Our Love Language is Fishing

We are newlyweds, although we’ve known each other for ten years, the commitment carries a different tone. I first met my now husband at a party in college in the middle of Michigan while drinking lukewarm beer and flipping sticky playing cards at someone’s table that was likely plucked from a curb or dumpster. We quickly got around to hanging out and soon after that, we went fishing.

We had both grown up fishing. Myself, under the guidance of my father, letting worms hang under bobbers and elating at the diversity of surprises that a Walt’s crawler might surface. My husband, Willy, being a bit braver, read forums at twelve years old that taught him how to fish a Senko worm wacky style and how long to let a lipless crankbait sink. Both of our approaches got the job done well enough that we continued to fish as adults.

Well, Willy and I grew up, or tried to anyways. We got a bit more technical and strategic when it came to our fishing approaches and we even began fishing other states in our early twenties, as much as our summer jobs would afford us to. After college, we both picked up office jobs and drifted a part for a while, only to reunite under the pretense that we’d only be fishing. We did fish though; we crossed paths on hard water in January and caught up about how our folks were doing. We pulled buzz baits and topwater frogs through the canals in August and discussed how tall the tomatoes were getting in each of our respective gardens. We even had a tacklebox draft, dumping everything on the picnic table in my backyard and one by one retrieving old spoons we had loaned to the other or snagging a panther martin we had been eyeballing for years. Eventually, we called each other up and figured we might as well get together again, only I had moved to Montana at some point in between fishing trips.

“I’ll meet you out there,” he said sweetly over the phone in almost a whisper as butter spun around a cast iron that I mindlessly swirled. “That would be great,” I agreed. Along came fly fishing.

Somewhere in there, Willy moved out to Montana, bought a ring, and we planned a wedding. Somewhere in there, we decorated Christmas trees, flew home for funerals, and quit a job. Somewhere in there, we got fairly low on cash, we shot a couple of muley bucks, and we prayed more than ever. Somewhere in there, the fishing slowed down and then it stopped.

So, yesterday afternoon, when my husband Willy asked me to go fishing on a particularly sweltering night, the kind of night when you lay on the couch in the breeze of a dusty box fan and nothing but the buzz of grasshoppers occupies your mind, well, of course I smiled and grabbed my boots. In the process of pulling neoprene socks over sweaty feet and sifting through a fishing closet in search of a certain fly box, resistance had crept in. “It’s really hot,” I moaned. “The river will cool us down,” he assured me. “We’ve just been so busy, I mean, we need to slow down,” I complained. “This is the best way I know how to,” he said, persistently positive. “It’ll be nice, you’re right, but if the stonefly report is wrong, we’re not staying,” I baited. “We’ll see,” he didn’t bite.

Willy’s red chevy truck rocked back and forth and I listened to a water bottle roll across the floor as his rig carried us on the gravelly road to our favorite fishing hole. I watched clusters of cottonwood fluff drift by like puffs of smoke. I smirked imagining the flock of nearby turkeys with cigarettes hanging from their beaks and cartoon like clouds in the form of cottonwood pouring from their tobacco filled mouths. The sun was stretching through the woods and we parked next to the abandoned rust-orange tree stand that might burst into dust if a strong enough wind came through. The switchgrass poked at my bare legs and I regretted not wearing longer pants and resisted the urge to whine again. As I struggled to twist up a clinch knot, it occurred to me. “It’s been more than a month since we’ve fished,” I announced. Willy scoffed and gears turned as he bit off excess tippet near his tied-on fly. “Huh,” was all he said. If possible, months is a term that should never be used when discussing time between fishing trips. “The wedding kept us busy,” I tried to make an excuse as we trudged through prickly lettuce, woods rose, thistle, red osier dogwood, and willow. Our boots muddled wild daisies and I tried to dodge each white pedaled wonder on the bank, only rolling my ankles a few times. When we reached the rushing water I was nearly running and I sighed deeply as the coolness numbed my itching calves. We held hands as we crossed the river, then hiked a few hundred yards to one of our favorite pools.

“There,” Willy pointed and I watched a fish rise just a few seconds after. Willy and I discussed who would fish upstream and what would normally require a game of rock, paper, scissors instead required no debate at all. We were so excited to get our lines wet that we were already walking in different directions. We kissed the air between us and mouthed “good luck” then I walked about twelve yards south and upriver while he positioned himself slightly in the other direction to begin fishing the pool. I waited patiently, knees bent, eyes studying the softer water. I nearly hollered when I saw a speckled fish head bob above the surface. I let out line and began casting, watching the yellow fly line swirl in the air above me, a cornflower blue sky and white melon wedge moon behind it. I let my line drape over the water and laughed as the foam stonefly I fished smacked the water a little too hard. I was out of practice. Before I could watch a complete drift, Willy was shouting.

I ran to him, as fast as one can in wading boots on a rocky stretch of riverbank. When I reached him, I tugged the net from his pack and moved toward the fish. His rod tip was high and as the intoxicating clicks of a spinning drag faded, he guided the large rainbow trout into the net that I held firmly. We howled and our wet palms met in a clumsy high-five. The fly, olive-stained whitetail hair knotted to a bit of foam with a barb smashed hook, was pierced picturesquely in the corner of the trout’s lips. Willy plucked the fly from the bow’s mouth and dunked his hands into the water. He gently held the fish just above surface in the sunlight so we could get a good look at it. It was a pretty fish; its skin was like the patina film over weathered copper and a muted pink stripe iconically decorated its side. He placed the trout into the cold river until it was ready to dart off, back into the pool to recount what had just happened and try to figure out how to explain it to all his buddies. The trout did just that and while I was anxious to return to my fishing spot, I was stopped by a familiar smile on Willy’s face. There it was, years of netting fish for each other, untangling knots when the other had had enough, pointing out bald eagles or kingfishers for the other to see, it was all there in that smile. I walked slowly back over to my fishing spot and remembered the quiet coyote that had once joined us on an outing, the coyote hunting voles on the riverbank across from us while we eagerly pursued Yellowstone cutthroat. I thought of all the shared prayers Willy and I had over the years, for peace and protection and tight lines. Poor God, of all the things to bend his ear on he had to hear from Willy and I week after week, fingers interlocked and talking about trout again. I smiled and casted methodically, glancing over here and there at Willy who was knee deep in the river and happy.

After three (six) missed fish, I hooked one. I hollered and there was Willy with a swift net. A beautiful brown trout, so poorly named, I always thought, with its golden belly gleaming and vermillion spots electric in the evening light. I told Willy how it had taken my Chubby Chernobyl as it sank on the tail end of a sorry excuse for a drift. “Sometimes, you just catch one, against all odds,” he winked. He congratulated me and after catching three more trout and a whitefish we set our rods down on a nearby log. We watched a low flying pelican for a while that appeared to turn every fish off and a trout didn’t rise for a long time as the bird surfed the breeze. The air was hot, even in the last light of day, and we went swimming in that very same pool, letting our bones ache in the chill that sustained our quarry. We felt grateful to momentarily be like the trout, pushing against the late June current, sleepily.

We watched the sun set flawlessly in a saddle between two peaks on the distant mountain range as we exchanged the stories of each catch as if we had not been side by side for it all. I realized then the rareness of this moment in our lives as we swam where we had caught fish just moments before, just the two of us. The stillness of time, between all the things, for better or for worse, that kept us from fishing. The flood of cottonwood fibers blending with our flies. The coolness of the river just before sleep on a hot summer night. Ten years into a friendship and three weeks into a marriage and realizing my greatest fishing buddy, is him.

Soulmates can carry a lot of qualities and responsibilities, mine carries a net.