Michael Dean Clark's "A Small Compensation"

Bio: Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and literary nonfiction whose essays have most recently appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Angel City Review, The Other Journal, Punctuate, and The Jabberwock Review among others. He lives and writes in Southern California. Follow him on Twitter at @MDeanClark.

 

A Small Compensation

The last time I went fishing, I was 13 and with my dad, dropping lines into a glass-topped lake reflecting the Eastern Sierras of Kings Canyon at portrait quality. Around us the air hung drenched in post-modern silence: not a car or plane or mechanical noise in earshot. The sun dipped toward the tops of the peaks to our west and the hope was fresh fish for the dinner fire Mom was building at our back country campsite. 

The scene should have been an ad for the National Parks or Hamms Beer. It could have been, except almost everything about that moment was painful. 

When I should have been enthralled with the gift wilderness hiking has always been for me, I was instead stuck on the choppy surface of my memories. More specifically, my thoughts swam laps around the loss that had taken fishing from me two years earlier. 

My grandfather—the one I got to spend any time with—died that year, succumbing to a brain tumor that left him bed-ridden and weeping daily at the loss of his ability to put words to his pain. 

His last days were awful, and all I could process beyond the terror of witnessing cancer douse his light was the cold fact that the man who taught me to fish would never again cast a line with me. 

Never again sit with me at the table and roll cheese balls for bait. 

Never again load up his pristine VW station wagon with our rods, a bag of breakfast, and a thermos of coffee meant to share during our hours in the boat. 

Never again critique my casting technique or laugh at my reluctance to pee in the relief bottle while we were out on the reservoir. 

Never again take my picture with the fish I pulled in before telling me how small they were in comparison to his average catch. 

Never again introduce me to his friends with a look that said “I’m pretending to put up with this kid, but he might turn out alright.”

Grandpa Bruce, my dad’s stepfather, was softer with me. Gentler than I’ve grown to understand he was capable of being with most everyone else, including my older siblings. I think he had a soft spot for me because I never got tired of his stories about building jet engines or tucking in Chuck Yeager on test flights or riding a motorcycle from Pennsylvania to California where he would meet Grandma Ellie and fill the hole my biological grandfather left when he checked out permanently around Dad’s first birthday.

His end, however, was anything but soft and I took it harder than people in my life realized. Generally an external processor, I wrapped that wound tightly and hid it within me. 

So, when Dad told me to pack my fishing pole for our first back country trip—the pole his absentee father built me as a gift of the most passive aggressive variety—I didn’t want to. I hadn’t touched it since my real grandfather’s funeral. Left it in a corner of my closet, hidden in a cardboard tube. Pulling it out for the trip made my stomach turn and I didn’t sleep the entire night before we left, imagining it lying against my backpack in the back of our car.  

The hike into Kearsarge Lakes made me forget about it completely. We had a close call with a bear our first night when one jumped up and ripped the bottom out of one of our stuff sacks tied to the top of the bear pole while we slept, eating a third of our food before sniffing the outside of our tent and meandering back into the trees.

The next day, we hiked the last seven miles up and over an 11,709-foot Pass, during which we were hit with a hail storm while exposed on the naked trail above the tree line and also discovered unexpectedly Mom’s heart condition. By the time we dropped into the valley on the other side of the pass, the thought of fishing was an indistinct buzzing so quiet I could call it silence. As soon as we hit the first camp site, though, Dad turned the volume up on the buzz.

“You want to fish after we get the tents up or wait for tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? I’m shot,” I said, not really lying. The hike and worrying about Mom had worn me out, a feat my folks thought impossible at that point in my life. 

“Ok,” Dad said, and I heard it. The small lilt of disappointment. Dad wasn’t one to hide his emotions, but he also wasn’t one to call attention to them, so that little slip was loud. I scrambled a little because of it.

“Let’s go tomorrow afternoon. I want to swim in the lake today.”

“Swim in it? You realize that water is basically freezing, right?”

“Of course I realize that.”

Of course I didn’t realize that. I needed the out. To this day, Mom thinks I was just determined to prove my toughness when it really came down to simpler emotion calculus. The discomfort of the water was less than that of fishing. So I bit down on my cheek and smiled through what is the coldest minute I’ve ever spent in a body of water, making a myth of the moment I’ve left as history until writing this. 

Anything but talk about the specter of that last, gasping version of Grandpa Bruce that lodged itself like a tumor in my chest whenever I thought about fishing.  

The next day, with no plausible strategy left to delay the inevitable, I walked the path to the closest lake with Dad and my friend Jesse, who’d brought a borrowed rod for the trip. We baited our hooks and dropped lines in the water while the thick air around us swarmed with bugs backlit by shafts of buttery afternoon sunlight.  

And then, like all fishing trips, we waited. Coiled and then recast our lines. Tugged our hooks from the grass on the bottom of the lake and replaced the bait it had stolen. For an hour, this was all we did. No talk. Just cast, splash, and reel noises setting up a repeat of the same. 

After a while, Jesse moved around the edge of the lake a bit to see if a different spot would finally yield a bite. When he settled about 100 feet away, Dad cleared his throat gently.

“You not having fun?” he asked without looking at me.

“What?”

“Looks like it hurts to hold your pole. You ok?”

“Yeah, I’m good.” 

“Alright,” he said and went back to fishing. One thing my parents were both good at was waiting me out. They knew my extroversion abhorred a conversational vacuum. After a few minutes, the urge to say something swamped my silence. 

“It’s just…this was always my thing with Grandpa.” Dad winced slightly, like he’d been slapped, but stayed silent. “I don’t mean that we…I mean, like, it’s just I can’t do this without thinking of him and it makes me sad.”

“I hear that,” Dad said. His shoulders slumped a little and he watched the flight of his hook on another cast a little longer than necessary. “I miss him too. Miss our things.”

He looked at me, quickly, and I nodded and we both went back to looking at the water for another half hour. Now that he’s gone, I remember these quiet moments for what they really were: our own memorial for Bruce, one he would have approved of. Dad caught a couple small fish we’d add to our pouch of dehydrated backpacker’s rice that night. 

I caught nothing and felt like my chest could finally expand because of it. The next day, Dad went back to the water with his pole but without asking me to join. Jesse went with him, leaving me to the book I’d packed for downtime entertainment.

The whole time they stood fishing, the sound of their voices and laughter carried across the meadow to me, but not the words themselves. It was better that way, I decided, hoping Dad enjoyed fishing with Jesse, a small compensation for discovering he could not share it with me. 

© 2022 Michael Dean Clark