Growing Gills

by David Joy

  Growing Gills

  Growing Gills

  A Fly Fisherman’s Journey

  David Joy

  Illustrated by

  Michael Polomik

  Bright Mountain Books, Inc.

  Fairview, North Carolina

  © 2011 David Joy

  Cover art and illustrations © 2011 Michael Polomik

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce any material without the express written permission of the publisher, Bright Mountain Books, Inc., 206 Riva Ridge Drive, Fairview, North Carolina 28730.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN-10: 0-914875-60-4 (paperback)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-914875-60-4 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 0-914875-61-2 (E-book edition)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-914875-61-1 (E-book edition)

  Watercolor used on cover and illustrations by Michael Polomik

  Cover design by Derek Howell and Jamie Womack

  Slightly different versions of the following chapters have previously appeared in other publications: “Breaking in the Cork.” Wilderness House Literary Review 4, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 1–9; “Native.” Smoky Mountain Living, Summer 2009: 54–56; “Sound of Silence.” Smoky Mountain Living, Winter 2010: 42–45.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Joy, David, 1983-

  Growing gills : a fly fisherman’s journey / David Joy.

  p. cm.

  Summary: “David Joy’s Southern memoir details a North Carolina fly fisherman’s youthful experiences in the Outer Banks and Piedmont to his pursuit of native brook trout in the Appalachian Mountains. This work of literary nonfiction encapsulates the philosophical underpinnings of a man defined by fish, family, water, solitude, environment, and wilderness”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-914875-60-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-914875-60-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-914875-61-1 (e-book ed.)

  ISBN-10: 0-914875-61-2 (e-book ed.)

  1. Joy, David, 1983- 2. Brook trout fishing—Appalachian Region. 3. Fly fishing—Appalachian Region. 4. Wilderness areas—Appalachian Region. 5. Fishers—Appalachian Region—Biography. 6. Fishers—North Carolina—Outer Banks—Biography. 7. Fishers—Piedmont (U.S. : Region)—Biography. 8. Appalachian Region—Social life and customs. 9. Outer Banks (N.C.)—Social life and customs. 10. Piedmont (U.S. : Region)—Social life and customs. I. Title.

  SH689.3.J69 2011

  799.17’554097568—dc23

  2011032877

  Dedication

  To Granny, Ruth Weaver, who took me to the shoreline

  and taught me the ways of fish. Through her love,

  lessons of life, and stories of water, I find the courage

  to wade into the stream and face the current.

  As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.

  Nick’s heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling.

  —Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River”

  Author’s Notes

  Readers may notice that the order of events in Growing Gills is not strictly chronological. Instead, this book follows a conceptual and thematic journey that focuses on the primary causes that I feel have made me the man that I am: family and heritage, the artistic nature of fishing, the purity of the wild, the love of fish, and the natural world as teacher. I hope that this nonlinear structure will not confuse readers, but rather will emphasize the foundations of my journey.

  The chapter title “What in me is dark, illumine…” is an allusion to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674), lines 22-23 of Book I.

  Readers from Jackson County, North Carolina, may notice that the word Tuckasegee has been used for both river and community. We know the river as Tuckaseigee while the community is Tuckasegee. The publisher has decided to use the spelling found in most North Carolina atlases and gazetteers for consistency. This may indeed be more consistent, but rest assured, the two will always be a little different for us.

  Growing Gills

  Growing Gills

  The screen door creaked shut behind me as my girlfriend and I entered the pet store in downtown Sylva, North Carolina. Sara was immediately drawn to the puppy bins straight ahead. As she stood giddily overlooking the hounds, her petite frame, tight in jean shorts and a spaghetti strap tank top, seemed antsy. After gazing down on mixed breed mountain dogs, she looked back over her shoulder and smiled at me, but I found myself fixated on the rows of aquariums to the right. A blend of saltwater and freshwater tanks lined makeshift shelving units in the middle aisle and also ran along the back wall of the store. Colorful fish finned through bubbles in every glass box.

  A pair of oscars swam in a ten-gallon aquarium on the back wall: one albino with orange and pink spots, one a tiger colored like a tabby cat. Both fish were around ten inches, nearing full growth, and sharked through the tank in search of the next meal. Oscars are aggressive fish, so as I stuck my hand over the open tank I wasn’t surprised when the tabby-coated oscar exploded through the surface and bit down on the tip of my index finger. The fish sank back into the aerated water and I smiled.

  I knelt down to eye level while both fish stared forward swimming to stay directly in front of me as I shifted from foot to foot. The fishes’ pectoral fins rowed like paddles holding them steady. Watching their gills open and close, I felt my ears begin to move back and forth trying to mimic the motion. Buried deep in my subconscious is the memory of prenatal gills; I was created in water and a part of me has never fully dried.

  *****

  I don’t know where this obsession with fish stems from, but I became a fisherman as soon as my hands could grip the cork handle of a rod. By the time I was four or five, I knew how to hold a rod, set the hook, and reel. Not long after, I was obsessed.

  Instead of watching cartoons on Saturday mornings, I lay tummy-down on shag carpet with my head propped on a pillow and stared at Hank Parker, Roland Martin, and Bill Dance casting lures into beds of lily pads and yanking hard into the jaws of football-bellied largemouth bass. After the shows ended, I tied on a hook, headed to the pond, and emulated everything I had seen on television. I came home when the sun dimmed orange behind the red oaks and spent the rest of the night flip-casting barrel sinkers into a Dixie cup at the edge of my kitchen. I wanted to be a master, not for money, but for no other reason than to catch more fish. It was always about the fish, and the only way to get my hands on them was with rod and reel.

  My childhood bedroom in Charlotte, North Carolina, was a temple built to worship sunfish. A forest green border with paintings of a brownish largemouth, a ragged-finned crappie, and a god-awful portrayal of a rainbow trout bordered the ceiling. A scientific chart of “Bass and Other Sunfish” with beautiful brushings of panfish and lists of Latin names hung on one wall—depictions of my own pagan gods. An oak creel lacquered to look rustic dangled from a nail just above my headboard. A large framed poster, a still-life photograph of an eclectic collection of fly-fishing gear with the words “I’m Hooked” along the bottom, was hung on the wall beside my bed. My rods stood faceted in a pine stand beside the door. Within those four walls, my life was—and is—defined.

  Most nights I lay in bed and flipped through pages of Audubon field guides on fish, specifically the North American Fishes edition. As I learned terms like opercle, cycloid scales, and branchiostegal rays; I searched through colorful photographs fo
r fish I’d caught, fish I’d heard about, and fish I might one day hook. I read every book, magazine, and guide I could get my hands on, determined to know everything there was to know about my scaly relatives that swam beneath the murky film.

  I researched my piscine forebears as if they were the truest sense of family genealogy. I was more attached to my family with fins than I was to my own parents. Every time I watched a fish move through the water or swim from my fingertips, I felt as though I had to say goodbye to someone I loved. No matter how often I held them or saw one rise to a cricket thrusting across the surface of a pond, I never could get close enough.

  *****

  I couldn’t have been more than eleven when I decided I needed fish of my own. My sister, Deana, who was six years older than I, had a small, ten-gallon aquarium on her desk. I want to say that on this particular day there weren’t any fish in the tank (probably a time in between toilet-destined goldfish), although I could be wrong. Whatever the case, Deana was a strawberry-blond teenager more interested in boys than pets, and I knew that her little aquarium would make a great home for new fish. Being the loving brother that I was (as well as an avid, young ichthyologist), I decided I could fix the problem of an empty tank with a few small sunfish from a local farm pond. My plan was to catch a couple of juvenile bluegills to put in the aquarium. I wouldn’t keep any over four inches.

  I headed to the pond with a flimsy spinning rod bobbing in one hand and a five-gallon bucket swaying in the other. The worn clay path to the pond was lined with blooming yellow jessamine, and the sweetness of honeysuckle hung on the air like perfume in the warm afternoon sun. Standing on the bank, I cast a fire orange cork into the cloudy water. Immediately I began catching fish, but that day I had to be picky: they couldn’t be too big or else they wouldn’t have enough room in the tank. These weren’t fish fated for hot grease; these fish would be specimens for me to observe and learn from.

  With three fish in the bucket, I headed home, stopping occasionally to eat fallen muscadines. I walked into the house (luckily, no one was home) and carried the five-gallon bucket, filled with scummy pond water and three fish, into my sister’s room. Using a small mesh net, I scooped up each fish and placed them one by one into the tank. The first was a juvenile channel catfish about seven inches long with serrated pectoral fins and black spots covering its slate gray sides. Next, I put in a three-inch white crappie fry with specks scattered from its opaque green back down its silver body. The fish quickly descended to the colored-pebble bottom. I hadn’t realized it was a crappie until I saw the elongated fanlike soft rays of its dorsal and anal fins. Then I released a young yellow sunfish about five inches long with dark moss-colored stripes running down its olive back; it swam into the bubbles and hovered near the aerator.

  Granted, I had planned for a couple of small bluegills, but this was a much more scientific sample of freshwater fish; after all, now I could observe three different species at once. Unable to understand their confinement, the fish darted around quickly, ramming into the glass, but I was sure they would adapt.

  Not long after putting my specimens into the aquarium, my parents and sister came home. I excitedly ran to tell them about our new pets, and they, not as ecstatic, walked into Deana’s room to see.

  “Lord, boy, where did you get those?” my dad asked. His forehead grew redder as he stroked his state trooper-style crew cut.

  “I caught them down at the pond.”

  “David, you need to take them back,” he urged.

  “Why?”

  “Well, what are you going to do with them?”

  “I’m going to watch them.”

  “And what are you going to feed them?”

  “Crickets and worms.” The answers were simple to me.

  “David, you need to take them back.” Dad’s tone was firm, but the pleas fell on deaf ears.

  My parents let me keep the fish but, needless to say, nobody else in my family was thrilled about having wild fish in the house.

  Just as I had planned, I caught field crickets and earthworms to feed my fish. I expected that when I dropped in the food the fish would instinctively explode on the insects, but they didn’t eat. Even after all of my reading, I didn’t understand that a fish could become too stressed to feed. I watched them shoot around the tank much faster than any of my sister’s goldfish, as they tried to get out. Time went by and they still wouldn’t eat.

  After a couple of days, the water became cloudy from fish crap and decaying cricket bodies floating stiff on the surface. The smell of rotting bugs and still water was strong each time I opened the lid. I could barely see the fish anymore, and I wouldn’t have even known that they were still in there if I hadn’t heard them butting into glass, still unacquainted with the confines of the aquarium.

  “David, you’ve got to do something with those fish in there. They’re going to die,” my mom urged. Dad had been worried about the mess, but Mom was concerned with life. She couldn’t stand to watch my inadvertent torture.

  “Well, what if I clean the tank?”

  “You need to let those fish go. You wouldn’t want them to die, would you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then you better let them go.”

  “All right, I’ll take them back tomorrow. It’s too late to go today.”

  As disappointed as I was, I knew that she was right. Those fish were going to croak off, as sure as the world, and I loved fish too much to let that happen. I sat there that night, watched their silhouettes move in the hazy water, and yearned for a bigger tank; but Mom was right, and tomorrow I would let them go. Still I went to bed dreading the release.

  I wish I could remember what I dreamed about that night, maybe some dream where I grew gills. What I do remember is a whole lot of yelling and hollering, loud whooping, and one angry father. I woke up to the sound of something beating against the wall that separated Deana’s room from mine. Next thing I knew, my sister was screaming bloody murder (she must have thought it was a burglar). My dad ran into my sister’s room, looking for an intruder to lay into. What he found was the seven-inch channel cat wedged behind Deana’s desk, thrashing its head and slapping its forked caudal fin against the water-soaked sheetrock.

  Pretty soon Dad walked into my room and turned on the light. I had heard all of the commotion as well as his explanation, so I knew what was going on, but I kept my eyes closed and pretended to snore. It was a Beaver Cleaver trick that never worked, but I still tried, fearing the whipping. The small catfish had burst through the surface of the water and out of the aquarium, knocking off the plastic lid and fluorescent lamp on top. Now there it lay trying to swim away on dusty carpet trapped between the desk and wall. Half-asleep, Dad did not look happy, and he had to go to work at seven the next morning.

  “You need to come get this blame fish,” he instructed, firm as the manager he became each day in the Pepsi plant.

  “All right.”

  I knew he didn’t want to pick the catfish up because he was afraid of getting cut by the fins, a lesson he had learned before. I walked into Deana’s room where she was still sitting up in bed with blankets wrapped around her while Mom stroked her hair to calm her nerves. I wanted to laugh, but held it in as I reached behind the desk, pulled out the channel catfish, put my index and middle fingers behind the fish’s pectoral blades, and held it firm with my thumb in its mouth. The catfish’s thick slime enveloped my fingers, and I felt the serrated fins edging into my skin. I was too young to fear being cut. I seem to remember running over to my sister’s bed to scare her with the fish and then getting yelled at, but my memory of that detail is about as foggy as the water in the aquarium.

  “We need to take these fish back,” Dad said.

  “All right, I’ll do it in the morning.”

  “No, David, I mean now.” His voice grew more intense with each syllable.

  “But Dad, it’s too dark to go to the pond tonight.”

  “Then we’ll just take them to the
river. Go get the bucket.”

  There was nothing left to say. I got the five-gallon bucket I’d carried the fish home in, filled it with clean water from the tap, and poured the fish into it.

  Dad drove me to the river in the Jeep Cherokee, stopping at River View Inn, a ragged little fish camp nestled on the banks of the Catawba River about two miles from our house. Stepping out onto the cracked asphalt parking lot, I grabbed the bucket’s handle and headed toward water. A couple of Canada geese, honking in succession, were startled away from the bank as I lowered the bucket to the river. A flickering streetlight allowed me to see the three fish ride the wave of water out of the bucket as I poured the contents into the Catawba. Finally free, they swam along the clamshell-covered bottom into darkness. In the river, they were home.

  *****

  In a way, I wish I could have swum away with those fish. I wish my fingers were webbed like fins and that my prenatal gills had never fully skinned over. I like to think there is a piece of my piscine past buried deep in my collective unconscious. Reading theories of recapitulation, I smile with the descriptions of ontogeny (embryonic development) mirroring phylogeny (biological evolution). I’m less interested in the connection between beginning as a single-celled organism and how I went through stages of reptilian and avian evolution; I focus on my piscine phase.

  Around five weeks in human development, we have brachial arches which look like gill slits. These arches that later develop into things like the mouth, nose, neck, and larynx once carried oxygen to the rest of the body from the gills. Each arch contains a brachial pouch reminiscent of sharks’ brachial clefts. During this time of development, we are cartilaginous creatures, and we have tails until shortly before we are born. I wish my gills and tail had never been absorbed back into my fetal body, allowing me to swim with the fish I feel closest to.