In adolescence, I was fortunate enough to live on a small barrier island off the Cape Fear coast. During the summers, I spent hours mastering the use of a casting net: I can still perform the motions in my mind, the twist and release of elbow then wrist that sends a six-foot diameter hoop of net through the air and onto the water’s dark mirror. The net’s perimeter of small weights would then pull it, open-mouthed, slowly to the bottom, catching anything on the way down. Once I could sense that the net was settling I would pull sharply on the rope, cinching the weights together and trapping whatever had become entangled.
Usually, this was shrimp. Occasionally spot, sometimes slightly larger fish, maybe a wayward crab — but most often it was shrimp.
The movement was automatic. It was all muscle memory and as thoughtless as a free throw.
Most of the time I didn’t keep what I caught. I would work shrimp free from the net and toss them back into the briny canal, the dock on which I stood barely shaking with the echoes of my casting.
Sometimes I would hook a shrimp on a fishing line and try my luck but I’ve never been a good fisherman.
Coming back to the island in my mid-20s after undergrad, then a bizarrely brief stint in the Army, and at the beginning of my time as a high school teacher, I took my old net down to the intracoastal waterway and stood knee deep in the lolling wake of yankee yachts as they passed.
My first cast was a school of small fish, a lucky hit after I spied the telltale shimmer and flash just below the dark surface of the water. I released them.
The skittering rush of fiddler crabs, scores of the little sidestepping grotesques, almost drowned out the hissing breeze amid the marsh grasses. I remembered then, as I always do with a clench of remorse, how my younger self would sometimes take shots at the heavy-clawed little monsters with my dad’s air rifle.
But in my mid-20s, I was versed in new varieties of suffering and far less willing to inflict pain if I could help it.
I had brought a fishing pole and decided to challenge myself. Squatting in the sand beside my car I plucked a shrimp from the bait bucket. I gripped the shimmering critter between my thumb and index finger and brought the rusted hook to its soft underbelly, aiming between the columns of its sandshaded appendages. The shrimp flexed its body, contracting around the hook as I pushed up toward the hard shell of its exoskeleton.
Shrimp are basically see through, and though I can’t necessarily name all the glistening planet-like organs that float in its body, I could see the dull gray comet of pain, the hook, soaring between the panicked apparatus of life.
The point of the hook burst through the back of the shrimp with a crack. The miniature concussion rippled through my fingertips. My knees gave out from squatting and I dropped back onto the sand. I’d meant to exit the hook between the hard segments, using the interlocking pieces of skeleton along the shrimp’s back to secure the hook.
There was no way it would stay on the line for long. I’d wasted it. My fingers were numb from trying to hold the shrimp lightly enough not to…hurt it? Not to hurt myself with the hook as it passed along its burning course.
I cried.
Photo via Myrtle Beach TheDigitel at Flickr
An Unhappy Consciousness 