.
    The dream always ends the same: I never catch the fish. Sometimes I flee, fearing the creature powerful enough to pull me under. Other times I steel my nerves and stand my ground, only to snatch away the fly the fish is attacking, just before it sucks it into its huge mouth. In the worst of times the fish smashes the fly, I watch the line jump and lift the rod to set the hook—and I wake, heart pounding, trying in vain to force myself back to sleep, to reignite the dream, to find out what happens.
    Psychoanalytically minded folks could no doubt have a field day with this, guessing at the trauma that must have spawned such a dream. I was allowed to read Moby Dick before I was old enough to maturely process it? The fish represents all I wanted in my wandering life, but never acquired?
    They would be wrong; sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.

Fishing hard: casting over the fence
at Clarks Cottages, Selkirk, NY,
with my backup rod and first fishing
reel, an iconic Zebco 202. The man
in the background is, I think,
John Drozda, who took me fishing in
the very big Salmon River in his
very small boat. Even at that age,
I always had two rods ready to go,
one with the Zebco 202 and the other
with the Langley 777 spinning reel.

    The dream started when I was 11 years old, summer of 1966, after my first trip to the place where I should have been born and raised: Upstate New York, where the Salmon River pours into the far eastern end of Lake Ontario, just downstream from the small village of Pulaski, even closer to the even smaller village of Sandy Creek. The dream has persisted five decades, just as I persisted four decades trying to re-create the moment that spawned the dream. There is a saying about catching lightning in a bottle, that you can’t do it twice; after 40 some years of trying, I’m almost convinced.
    My mother, her parents before her, their parents before them, and my siblings before me—all were born and spent parts of their lives in Sandy Creek, on a farm that had been in the family more than a century. My father was born further west, just southeast of Buffalo, on a farm that had been in his family since his clan first arrived from Scotland in the early 1800s.
    My dad wanted to be a veterinarian. He went to Cornell to learn the craft, and no doubt would have been good at it, but the Great Depression intervened; he had to settle for learning a new, modern way of raising chickens. No more “chicken drives” herding thousands of semi-wild birds from field to field, from places that caught 20 feet of snow in winter to spots that only collected inches, no more shooting “chicken hawks” to protect one’s livelihood. This new way of raising chickens involved buildings the size of aircraft carriers and food additives that grew chickens the size of small turkeys. Progress, they call it.
    It was a plan hatched in the South and it quickly put northern “free range” chicken farmers out of business. A huge operation in Southwest Virginia took one look at my dad’s Cornell adorned resume and asked “how quickly can you get here?” My dad, eager to trade feet of snow for inches, said “next week.” With that, the family of five packed themselves and their most cherished belongings into a black ’47 Chevy, and headed south.

Copyright © 2020 by Paul Clark