Two Men and the Sea

Two Men and the Sea 6.27.20

Over the years, my brother-in-law Jim has invited me to join him for deep sea fishing trips off of the coast of North Carolina. I have declined each time. I use the excuse that I am too busy with work. But as Elizabeth informed me early in our marriage, we choose where we spend our time and who to spend it with.  If you choose not to do something, it’s because it’s not a priority. That particular conversation with my wife occurred because I would not mow our yard. I was working late every night, but I also I told her that she was right – mowing the yard was not a priority.  And she promptly gave me several reasons why it should be a priority. I mowed the yard.

The reasons are many for not making people or actions a priority, ranging from fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of the unknown, or just being lazy.  But “being too busy” is just another way of saying there are other things I would rather do.  I could have found the time to go fishing with Jim. I just never made it a priority. 

For me, going deep sea fishing is out of my comfort zone.  Getting seasick the last time I tried 30 years ago made it more so. Your mind tends to create a visceral reaction just thinking about doing an activity again that created a violent sickness.  In addition, I do not fish or hunt. Even with a huge lake as a back yard, I do not fish even though you can see beautiful bass and huge catfish swimming near our dock. It just does not appeal to me.

Growing up in rural Louisa County, everyone hunted. I did too, but only to fit in and to hang out with friends.  Other than catching mice in our mouse traps, the last time I remember killing something intentionally was killing a blue jay with my BB gun at the age of 16.  It was a good shot – right through the eye socket. However, something changed that day when I saw its lifeless form laying there in the snow.  I have never hunted again. I sometimes wish I could, but if I ever do hunt again, I will let someone else take the shot.

But instead of telling Jim these things – things that I never admitted until now, I just said I was too busy.  However, this time I had no excuses.  I had retired as an investment banker and the world had slowed down due to the pandemic.  It was also his 60^th birthday. So, I said to myself, “Hell, if I can manage freezing temperatures and no sleep for 34 hours straight to summit Mt. Kilimanjaro, I can certainly get up at 3:00 a.m. and spend 12 hours on a boat 40 miles off the coast of North Carolina.”

To get me in the mood, my son Carter suggested that I listen to The Old Man and the Sea on audible on the drive from our Lake House to the Outer Banks.  I am glad I did.  As one of my favorite novelists, I admire and almost worship Hemmingway’s concise and tight prose.  And it had been awhile since I had read the short novel.  As I drove east on route 460 through towns like Waverly, Wakefield and Windsor in rural southeastern Virginia, I listened to the Old Man’s thoughts through the voice of Donald Sutherland.  And I became the Old Man sitting in a 15-foot skiff in the sea off the coast of Cuba. And I knew why that book won Hemmingway a Nobel Prize in literature.

Unlike the Old Man, Jim and I would be on a 61-footer using kites and other modern gear to create “flying fish lures” to catch 40 to 50-pound tuna, not sitting on a 15-foot skiff with only our hands and our back and heavy line to reel in a 1,400-pound marlin. In addition, we had plenty of food, water, beer and each other to pass the time. 

The previous evening, Jim, his wife Karen, and I had sipped some fine bourbon that he has given me for my birthday, just a few weeks earlier. We talked about the things you are not supposed to talk about – money, politics and religion. Elizabeth had told me not to bring up politics with her brother because he and his wife have different political views than we do. Hogwash. I love Jim, and if I cannot have an honest discussion with him, how can I expect others to have honest discourse on issues they might disagree on. My brother-in-law and his father are masons. As a mason, George Washington spoke these words to a group of fellow masons many years ago.

“It is the act of a Patriot not to deny the contradictions in our history, our community, and our own lives but to face them, embrace them, and grow honestly through them.”

The only way we can make our country even better is to talk about our different opinions, but we to start with a common ground, whatever that common ground is.  We may have to go all the way back to the agreeing that our county stands for “liberty and justice for all.”  We may disagree on how to create that dream, but at least we can agree on that – anyway, I pray that we do agree on that. And from there, let’s start the dialogue.  Jim, Karen and I had a wonderful time together that evening.  We were relaxed and we listened to each other.  Maybe the whiskey helped. And I was very happy that I made fishing with Jim on his 60^th birthday a priority.

When we headed out the next morning in the dark at 4 a.m., Jim and the other six guests decided that I would reel in the first catch of the day.  After witnessing a stunning sunrise over the water, we stopped 40 miles off the coast of Cape Hatteras, and put out our “flying fish” lures, which do mimic flying fish by flying a kite behind the boat and running the lines through loops in the kite line. When a tuna did hit our flying fish lure, I was summoned and spent the next eight minutes reeling in a 45-pound tuna.  Many of the other guests were accomplished fishermen in their own right.  As a result, they had a lot of fun watching a neophyte trying to reel in a big fish.  By the time the big tuna was hauled into the boat, my left arm felt like a limp wet rag.  And it hurt.  Jim reeled in the next tuna and I can say that it was fun giving him a hard time the same way I had been ribbed. 

Jim and I will enjoy the sushi and tuna steaks that those beautiful and strong fish will provide. However, as we reeled in each fish and I saw each tuna gasping for the water it desperately needed to survive, I became a little queasy.  It was not from motion sickness.  It was from a deep sadness seeing one living thing die in front of me because of me. 

I remembered the Old Man becoming deeply saddened when the sharks began to tear into the large and beautiful marlin that had taken him days to reel in.  When the Old Man finally arrived back to shore with his catch, the only thing left of the big, beautiful marlin was the skeleton. The nasty sharks had done their work.  He was sad because the big fish had died for nothing, and he was responsible for its death. And even though he was fishing for his livelihood and not for sport, he knew that he had been irresponsible by going out so far from shore. 

After we arrived back at the dock and I watched the tuna that we had caught being butchered, I became sad again. But only briefly. I would honor these fish by not wasting their meat and be thankful for providing me and my family sustenance.  Many cultures including Native Americans had a special relationship with the animals they killed for sustenance.  Like the Old Man in Hemmingway’s novel, they even felt a kinship. If Jim does ever ask me to go deep sea fishing again, I will gladly do so.  In fact, going deep sea fishing with Jim and my three sons is now on my bucket list.  It will be a right of passage.  And I will convince my sons to make it a priority.