I've fished my whole life. For as long as I can remember, fishing called the shots...with one major hiatus. When I was in college, I didn't know anyone who fished. I fished, maybe, a half dozen times a year. I fished when I visited my folks in Pennsylvania. I fished when the opportunity literally smacked me in the face. Most of my time was spent writing, playing music, and cultivating bad habits. There just wasn't a place in my life for fishing.
I lived in San Francisco during this time, and I'm a freshwater guy by birthright. It didn't occur to me that the San Francisco Bay Area could be one of the best places in the world to be a fisherman. When I decided I needed to fish again, I was working as a teacher. I had a scooter and a cool girlfriend (who is now my cool wife). I fished Lake Merced a few times. I'd take a collapsible spinning rod and toss lures into the neon green water. (Before it got ruined, Lake Merced was considered one of the premier fishing lakes in the US, then a few golf courses sprang up, dumped a bunch of fertilizer into the ecosystem, and essentially killed the lake). Fishing Lake Merced is like fishing in some future dystopia. The water is gross, you never catch anything, and if you do catch something, you don't want to touch it because you might catch something. Like, I don't know, Ebola.
But Lake Merced did one very important thing for me...the bug was back. Soon, I was seeking out decent fishing spots outside the city limits. There are lakes and reservoirs to the east and some beautiful lakes in Marin County to the north. I became obsessed with one particular spot that shall not be named. I started fishing a few times a week. The addiction was back.
This is a story about Lake Merced, though. Let me paint a little portrait for you. The water is gross, covered that. You're in the middle of a city, but it only sort of feels like that. There are great blue herons and snakes and other fun animals. It's a nice place to spend a day if you are not a fisherman. If you are a fisherman, it is frustrating and sad. It makes you really, really want to vandalize a few golf courses. It makes you wish you could have fished the lake in its prime. I keep veering towards the eco-political, though, and this is a love story. Did I forget to mention that this is a love story? Sorry about that. This is a love story.
I met my wife at a bookstore. She worked there. I went there on my lunch breaks. Very neat and tidy and a little bit too cliched for a writer, but what can you do?
My wife is a wonderful woman. Her childhood was, however, MUCH different than mine. She has held a fishing rod about as many times as I have held a golf club. She grew up 'camping' with her family in those kinds of campgrounds where they have jacuzzis and show movies at night. My ideal camp spot is so far away from civilization that I might die. Her ideal camp spot doesn't require a tent. We hadn't been dating all that long when I invited her to accompany me on a trip to Lake Merced.
I was not new to dating. I had gone out with girls who wouldn't get their shoes muddy. My wife is not like that, but she is no outdoorswoman. She goes fishing with me a lot, now, but she never wants to actually fish herself. This boggles my mind. But, it is what it is. Point being, Lake Merced was a good entry point. There are piers. There are people. It ain't all that 'rustic'. I made the wrong choice.
It was a beautiful, sunny day when I picked a spot near some cover and started throwing spinners into the neon soup. I knew I wasn't going to catch anything, but it was shaping up to be a great day. We had some snacks and water. We were falling in love. She had never seen me fish before, and it's always good when your lady friend discovers that you are skilled at something most people aren't interested in. (I wasn't catching anything, but you can tell if someone knows how to fish whether they get skunked or not).
It was a quiet day. The sun was soft and the breeze was cool. It was one of those days where you are completely in the moment, but it also seems like that moment could stretch out to eternity. You stare at the blue sky and, momentarily, you can convince yourself that, if you don't blink, you can freeze the moment. You'll never have to go back to work. Your truck won't ever break down again. It won't matter that you are poor because you will live in that one crystallized moment...your world a drop of condensation refracting life until it is a simple equation. Sun, life, love.
There were not many people fishing. There are never many people fishing at Lake Merced. We were alone save one gentleman sitting on a folding chair, holding a rod. He did not make one cast the entire time we were there. Something was sitting on the bottom being ignored by whatever mutant fish still survive in the poisoned water. He was quiet and unobtrusive. I was content to chuck my lure towards the reeds and structure and ignore the man sitting twenty feet away. My wife, who is a photographer, was content to shoot the heron that was stalking the bank beside us. Hours passed in minutes. Little was said. There was little that needed to be said. And then it happened.
I had spent some of the time that I was not catching fish thinking about how well my then-girlfriend had adapted to our 'outdoorsy' outing. There were no bugs, the weather was perfect, the birds were pretty. I glanced to the right and noticed that my fellow angler was reeling in slowly. Even better...soon, we would be by ourselves. I paused and watched him reel in his bait. I was curious. I was also not surprised when he lifted a slime-covered wad of Powerbait out of the water.
I hate Powerbait. It smells weird. It feels weird. It strikes me as unsportsmanlike. It just seems all kinds of wrong. I have used the crappie balls when fishing with my daughter, but now she'll touch a worm, so I am free to hate Powerbait without feeling like a hypocrite. I have very unfair, unwarranted, and unfounded dislike for those who use Powerbait. I'm not proud of that. But so be it. It was with some disdain that I watched this man look at his Silly-Putty sized wad of the stuff. He didn't want to touch it (I couldn't blame him), so he went with the old 'whip your rod maniacally back and forth until the bait flies off' method of bait removal. I had never seen anyone whip a rod back and forth that fast. I was mesmerized, and I was about to say something to my lady, when the wad of Powerbait finally flung itself loose.
What happened next will play like a movie in my head until I die or lose my mental faculties. My wife is a very pretty lady. She is half Italian and half Irish. She has incredibly thick, beautiful, brown hair. She is petite and wonderful and kind. Anyway, I was about to turn and speak to my lovely wife (then girlfriend) when I heard a loud 'WHAP', followed immediately by the slightly elevated, dulcet tones of my sweetheart.
"OW!!! I've been hit, I've been hit!!!"
And then I saw it. The Powerbait. I somehow closed the space between us in about .5 seconds and grabbed her wrist as she reached for the wad of bait which, I could now see, was stuck to the side of her pretty head, wrapped in her curly tresses. I know Powerbait. I know the stench. I know how sticky the damn stuff is. I knew that, after hours on the bottom of the grossest natural lake I've ever seen, there was no way that it was coming out of her hair. And in that 'mind-race' adrenalized moment, I knew that there was only one solution. I looked into my love's eyes and said the following:
"Don't move. You have to trust that what I am about to do is the right thing to do. Please."
Her wide eyes locked onto mine as I reached back for the insanely sharp knife I keep clipped to my back pocket. I flicked it open with my thumb and, in one smooth motion, I grabbed a handful of hair and, like that, it was over. I was staring at my date staring at a sizeable clump of her hair, green slime holding the strands together.
We're married now. That's amazing in and of itself. It probably helped that my wife's hair is so curly and thick that you couldn't really tell that I'd sliced a hamster's worth of it off her head. Once I explained the situation, she even agreed it had been the right thing to do. Down the bank, the man calmly packed up his stuff while watching the aftermath...no apology, no look of shame, no nothing.
That was the last time I fished at Lake Merced. It was the moment I officially started to hate Powerbait and the people who use it with an insane passion. I don't know how I managed to pull off the surgery so successfully. But I did.
All in all, it was a good day. And I'm glad the Powerbait thing happened. If it hadn't, that day would be lost amongst other memories. I didn't catch any fish, but I caught something more important: a great fishing story and a lady who trusts me enough to let me flip out a 3.5" blade by her face and still sleep next to me.
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