My family wasn’t the outdoorsy kind (too much nature), but I don’t think it’s possible to grow up in Minnesota and NOT go fishing at least once. And while ice fishing is definitely something one needs to experience — again, at least once — it’s lake fishing, in the middle of summer, on a 90 degree day, with a peerless cloudless sky, in placid waters, that I remember with such fondness. I don’t remember the first time I went fishing, but I do remember going out one day in North Dakota, during the month I was visiting my father, though my dad didn’t go with us. Again, not the outdoorsy type. Instead, one of his colleagues and friends took me out with his two sons, one of whom was roughly my age, out to some park or another that must have been outside Grand Forks because honestly, there isn’t a lot of natural beauty that I remember in Grand Forks. It’s been a while since I’ve been back, so forgive me if I’m wrong.

We had a picnic-style lunch of hot dogs and chips and pop (I say soda now, but I want to stay true to my Midwestern roots for this story), and then set out in a motor boat, life jackets at the ready. For the purposes of this story I’m going to make this the first time I’d gone fishing, and I’m going to say that this is why my dad sent me along without him, because he had no interest in it but knew that I was keen. And so Ed and his sons whose names I have forgotten (Tom? Mike?) taught me how to how to bait my hook, first offering to do it for me. I took that to imply “cuz you’re a girl” and I wasn’t going to let that happen, so I said, “I can bait my own hook, just show me how.” And I put a worm piece on my hook, remembering at the time how I used to dig up the backyard looking for worms because I thought they were fascinating creatures, and I used to collect them and put them in plastic buckets of dirt and I guess I was trying to start my own worm farm? But then my grandmother caught on to what I was doing and berated me for digging up her lawn, and that was the end of my worm farm enterprise.

We sat in the boat for what felt like hours, drinking pop and eating chips and listening to the water lap at our boat. We weren’t catching anything, and the boys and I were becoming frustrated, and we were running out of worms, because the fish would grab the worms right off the hooks and say thanks for the snack and then rush off again to tell their friends that there were free snacks availalbe if they were careful enough. I’d just lost my last worm but I didn’t want to give up fishing because I liked the experiment in patience, the possibility that at any moment something could happen, and the tranquility that comes with being on the water. (On certain summer days, those around me will hear me openly long to be on a boat. And not on the Hudson or East River. I mean on a lake, far away from anything. Give me a canoe and a paddle and push me off.)

We had leftover hot dogs, so I reached into the cooler, found the uneaten dogs, broke off a small chunk of one, and put it on my hook. The boys laughed at me. Fish don’t like hot dogs, they jeered. That’s never gonna work. I shrugged, because clearly they didn’t get it, and flung my hook back into the lake. Within minutes, I had a bite. A real bite, not a tug that would’ve told me that I’d just lost my worm to a hungry fish. This fish was threatening to pull my fishing pole right out of my hands if I wasn’t careful. I whooped, and Ed was right there to back me up. He told me how to move with the fish as I reeled it in, he held my shoulders down so I wouldn’t get jerked around. I held on, and while the fish wasn’t that big I felt like I was in danger of getting pulled right off the boat. The end of the pole was starting to chafe, my arm muscles were straining, it was all happening too fast and too slow at the same time. But we finally got the fish out of the water, and I whooped again, looking triumphantly at the boys who dismissed my hot dog experiment. I’d caught the first fish. I’d caught the only fish that day.

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