Her smile stretched as large as the sockeye salmon she
caught – big, broad, and beautiful. As I scooped my daughter’s fish out of the
water for her to see, I thought the tightening net would snap because of the fish’s
weight. After years of fishing for trout in the rivers and lakes around
Montana, fishing for salmon in Alaska was, literally and figuratively, an entirely
different animal.
Our friend Aaron gave us all the same instructions before we
started plying the waters. Turns out you don’t trick salmon into biting a hook
or a fly. You don’t delicately present your fly in a natural way, hoping not to
spook the fish. You don’t select the right pattern or color to dupe them.
Instead, you chuck this mass of metal upstream, where it
splashes in like a cannonball. The weights and hook bounce and drag on the
bottom, until the river pushes it just pass you. Then you heave the hook
horizontally out of the water with a sidearm motion . . . and hope the hook
happens to snag an unsuspecting fish in the mouth.
As rough and tumble as it sounds, there is a technique to
it, which Aaron explained and demonstrated to all of us many times over the
course of two days. When my wife and I were lucky enough to snag a fish, however,
his instruction evaporated from our minds, and we reverted back to what we knew
– trying to land a trout. The result: lots of Aaron’s tackle lost, and no fish.
But my daughter’s brain, and the brain of most kids, is like
a chalkboard. Her little mental eraser wiped away the instructions about catching
trout once Aaron started explaining how to catch salmon, and new instructions
appeared. She approached salmon fishing like the child she is - innocent and
unencumbered by any preconceived notions or I-know-what-I’m-doing pride, unlike
us adults.
