The first time I went fishing was in high school. We skipped class and went to the Hillsborough River, got high, and practiced casting lures into the water. I looked over at my best friend, bare tan legs swinging off the dock, just above the tea-leaf water, and I wanted to touch her. Our boyfriends tittered behind us. And we never caught a thing.

The second time I went fishing was with my college girlfriend, a woman named Jennifer who was slim-waisted and lightly freckled and who I took to calling Penny because she was bright and shiny, but also solid and uncomplicated in a way that I liked then. She sought out bass on different parts of that same river in Tampa. We would steal out from our bed early in the morning for what looked like T’ai Chi by the banks. Cast. Reel, Reel, Reel. Cast. Wait.

Later she took me on a boat with her father on a lake in north Texas. I caught bass then, too, but preferred drinking cold Coors Light, watching the darkened shadows of the fish on the boat’s sonar system, the sundance of my bobber on the surface of the lake, and, most of all, the ease with which Penny, my bass fisherwoman, would cast and reel, and then after a long stretch of silence, catch.

“Babe,” she’d turn to look at me then, her eyes wide and blue like a North Texas sky. “Wanna learn to how to take out a hook?”

The last time I went fishing was after I left her. And that time everything was different. It was a night and we weren’t on a river or a lake but in the dark waters of a bay off an island called Boca Grande in Southwest Florida, where a fish called the tarpon is legendary and almost everyone has a tale of catching a big one.

 

 

Boca Grande literally means Big Mouth. The mouth in this case is a metaphorical yawn where the waters of the Gulf of Mexico meet the Charlotte Harbor at the island’s southern tip, a spot where shrimp and sharks and tarpon like to congregate and feed. Today some tarpon fishermen refer to that stretch of water as the cafeteria bowl of the Gulf because there are so many tarpon eating and spawning there.

The Calusa Indians discovered Boca Grande sometime in the first century and included it in their fishing empire along Florida’s west coast. Then the Spaniards arrived and the Calusa slowly died off or were killed. A railroad came to Boca Grande and by the early 1900s the island was an important port for the distribution of phosphate as well as a second home for rich people who made money off the phosphate and who liked to fish tarpon for sport in their free time. A regal yellow hotel was built. Then a second one. The town square grew to include a gourmet grocery store, restaurants with white table clothes, and a Lilly Pulitzer boutique shop. The DuPonts bought summerhouses and opened a small school for the locals. Katherine Hepburn went for her morning swim on the island’s bayside. And at some point, someone told the Bushes, and next thing you know Jenna and Barbara Bush are partying at the local bar alongside a life-size sculpture of a tarpon made from beer bottle caps by my new lover’s step-mother, one of the many local drunk artists who share the island with DuPonts and Bushes and former Yale Whiffenpoofs singers.

I showed up on the island in 2002 looking for work at the Boca Beacon. This was six months after graduating from college, and a month after everything fell apart with my bass fisherwoman. I brought with me a three-page résumé: espresso making, bowling-alley-burger flipping, paper filing, waitressing, drink-order taking, book-order processing, publicity seeking. The Boca Beacon reporter before me had quit suddenly after a fight with the editor and a friend of a friend happened to be the daughter of the newspaper’s publisher. She recommended I apply.

“I want to be a writer,” I told the editor Gary. He had fat fingers and smooth tanned skin that reminded me of a river stone. He nodded, skimmed my credentials, and said he thought I had the potential. He offered me $12 an hour, no insurance, and I accepted without hesitation. I had just moved out of the apartment I shared with Penny for two years and was living in someone’s renovated garage. More than a job, I needed change.

My professional duties commenced the next day: a weekly profile of an “influential” resident or local employee (on an island of 1,000 this meant nearly everyone), a weekly brief on any local crime (again, 1,000 residents), and regular stories about new businesses, property taxes, golf cart accidents (everyone drove a golf cart in town), iguana infestations, beach erosion, bridge toll hikes and, once, the appearance on the beach of a thirty-foot dead sperm whale. Less than a month after starting at the paper, Gary informed me of one more requirement.

“Tarpon is king here,” he said. “You’ve got to catch one.”

The story of the tarpon begins one hundred million years ago. Wade back through a dozen climate cycles, through the Negene and Paleogene Periods, the Oligoene, Oecene and Neogene Eras, and there you’ll find it’s beginning: one of the oldest fish in the sea and also one of the largest. Its birth looks like a mating between the whooping crane and the crocodile. A strange dance: half-air, half-water, scales mixing with feather mixing with flesh and fin. Because one important thing about tarpon is this: they breathe. They gulp air, just like you and me. In the tarpon, organs like lungs filter oxygen in concert with gills, sharp and bloody.

The scientists tell us another story of the tarpon. Once, they say, these fish swam in giant herds everywhere in the Gulf of Mexico. Their lives began somewhere south, either in Florida or Mexico where the waters are warm. But tarpon are swimmers if they are anything and they chase mullet and shrimp and crabs and so, with the warming of the weather each summer, they slither up the Gulf of Mexico on both sides: Mexico to Texas and maybe Louisiana; from the Florida Keys to Pensacola and then toward the great Mississippi, too. This migration has been their annual marathon for one hundred million years. And for years we have killed them when they reach our nearest fishing holes. And yet they survived.

Because they gulp air. Because they are as big as we are. Because of their eyes.

“They stare at you,” a tarpon guide told me once with a sort of conspiratorial glee. “They lock eyes.”

Indeed. They were named for those eyes. Latin: Megalops Atlanticus, meaning Big Eyes of the Atlantic. Silver King is their familiar name, the moniker evoked in fishing tournaments, where dozens of beer bellies hop into skiffs and skim the ocean in mid-afternoon, plopping down crabs or jigs, trying to snag the biggest tarpon of the bunch. They call them silver because of the color of their scales—a sweet metal-blue that glimmers in sunlight—and King because of their reign. In small circles, tarpon are an addiction. They have ended marriages. They have killed those who love them, their silver-blue bodies flying from the water and, in a leap, slamming into a 20-year-old holding a rod and reel, knocking him from this world to the next. Tiny Poseidons, they are.

But scientists prefer the Megalops reference.

“Their eyes are infrared,” one tells me after I have asked him what it is about tarpon that makes them so unique.

“They can see in the dark,” he explains across a phone line from an office in Miami. “This is a very ancient fish.”

He has just published a book of studies on tarpon and hopes one day to count every tarpon that swims in the Gulf of Mexico. Too many people are killing them, he complains. If only they understood their worth.

Because, while we killed tarpon for years, one day, or one year not that long ago, we began to kill too many. In Louisiana they speared them to death. In Mexico, a mayor offered a truck for the biggest one. Others elsewhere were so poor and hungry they began killing the oily, bony fish for food.

But really, I want to tell the scientist, the tarpon are killed because they have so much worth. Because there are people who value them so much they want to memorialize the fish. They kill them and hang them from the rafters of a dock for a picture. They kill them and mount their arcing, taxidermied bodies above the mantel in a lodge or hotel. They value the tarpon enough to want to make them theirs forever. And therein lies the problem. This destructive form of admiration, maybe even love, is why there are now laws in every state prohibiting the killing of tarpon. We may fish them, yes, but after we have caught them, we have to let them go.

On the day appointed for my tarpon catch, a captain arrived at the Boca Grande dock with his boat, Lil Priss. It was two hours after sunset. He had been tracking the tides, watching the movement of baitfish and he decided this was the time. Close to midnight, he guaranteed, the mullet would be running, which meant the tarpon would be biting, which meant we would get our great catch.

We climbed on board: Me in a hooded sweatshirt and cap to manacle errant blonde hairs attracted to wind, Gary and his mousy wife, Lynne; Rebecca, a tan, full-lipped advertising rep rumored to be having an affair with the publisher; and the publisher himself, a short man named Dusty who had outfitted his island golf cart to look like a Harley Davidson. Rebecca and I each sat down in designated tarpon fishing seats near the stern above a rumbling in-board motor. Rebecca crossed her long legs. Beside us Dusty sat on an ice chest, camera in hand. The newspaper had no staff photographer, so he filled that role as well.

“We need to capture your initiation,” Dusty explained.

“Tarpon virgin,” someone else poked.

“This is unlike any fishing you’ve done before,” our captain, a man named Steve Futch, emphasized as he directed his boat toward the bay. Behind us a lazy halo encircled Boca Grande. The inky waves reflected moonlight the color of polished teaspoons. Rebecca’s mouth flashed white at our captain and I tried to smile, too, but I felt too nervous.

“Little ol ladies the size of my pinky have reeled in tarpon twice their size,” Capt. Futch reassured me at some point. “You’ll be more than fine out here.”

My tailbone ached from the plastic seat and my body felt frail. A few weeks earlier my dad had driven down to help me move to Boca Grande and when he made a detour to a Wendy’s drive-thru, our shared favorite, I shook my head.

“My stomach can’t handle that,” I had told him. I hadn’t been able to eat a normal meal in over a month. My dad shook his head, never one to worry, but worrying somehow.

“You’re looking too thin,” he’d said. After things fell apart with my bass fisherwoman, I had lost ten pounds, cigarettes and beer replacing food, and I felt both lighter and unmoored, which seemed appropriate that night on the Lil Priss out in the middle of the Boca Grande Bay.

The first time we cast, I watched my line disappear into the night. The bobber jiggled, already so different from ones I’d seen on the lake, or on the river, where movement like that would mean a fish was already was nibbling at my bait. Out there on the open water it signified nothing more than an ocean swaying against the night. I sipped from an Amstel Light, refocused my eyes on the orange sphere in the sea and imagined a telephone line running from my rod, through the waterline, and down to the tarpon below.

The first pull, when it finally came, was so hard it jerked me present. My line morphed from slack to a natural force, like that fear that comes before a steep fall in a dream, knocking you awake just as your body loses weight.

All I could do was brace myself and yell. Capt. Futch gunned the engine. Then just as quickly as it appeared, that tug of life vanished. My line went slack, my tarpon lost.

“Shit,” Capt. Futch sighed.

Dusty put down the camera. The water was so dark I couldn’t see the waves.

 

 

I met my bass fisherwoman when I was 18. We happened to be at the same coffee shop one afternoon and started to talk about books. I said I loved My Side of the Mountain as a kid and she told me she had, too. We’d both read lots of Sylvia Plath, listened to lots of Tori Amos and refused to eat meat. She had broad shoulders and big blue eyes that locked on mine whenever I spoke. I felt dizzy and she felt right.

My senior prom was a week later and I invited her to the after-party at a Motel 6. That night we kissed for the first time in a shared double bed with the lights out, my friends sleeping in the bed beside us or on the floor. The first time we made love it was in my bedroom in my parents’ suburban house. We kept quieting each other so that no one would hear us. Afterwards we watched the moon rise over the swamp through the back window of my bedroom and talked about our ideal house.

“Mine would have a spiral staircase in the kitchen,” I said. “And there would be at least one window seat where I could sit and read.”

“I’d like a big front porch,” she told me. “And a view of woods with a river running down below.”

I’d like to be with you in that house, I thought. Later she told me she was thinking the same thing.

I told my parents she was a new friend. But they knew better. When I finally came out, my mom’s only response was, “You love her, don’t you?” To this day my sister still asks about her. “She was so funny,” she says. “She was like family to us.”

She was a Texan and a college dropout who had joined the Air Force just to “get out of there,” as she told me later. She smoked Virginia Slim Lights, almost always wore a baseball cap, and made wishes when the clock read 11:11. She taught me how to play pool and I got her into Scrabble. Soon after we started dating, I went to college and she was sent on three-month tours to Turkey, then Saudi Arabia, then Italy. We wrote long letters to each other filled with the kinds of things you say when you’re that young and in love for the first time.

“I’m at a stoplight. It’s raining. The rain reminds me of you,” I wrote.

“Sometimes I whisper your name, Sarah, in the wind,” she wrote back.

And then later: “I want you to see what I see and love it, too. But you can’t, and that’s not your fault. This silent roar inside me.”

Each time we came back to each other after a period apart, the intensity I felt for her renewed itself. I stopped making new friends and spoke less and less with the ones I’d had for years. She told me I was her best friend and didn’t need anyone else. We swore we were happiest when we were together. We swore it.

Once we climbed on top of a strip mall and made love against the parapet. I leaned into the sheet metal and concrete and she leaned into me, half-standing, half falling. I looked up and watched night sky until I felt her fill me. We cried that night, afterwards. Or maybe it was another night. Because for a long while, it felt like we were swimming together.

Until one day, when I realized I could no longer breathe.

After my first loss, Capt. Futch showed me the crabs and demonstrated how to re-bait my hook.

“Try again,” he sighed. “This time, don’t pull so hard.”

I held the reel in my hands and put the crab bait on my hook and cast it again into nothingness. I was sure I would lose the fish again, until I was so sure I would lose it that it seemed impossible I wouldn’t.

After twenty minutes, maybe, I felt it. It was so unmistakable, that pull, that there was no time to pause. I yelled “Fish On” as I was told to do, and Capt. Futch again gunned Lil’ Priss and, finally, my tarpon latched.

The fight that followed—because they still call fishing for tarpon a fight—really was like T’ai Chi. I reeled in the line, folding it upon itself like a kite that’s run with the wind, and then pulled up on the rod, drawing my fish closer. I repeated. And repeated. And repeated. The night didn’t get any lighter, and the voices around me crept in. Rebecca yelled from atop her long legs. Dusty took pictures. Even my fat-fingered editor began to cheer.

The pivotal moment in any tarpon fight is never the end, when you get your fish to the boat. It’s several heartbeats before that, when your tarpon jumps for the first time. All tarpon do this. It is their last attempt at a fight, perhaps, or their final salute to grace. After you’ve pulled and reeled so much your arms melt into the night sky and your mind fixates only on relief, the tarpon on the end of your line leaps from the darkness of the water into the stillness of the air, letting you know that you’ve won, that she’s yours. And sometimes when this happens, she seems to lock eyes with you. A line in the night from you to her.

And this is what happened to me that night. My fish jumped and I felt for a moment a physical release on the line and a billowing inside of me. She was beautiful and airborne.

“Are you getting this,” Gary yelled. “Are you recording what this feels like?”

He wanted me to write a first-person story of my catch for the paper.

Yes, I thought. There will be a record of this.

 

 

I caught a tremendous fish, Elizabeth Bishop writes when I peek into the dog-eared and well-worn collection of hers I bought in college. And then I let him go, is how she ends. Her fish was homely and battered, his worth in what he had escaped over many long years. And he did not fight.

My fish was young and bright and bigger than me. And her fight is why I remember her today. The other difference is this: I didn’t let my fish go. Not willingly. If I had been able to have it my way, I might have kept her. I might have hauled her in and hung her up on the dock for a picture with me like they did in the old days. I might have had her mounted and hung her above my living room fireplace in whatever state or country I would eventually settle, with whichever woman I would eventually be able to keep loving without feeling trapped.

The truth is I left my bass fisherwoman because she first left me. One night while she slept, I sat on our porch in the thick Florida air and kissed another girl who took pictures and talked about poetry, a girl who had graduated from college and who I felt understood me, or the me I was becoming then. Telling Penny the story of that kiss the next morning was the unfolding. She woke up and looked at me in such a soft way, such an ordinarily soft way, and for a moment I almost stopped myself, because I knew her eyes would change when she heard. And they did.

“I’m sorry,” I said after I was done confessing, but she turned her back to me and found a spot on our porch, casting her gaze back into the swamp behind our house without a word. I curled on the couch and watched her, registering the beginning of change.

A little tug gives way to a pull and then a yank and soon the kite at the end of your unfurling line is a fish and that pull is a fight that you either lose or you don’t. These things happen to everyone at least once. But then they happen to you, and you never forget them.