My Mother is a Fish

The last time mom and I talked she was scared. A few hours before getting hold of her, she left me a message. I had been out on the river, guiding east coast clients to McKenzie River redsides and missed her call. When we did get in touch, she told me through tears it was back. I knew what she meant. Cancer. Through our whole conversation she never said the word. Instead, she kept using the third person indefinite pronoun indiscriminately, as if grammar could create some measure of distance, as if it established some sanctuary or reprieve. It didn’t work. Less than three months later mom died because it came out of remission with a vengeance, attacking her brain first, then her body. In the end, her doctors recommended hospice. The night before she was set to move, Kay Sue Conable decided she’d had enough of hospitals and beeping machines and tubes and shitty jello. I wasn’t there. She was in Virginia. I was in Oregon. So, I don’t know how she left this world. I hope, though, that it was at once peaceful and with a last curse word on her lips. Besides loving life more than any person I have ever known, my mother was an exquisite cuss. It’s one of the many gifts she passed on to me.

Mom also gave me the gift of a fabulist’s bent which some consider a kissing-cousin to lying but I prefer to see as the manifestation of imagination. Unlike a liar who has a regard for the truth if only for yet-to-be-revealed personal gain, a fabulist regards the truth in narrative—they connect through story. In our last conversation, we leveraged the full force of our fabulist tendencies to her advantage. I did most of the heavy lifting but, to her credit, she was more than willing to follow the pattern. We wove reasons for her to hope. The doctors had yet to render her their findings. She had beaten both breast and brain cancer before. Neither one of us could think of a better person to kick its ass one more time. The family needed her to hold things together. I needed her to see me to 40. The school cafeteria would fall to pieces if she was not there talking shit and slinging square pizzas to high schoolers. Her grandkids needed her to smooth the edges of poverty. Halloween was just around the corner and who knew what new costumes there would be this go around. I chided her for leaping to the worst of all possible conclusions just because some asshole had told her half a piece of news that she ought not fully trust to begin with. She laughed at that. I reminded her of how she talked me off fatalist, misanthropic ledges all the time—ledges that do exist but only existed between us just then. I fabricated conversations between us that spanned years if only to remind her that memory can be projection as well as recall in the right hands. She told me of things we shared that I never knew existed—of comforts given and received through low comedy and away from fear. In the end, we made memories that never were. They left her better than where she started.

When we said goodbye, I followed along one of the more cliched paths on the map of mourning. I got drunk. Very drunk. A quick internet search tells me the five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Apparently, these come in no particular order. Truth be told, I spent most of that night—and most of my process since—angry. Angry at the injustice of my mother’s situation—an injustice she was too good-hearted to see and too overworked to understand. I rage and have raged against the conditions of poverty that saw her working two jobs in support of an out-of-work husband (my father), four grandchildren (my older sister’s), and two daughters that stole from her. I uncovered and have uncovered since new depths of disgust for a culture that denied my mother simple measures of dignity because of her labors in a world that does not value the least of us. I moved and continue to move through new genres of hate for a system that worked my mother to death only to see her numerated, only to move her from one Excel column to another in a policy spreadsheet where bureaucracy’s political compassion offers perverse sanctuary to persons in power. That night, hate turned to shame when I realized I could not fix it, I could not heal my mother with the touch of my hand despite all my yearning, when I remembered that I had fled home to a farther coast and that, even in her worst moments, she still told me I was her hero. She told me she was proud. Of what? I don’t know. I still don’t know. And yes, I am still angry because I don’t know and she is gone and I’ll never get to ask. I do know, however, that my wife, Rene, held my hand as I sat in our living room, drinking, angry, trying to remember how to cry.

I came to some measure of acceptance in the days following. My father and sister kept me sporadically informed of mom’s condition. Through their staccato messaging and phone calls, I gathered things deteriorated rapidly. Three weeks after we talked, her doctors removed her from all medications except pain meds. Her oncologist said the cancer was aggressive, ascribing an anthropomorphic disposition to a disease written in genetic code. The cancer was most aggressive in her brain. Mom’s cognitive abilities faded from day to day. My father likened it to dementia at its worst. Somedays mom didn’t know who she was, where she was, or who was around her. Bodily functions followed on the heels of cognition. Within a few days, lucid moments became just that, momentary.

Mom died on October 13, 2022. She didn’t see me to 40. Dad called. My sister sent a text. My sister asked for money so she could make a photo album of mom for the kids and so she could buy a nice poster board from Walmart for the celebration of life which was also a chance to take donations for mom’s funeral. My dad talked about the cost of lingering medical bills, his attempts to get hold of mom’s retirement fund from the county, funeral expenses, cremation, and the several churches that might offer space for the celebration because of charity. He told me there was no need for me to come home. He assured me that he understood I had to work and that flying across the country was expensive. These are the truths of poverty no one knows except the poor. Death and mourning cost money, often more than you have and always more than you can afford. I sent them both what dollars I could which is certainly a kind of currency but also a means to buy time for distance to reestablish distance. I knew well I would not go home. There was nothing for me there. I, too, knew well that I had already made the choice to mourn and remember in my own way which was not their way and hadn’t been for a long while. Two days later, I went fishing.

In Eugene, Oregon, steelhead anglers combine September and October into one long month we call Fishtober. The portmanteau signifies sixty-one days wherein elusive steelhead—anadromous, ocean fed rainbow trout measuring upwards of thirty inches—become especially eager to take a fly after spending five months in river systems preparing to spawn. Steelhead, known as the fish of a thousand casts, steelies, gray ghosts, or simply unicorns are emblematic of the Pacific Northwest. More rare than salmon, these fish have traveled thousands of ocean miles in the course of their lives only to return to their home rivers and spawn. They have inspired novels, poetry, science, folklore, myths, and legends. There are women and men who dedicate the whole of their fishing lives to the pursuit of steelhead. They chase them up and down the west coast, from Washington to California to Canada. They live in vans, trucks, tents, campers, pulling drift boats or rafts behind them, timing rains and runs through alchemical formulas that are rarely shared and never the same from year to year. They’re happy, haunted people. I envy these mendicants their commitment. Given that two smaller, productive steelhead rivers are in my backyard, I tend to take Fishtober seriously. While no monk myself, Fishtober is my high holy season. These are the days where my choice of a fishing life is most clearly my existential reality. This means that, in the face of all other defining orders, Fishtober confirms my preference for a self bounded by waters, a self lived through in the absurd importance given to bits of fur, feather, and thread.

Of course, mom knew little of fly fishing, of steelhead even less. She lived her whole life in the Virginia of largemouth bass and conventional tackle. She knew of bass fishing because her older brother, my uncle, is an avid bass fisherman with a fast boat and too many rods. In a closer orbit, my father and I used to fish the way blue collar fathers and rebellious sons often do: in the summer time, occasionally, in a canoe, using hardware store rods and live bait only to small success. I don’t remember mom ever going fishing herself. We certainly never fished together. To her, the fishing world meant minnows, worms, a bobber, maybe chicken livers for catfish. A fishing trip meant a day without men getting underfoot, a day where summer evenings arrived at a lazy pace while she drank coca-cola waiting for our station wagon to pull into the driveway with canoe strapped to the top. A fishing trip meant husband, son, brother leaving before dawn then coming home with sunburns and wet sneakers. They meant cleaning fish on tops of coolers for a fish fry. She had never seen a fly rod in action. To her, the world of fly fishing, with its small flies, expensive tackle, and clear waters, its trout and catch-and-release ethos made no sense no matter how hard I tried to explain it. Even now, I can hear her: “You don’t keep them? You let them go? Lord, Willie! Seems kinda silly to me.” And yet, there are aspects to fly fishing in general and steelhead fishing in particular that I know she loved if only because they share a valence with what she already knew of fishing and most likely because I love them, too. She loved the stories. She loved the fact that anything over a ten inch trout is almost always generous by two to four inches depending on the needs of the teller. She loved that fly fishing for steelhead is, more often than not, akin to tilting at windmills though she would not know that reference even as she lived its spirit. She loved that, when we talked of my west coast escapades, they were and are framed by comedic errors—by failure and laughter more than success and brag. She loved that fly fishing is more elusive, more romantic, more aesthetic an endeavor if only because I said so and she took my word for it such as that word holds any truth to beauty. And she loved that trout and steelhead need rivers because it is from her that I get a love of rivers. All of which is to say I went fishing two days after my mother’s death because I needed to stand in a river which was and is as close to her as I could get all while praying to maybe catch a ghost somewhere in a thousand casts.

Fly fishing by myself is a serious event. As a guide who takes clients out for pay, solo fishing not only replenishes the store of patience needed for success in a hospitality business, but it also allows for me to experiment without the stress of paying customers. I can get weird with it. That said, sometimes I will go with friends on an off day—especially if those friends are willing to indulge some less than certain techniques or run a new river with me. That first trip after mom passed, I went fishing with Jeremy, the rare breed of friend in a professional angler’s life who rises to the occasion of fishing buddy—a much higher standard mere weekend warriors can only hope to achieve. We can and have spent over ten hours together and maybe said twelve words between the two of us. He has his own gear, matches me for river endurance, obsession, passion, brews strong coffee, and more-or-less agrees to fish with me regardless of conditions with the minimum amount of notification. It helps that he has a good heart, loves dogs, and makes a pretty good sandwich. When we planned our trip, my mother had been alive. At the time of our planning, I warned him I was only going to spey fish for steelhead—a technique that takes the already difficult task of catching one on a fly rod and makes it exponentially harder by relying on the single method of swinging a fly, sub-surface, through rather specific water conditions, at a pace the river dictates. He didn’t care. For people like Jeremy and I, the going matters. Catching, while important, nevertheless remains ancillary to the event.

We met on the early side of morning, about an hour after dawn broke over the river. The Middle Fork of the Willamette River runs a meandering south-to-north course through its namesake valley. While not nearly as popular as its main tributary the McKenzie River, the Willamette holds a special place in my heart. I have always seen it as more rough around the edges, a working class alternative to the rarefied Mckenzie. The Willamette is a big, sometimes muddy, always complicated system with hardly any stocked trout. Fish are harder to catch because they have more water to hide in, more water to feed in, and their wild nature makes them far more wary of taking a poorly presented fly. Tougher fishing conditions lead to fewer anglers because paying clients or so-called accomplished trout bums don’t like to be skunked, and, on the Willamette, getting skunked is always a real possibility. Yet, there is a hidden beauty to this taciturn river. Whereas the banks of the McKenzie are lined by private property and backyards that run down to the water’s edge, the Willamette goes through more park and forest land giving the sense of being in an oasis though you are only fifteen minutes out of town. Most importantly for the trip Jeremy and I planned, the Willamette has more opportunities for the spey angler because we need long gravel bars to fish spey properly. Indeed, when spey fishing, the boat is less a tool of fishing and more the vehicle used to get the anglers from gravel bar to gravel bar. The pattern for spey fishing goes like this: launch, row to the first gravel bar, beach the boat, jump out with rod in hand, one angler wades up to the top of the run, the other wades to the bottom, and then both fish that run in a cycle. We cast our flies out, take two steps down river, wait, cast again, take two steps down river, and repeat until we are at the end of the run. When the bottom angler reaches the end, they walk up to the top and fish back to the boat by that time the top angler is at the bottom and should be making their way back so both can move on. Fishing one run can take up to an hour, sometimes more. Spey is a meditative method, one where the lines between you, the water, the fish, and the cast blur. I can’t remember if Jeremy and I held a conversation on our way to that first run of the day. I imagine we didn’t. I imagine we held to our silences, trying to read the current and light.

All told, our float stretched over nine miles of river and holds upwards of fifteen runs depending on river levels. I had recently guided a client on the same stretch who shared aspirations of catching a steelhead on the swing. Over the course of eight hours, his one chance came and went in a flash. His fly was in the middle of its swing on probably the eighth run of the day when, all of a sudden, the tip of his rod dove down, the drag on his reel screamed, and his fly line moved against the current so fast it threw a wake. He set the hook; the fish leapt free of the water by three feet showing all of its thirty inch beauty then hit the water with a splash that echoed against the cotton woods. That was it. The line went slack. The fish was gone. My client stared at the water for a full five minutes, mesmerized, unmoving, somewhat frustrated but nevertheless alive to the thrill. I don’t remember when I shared this story with Jeremy on the float, but I know I did. This is a habit all guides have—the telling of stories. It’s like an instinct, a way to bend time and narrative to the river. Like most people who fish, Jeremy responds to such stories in the appropriate manner. He voiced a few expletives in admiration of the event. His signature “JESUS! That’s all I want!” recognized that the poetry of losing can, and often is, better than the poetry of catching because myth gets to grow. And, like any good story, my telling allowed time to feel less like itself and more like movement because, truth be told, we weren’t catching shit.

Maybe it was our lack of fish. Maybe it was time spent and good sandwiches. Maybe it was autumn’s long glare and the day’s rhythm working on me. Or, maybe, it was the pressing weight of grief and loss and confusion I had yet to fully accept let alone share with anyone else besides Rene. Whatever the maybe, somewhere just passed the mid-point of our trip I told Jeremy about my mom’s death. Of course, this is a different kind of telling than sharing the story of a missed fish with another person who fishes. The stakes are higher. I had just dropped anchor above what I knew to be a promising spot. To fish this run, the guide must know that there is a shallow gravel bar in the middle of the river. It’s a stretch where the water is only a few inches deep for about one hundred yards even as two deeper channels sit on the right and left. If the guide times things just right, the anchor will hold the boat in place and both anglers can fish the run while standing, ankle deep, in the middle of a river.

“My mom died two days ago. Cancer. She was sick for a while, got better, then it came back, then she went quick.”

Jeremy paused in gathering his rod and flies. He’d been looking to the water, at the spot we anchored because he’d never knew it was there. It is the closest thing to an open secret a river can offer those who pay attention. “I’m sorry to hear that. You alright?”

I went about gathering my own rod, checking the fly, making sure the knot holding everything together didn’t need to be retied. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I see it as a mercy. No one should live with that much pain.”

“Are you going home for the funeral.”

“No.”

Jeremy leaned back in his seat at the front of the boat. His left foot rested on the gunwale. He cradled his rod across his lap. Drying river water had left a pattern of swirls and eddies on the bottom cuff of his waders. I remember his eyes studied the far bank of the run with its rip rap and pooling currents for a long while. “You sure about that? It’s your mom.”

I paused. He waited. I studied the bank. He waited. I told him I was sure, that everyone mourns in their own way and my way wasn’t the kind that goes to funerals. I told him I wanted to remember my mom’s life, not the way she was in death. “She loved life more than anyone I’ve ever known. A funeral doesn’t seem right to me.”

Jeremy stepped out of the boat first, shifting his gaze from river to me. I couldn’t hold his eyes for long. I looked back to that far bank with its currents and pools trying to make order out of what I knew. “I lost my dad when I was 39. We were like Batman and Robin. I was lost for a while. It was tough.” He turned to the river again, getting his bearings. He changed the subject. “You think up there a bit?”

I followed the pointing tip of his rod. He was offering me an out of something heavy with a question about something hard. “Yeah. Start your swing about halfway down that first riffle and fish the pool slow. If they’re in there, they’ll be at the tail out, so let the fly hang down at the end longer than normal. I’ll wait until you get set then I’ll work the bottom of the run.”

I remember he squared his hips to the river for the wade upstream, then turned back, “I have to tell you something because I know, and you need to hear it.”

“Okay.”

“You’re never gonna be the same.”

He didn’t wait for a response, just waded to the top of the run, rolling his fly out into the water as he went. I waited, as promised, and then jumped out to fish the bottom tail out. Not three minutes later, I heard Jeremy shouting—well actually he was shouting and reeling and backing up against the current and cussing a blue streak. He’d hooked a fish. His rod bent nearly double as his fly line shot down stream. I reeled in as fast as I could while running toward the boat to get the net. The game was on. Jeremy fought that fish for ten minutes, swearing and grinning and panicking and doubting and believing and hoping the whole time. When we finally netted her, his steelhead came in at a solid thirty inches. That’s big for a hen. I have a video of him trying to wrangle her out of the net for a picture. I sometimes rewatch that video for the sheer joy in Jeremy’s voice, the total wonder his face holds in a moment. She was his first steelhead on the Willamette caught on the swing in a hole he never knew was there. In the end, we released her back into an eddy and just stood there, looking, laughing, shaking our heads trying and failing to comprehend what had just happened.

Our second steelhead came an hour later. This time it was my turn. We had just rounded a slow bend, the kind of spot where deep water begins to gather speed as the river gradient drops and the banks narrow. I sighted two, maybe four, fish holding against the shaded far bank. They stood out from the freestone bottom with their big-shouldered, streamlined bodies and the graceful wave of their tails. I pointed them out to Jeremy with a word. He nodded, staying silent as anglers do when spotting fish even though fish don’t often hear what is said out of water. I ferried the boat across the current and, through sheer dumb luck, found another submerged gravel bar. Granted, here the bottom was deeper than the last run. We were farther from the fish. The water was heavier, too. There was simply more of it in less space. The challenge was different—more demanding, more precarious. I am a better spey caster than Jeremy and told him this run might be at his limit maybe even over it. He agreed, looked down river about fifty yards and said he’d make his way there, fishing the softer water at the tail out’s far edge.

When I jumped out of the boat, I remember my surprise at the strength of the current. Such is the nature of chances. Taking stock, I knew the needed cast to get to that far side was at the absolute limit of what the river’s current would allow. I knew that, with currents moving at a speed where rocks the size of softballs go tumbling along, the fish would only see my fly for an instant, two seconds at best. I understood that in this place it was not so much about everything depending on a perfect cast because I have long held no faith with the perfect but rather accepted the most of what would happen depended on me doing the best with what I had to do with and nothing more. There are not many truths I can be sure of, but I have learned a way to the truth of that.

My first few casts weren’t all that great. The river snatched my fly into its current as soon as it hit the surface. I pulled more line off my reel, casting farther, mending deeper upstream to try and help the whole sink and slow. That didn’t work. There were too many variables against me. Out of frustration, I reeled up, stuck my fly into the cork of my rod’s handle, and waded upstream by some yards. It was hard going. The river pushed back, trying its damndest to sweep my feet out from underneath me. Farther up, I settled again, deciding there was no need to work my fly across the run yard by yard with successively longer casts. One big, long, deep cast was all I could do. I stood there, legs braced against the breaking of the water around me, and stripped line off my reel, letting the current carry the fly below me while I guesstimated the distance needed. Satisfied, I sent my chance out, across, and slightly upstream in the hopes that this would be enough, that the angle would give the fly time, that whatever was over there if it was still there might let me touch a piece of lightning, too.

The grab came fierce and certain halfway through the swing. I had so much line out from my cast that instead of setting the hook I turned my rod into the bank letting tension and the fish’s flight do the rest. This time it was my turn to cuss a blue streak. This time it was Jeremy who had the wherewithal to come running, to start filming as I played a fish in a river that had grown most of its strength from a life in the ocean. I rewatch that video, too, sometimes. In it, I hear Jeremy shouting encouragement, “Jesus, Will! Holy Shit! Holy SHIT!” I hear myself tell Jeremy—none too politely I might add—to get the net while my body is framed against the tree bank and my rod bends nearly double. As the camera angle dives down because Jeremy is running back to the boat, I hear over the river and the splashing of his strides the purest Whitmaniac yawp I’ve ever uttered. I think this is what it means to be alive.

I fought that fish for a long while, making up and then losing ground, holding nothing of time except that moment. Something worked. We netted my buck steelhead together. I handled him little, wanting to give him back to the river fast. Jeremy said it was cosmic. I smiled. When released, he and I stood in the current again, laughing again, shaking our heads again, not fully understanding that we, too, can be a bit untamed—that all things, too, can sometimes be a bit untranslatable.

I have fished for and caught steelhead since that day. Jeremy has been with me on a few of those trips, most have been done alone. As summer gave way to fall and fall to winter, the start of some endeavors creeped to before dawn, involved hours and miles on the road, and ended with nothing but frost bitten hands and numb feet. Other ventures were closer, involved my boat, and meant me splitting time between fishing a run and making strong coffee on the riverbanks without a person in sight. On the one hand, the rhythm of steelhead fishing remains the same. Drift, anchor, wade, cast, two steps down, cast, two steps down until the thing is done then repeat. It’s a familiar ceremony. On the other hand, I am not the same. I now talk to my mom when steelheading. Not in a conversational way; not out loud. We talk in the way you talk to those we love and loved who are there and not there. We talk in a kaleidoscopic murmur where feelings and phrases and words and notions and sensations and memories and anticipations babble along making and unmaking all the while. This is a new story. It may not stick. But for now, at least I am starting to understand that a river is not always a river. A fish is not always a fish. And I am starting to understand that all things that may not be what they seem sometimes provide the occasion to lose and love and release and keep. Or, maybe, they’re a means to grieve.