Hunting and Fishing

There are many old fishing boats parked in back yards around here. When I was a child it was possible to make a good living as a fisherman. These are rough, treacherous seas   where strong currents sweep the cliffs and fierce winds push higher the swells born in the deep ocean. It is a dangerous place to fish, but in the seventies, powerful, affordable marine engines made it possible for any able-bodied, high-couraged young man  to make a living fishing for yellowfin tuna. For a time. 

There was a fishing boom, that lasted about a dozen years, and then a long, slow bust.  When I was child the cliff mooring and the beach landing  were full of boats, some of them colorfully painted old wooden boats, some the gleaming white fiberglass boats.  Now there are no boats, the fish are nearly all gone, the big pelagic fish that used to run in the waters here at certain times of the year.  Now there are still runs but the fish are all small. When I was a child my father would catch yellow fin tuna that weighed over one hundred pounds; now the fisherman catch “rats “ - little ten pounders.  There are not enough of them to make a living anymore, except for a handful of hard-scrabble fishermen, who sell their small catches by the side of the road.

That is what resource depletion looks like, in microcosm, in a flicker of time, my life-time. Sunk costs, unsustainable yields, nostalgia for better days.   

My uncle has an old boat in his back yard, my father, too.  They all fished in the old days, and had their share of high adventure and close calls with our unforgiving waters.  There is no drug as intoxicating as the full use of our powers hunting in dangerous conditions or against a dangerous prey.  I know this from experience, not at sea but on land, hunting wild cattle.  It is an experience that few women get to have, and which we may not even experience as intensely as men, but even so nothing in life made my brain light up, sharpened my senses, called up the powers of body and mind, like hunting. There is no fear and no sense of time; hunter and hunted are immersed in that single enchanted, primal world beyond thought and beyond words.  

And then I had my baby, and though I long for those bright, wild, uncomplicated days, I gave it up on a level deeper than will and longing. The fierceness of hunting went into the fierceness of mothering.  It took everything in me to rise to the challenge of nurturing a child - making a world for that child to flourish in, protecting her, teaching her, understanding her. I know fear and I can no longer sink myself into the divine and timeless dangers of the chase.   I don’t have that luxury or that passion anymore; I am needed elsewhere.  Perhaps I’ll change again when my daughter’s flown; I'll become some other kind of being under the direction of another kind of Heaven.  

We can’t go back to the innocent, grand heroism of an un-depleted world.  That was our childhood; it’s gone now.  Our very passion for the world depleted it. No blame.  It’s just not there anymore.  And what we once hunted are the very things to be nurtured, in the way that a parent will empty out themselves for their child.  In the way that a true fisherman will die for the sea, in the sea, gladly.