Fishers
By Marvin Payne

Why do you call guys who go fishing “fishermen”? You don’t call guys who go hunting “huntermen.” The Savior called them “fishers.” He should know. I think maybe calling them “fishermen” is the first step on the road to apostasy.

When I was a Boy Scout, we had a scoutmaster who was a fisherman. Or a fisher. He was a guy who tried to catch fishes. So every scout trip was a fishing trip. We hiked high into the Sierra Mountains above where trees grow and that’s where I caught my first fish. Moose Lake. All the rest of the time that I was a kid I caught about eight more. Fish, not mooses.

When I was first married, I went to California to make a record of some music. One morning while I was there, I drove up into a canyon that I knew when I was a kid. There was a river in the canyon, and I suddenly wanted really bad to go fishing. So I pulled into a little mountain store and bought a pole and a reel and the kind of lure I used back when I was a Boy Scout, called a “Super-Dooper,” which is this little folded metal thing with hooks hanging off of it, and went fishing. And didn’t catch anything. 

At the very end of that summer, back in Utah, I figured I ought to go fishing at least one more time with my new stuff. So my wife and I drove up Provo Canyon to Deer Creek Reservoir — where, in a couple of hours, I didn’t catch anything. 

Driving back down, I saw a place in the Provo River that looked to me like the kind of place I’d like to be if I were a fish. So we stopped and I climbed down and didn’t catch anything. I was getting pretty mad and I thought, “Okay, just one more cast and then we’re going home.” Well, I caught one! So I thought I’d try again. Just then a guy in a uniform with a badge appeared and said, “Did you know you’re not allowed to fish here?” I said I didn’t know and he said, “Well, that’s an honest mistake, better pack up.” He walked away about twenty steps and then turned around. “Hey, do you have a fishing license?” I said no and he said, “Well, that’s a dishonest mistake.” And he wrote me out a ticket.

So the next two things I did in my life were buy a fishing license, and pay the fine. Well, the fine was about thirty dollars. The fishing license was about twenty dollars. The pole and reel and Super-Dooper had cost about twenty-five dollars. And the one time I went fishing after that, I didn’t catch anything!  So that one fish I hauled out of the Provo River cost me seventy-five dollars! And while I was talking to the guy with the uniform and badge, my wife felt sorry for the fish and let it go.

Fast forward thirty-five years. Now I’m a multiple grampa, even though I have three little kids at home, who are named Aunt Cait, Uncle John, and Aunt Baby Adwen. Being an MG (Multiple Grampa), I found myself feeling that maybe I was working too hard. You know, making up stories, practicing the guitar on my front porch, singing and dancing and pretending to be kings and lovers and prophets for money. I figured I needed a hobby. Well, fishing! So I went to our new Cabela’s, the Disneyland of fishing stuff and the only man-made feature in Utah besides the Kennecott copper mine that can be seen from outer space, and got a pole, a reel, and a Super-Dooper. I got a license right along with the stuff, and now I go fishing about three times a year from the shady north shore of Tibble Fork. Most times I go, I don’t catch anything. But altogether I’ve caught about five fish. I snip off all the barbs from my hooks so I can get the fish off easy, and I always just say “Hi, no offense,” and let them go. I figure I’m doing them a favor by showing them what scary things can happen if they try to eat things that look like they’re made out of metal and have hooks hanging off of them.

Baby halibuts swim around like regular fish, sort of fish color on both sides and one eye looking out starboard and the other looking out port. But they glide along the bottom of the ocean and scoop up whatever looks yummy down there, even if it looks like it’s made out of metal and has hooks hanging off of it. (Except they like anchovies better, which is what we used for bait. Which is what anchovies should be used for. Bait is the fulfilled measure of an anchovie’s creation.) So that halibuts can get their mouths closer to the bottom, where their favorite food is, they start swimming on their sides. Since one side is down all the time, away from the sun, it turns white, just like you would. And since there’s nothing to see right exactly underneath the halibut, where it’s dark because of the halibut’s shadow, that under eye travels around the edge of the halibut’s face and settles next to the other one, so that both eyes can gaze up into the gauzy light. So the white side has no eye, and the fish-colored side has two. Halibuts look really weird. That’s the other fish story I could tell that’s true.

So I had to make up new fish stories for my kids. Usually they ask for them on the way to Kohler’s, our friendly store out by the traffic light, so I don’t have to make up very much. It’s when we’re on the way to Arizona that I’m in trouble. Since I can’t make up plot very quickly, a lot of the appeal of the stories is in the names of the fish heroes and fish heroines, which alternate with exactness, seeing as how my audience is precisely half male and half female. The names are like “Sheeowwm ba-dat-dat-dat Boinngg.” When your hero is named “Sheeowwm ba-dat-dat-dat Boinngg,” you hardly need a plot. I mean, if it goes like,

And hey, here we are at Kohler’s!

But then my kids wanted these fish stories at bedtime. I couldn’t count on Kohler’s to save me, so now there really had to be stories in the stories. Something really had to happen to the fish. Since I haven’t the vaguest understanding of the life of a fish (the only time I see them is when they’re staring me in the face sort of saying “Hey, get this hook outa my lip!” — and that’s only about twice every summer), I have to borrow stories from other animals. One night I got pretty far into The Three Little Fishes, where the first little fish (I’ll skip his name, for now) built himself a little house out of bubbles, the second built himself a house out of seaweed, and the third cemented himself a house out of coral, barnacle belly, and Spanish doubloons, before the kids caught on and stopped me. “Da-a-ad, that’s supposed to be pigs! Duh!”

Sometimes the bedtime story I’m stealing isn’t as easy to figure out as that one is. You can just about get a kid unconscious with something like, “Then Whinngg-doop-doop-doop silently swam out onto her balcony and called out, in a soft bubbly voice, ‘Sheeowwm ba-dat-dat-dat Boinngg, Sheeowwm ba-dat-dat-dat Boinngg! Wherefore art thou Sheeowwm ba-dat-dat-dat Boinngg?’” In this story, Sheeowwn ba-dat-dat-dat Boingg does finally get a friend, which is good news! The bad news is that both of them die, in each other’s arms — fins. Of course, that still might be better than trying to eat things that look like they’re made out of metal and have hooks hanging off of them. (Shakespeare, y’know, borrowed all his plots, too.)

Okay, let’s see if you guys are sharper than my kids. I’ll tell some fish stories, and as soon as you can recognize the story I’m stealing, holler out what you think it is. 

Okay.

Once there was a little fish named Finderella. She had an evil crab for a stepmother, and two crabby...

At least you could have let me get to the part where she lost her glass flipper. One more:

Of course, what Leviathan Blubbertooth didn’t know was that Jonah was scurrying off to become a “fisher of men.” I think he’d had enough of fish to keep him out of Cabela’s for a long, long time.