A Childhood Memory
I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia, northwest of the city about a half hour in Bucks County; you can see it in M. Night Shyamalan’s movies: Signs, The Village. The beautiful farmland is more north of where I lived, though. There used to be farmland near my house, but it was eaten up by developers building more gas stations and supermarkets and housing developments.
We moved to Chalfont when I was four. The neighborhood was big. It was three main roads that converged back on each other to form a semblance of blocks, the occasional cul-de-sac branching off the main roads. My house sat more or less in the middle of the neighborhood where two of the blocks became one. One road went up a hill, where it curved to the left and leveled off. It came back around, going back down ever so slightly, so that without realizing it you’d be back at the bottom of the hill, like Escher’s waterfall. The other street led down to a cul-de-sac.
If you walked down that street, straight down in a sort of continuation of the road, you came past a row of tall white pines down to a tiny park with a picnic table and a couple of those grills you see at parks that are anchored into the ground and are always dirty and look like if you ate off of them, you’d get sick. A creek weaved slowly and silently past. There were large trees and, on a sunny day, their shadows made patterns on the water.
We used to walk the creek in the summer as a way to cool off. It was hardly ever very deep, so we’d wear ratty shoes and go exploring. You could start at the park in the neighborhood and walk until you reached the park in downtown Chalfont, behind the police station, but we hardly ever went that far. Usually, we’d look for a place where it was deep enough that we could swim, though we knew there was no such place.
Once, we were walking the creek and found some older kids hunting carp. I guess I could call it fishing, except they were using a bow and arrow. The creek was rarely more than two feet deep at the most, but somehow some really big fish lived in there. Some of the carp were like a foot and a half long. So these kids were stomping and splashing and moving the big rocks that the fish hid under, trying to scare them out so they could shoot them with an arrow. The arrows were easy to find when they missed because of the shallow water.
I remember they actually shot one or two, and these big fish were floating there in the water, their pale yellow scales tinged with the red blood oozing slowly from the small wounds where the arrows hit them. The kids never said what they were planning to do with the fish. Can you eat carp? I don’t think I’d ever eat anything out of that creek. Not that it was a dirty creek; I just don’t trust anything I’ve urinated in more than a few times. Would I drink toilet water?
Another time, I speared a koi in the creek right by the park. I had found some sort of gardening tool in the creek; it was short, maybe two, three feet long with a metal tipped that forked slightly like a snake’s tongue. We were fishing, and we saw this fish, this beautiful orange thing like a giant goldfish swimming around and we tried to catch it but it wouldn’t bite. Then I saw this piece of wood peeking a bit out of the muck in the bottom of the creek and I pulled on it and this gardening snake’s tongue popped out. So we started trying to spear the fish, splashing around and chasing after it as it darted under rocks and ducked into the branches of the willow that skirted the creek.
There we were, jumping around and yelling and chasing this fish, just missing each time as the water altered the trajectory of our gardening spear ever so slightly. Finally, after getting so close a bunch of times, I hit it. Or, I thought I did. The spear didn’t go through the fish like I thought it would. But its movements slowed, and it stopped hiding and kind of fluttered around for a minute and I picked it up and it was slimy in my hands and I carried it over to the picnic table and laid it there on the table. It was dead now, with its gardening spear wound and no oxygen; really, the wrong kind of oxygen, being breathed through the wrong respiratory system. I had a pocket knife, a tiny little knife on a key chain that also held my little Phillies baseball player key chain. And I figured, why not, so I started to cut the fish with my knife. It felt weird when it broke through the scales, like cutting through the hard crust on a loaf of bread, only the insides of the bread were fleshy. I cut a square, like a window to the inside of the fish.
What were we looking for? Did we expect to find fish like my mom puts on the dinner table, filleted and gutted and cleaned, cooked nicely all the way through? Maybe we were hoping to find something more, some sort of evidence of a fishy soul that would rise up in front of us, and wings and a halo would appear seemingly from nowhere, but we would know that they came from heaven and the fish soul would float away playing a soft, sweet, fish melody on his gold fish harp.
The fish had no soul. All it had were organs, and worms in its stomach but really the worms were intestines. The dark, bile color of the intestines contrasted sharply against the bright orange of the scales and made me feel sick and sad at the same time but I didn’t know why. I looked at my knife and there was blood on it and I wiped it off on the table, trading the blood for bits of the rotting lumber that flaked off and stuck to the blade. I wiped it once more on my shorts, folded it up and put it in my pocket. Then we gathered up our fishing rods, our shoes, and walked home.
We moved to Chalfont when I was four. The neighborhood was big. It was three main roads that converged back on each other to form a semblance of blocks, the occasional cul-de-sac branching off the main roads. My house sat more or less in the middle of the neighborhood where two of the blocks became one. One road went up a hill, where it curved to the left and leveled off. It came back around, going back down ever so slightly, so that without realizing it you’d be back at the bottom of the hill, like Escher’s waterfall. The other street led down to a cul-de-sac.
If you walked down that street, straight down in a sort of continuation of the road, you came past a row of tall white pines down to a tiny park with a picnic table and a couple of those grills you see at parks that are anchored into the ground and are always dirty and look like if you ate off of them, you’d get sick. A creek weaved slowly and silently past. There were large trees and, on a sunny day, their shadows made patterns on the water.
We used to walk the creek in the summer as a way to cool off. It was hardly ever very deep, so we’d wear ratty shoes and go exploring. You could start at the park in the neighborhood and walk until you reached the park in downtown Chalfont, behind the police station, but we hardly ever went that far. Usually, we’d look for a place where it was deep enough that we could swim, though we knew there was no such place.
Once, we were walking the creek and found some older kids hunting carp. I guess I could call it fishing, except they were using a bow and arrow. The creek was rarely more than two feet deep at the most, but somehow some really big fish lived in there. Some of the carp were like a foot and a half long. So these kids were stomping and splashing and moving the big rocks that the fish hid under, trying to scare them out so they could shoot them with an arrow. The arrows were easy to find when they missed because of the shallow water.
I remember they actually shot one or two, and these big fish were floating there in the water, their pale yellow scales tinged with the red blood oozing slowly from the small wounds where the arrows hit them. The kids never said what they were planning to do with the fish. Can you eat carp? I don’t think I’d ever eat anything out of that creek. Not that it was a dirty creek; I just don’t trust anything I’ve urinated in more than a few times. Would I drink toilet water?
Another time, I speared a koi in the creek right by the park. I had found some sort of gardening tool in the creek; it was short, maybe two, three feet long with a metal tipped that forked slightly like a snake’s tongue. We were fishing, and we saw this fish, this beautiful orange thing like a giant goldfish swimming around and we tried to catch it but it wouldn’t bite. Then I saw this piece of wood peeking a bit out of the muck in the bottom of the creek and I pulled on it and this gardening snake’s tongue popped out. So we started trying to spear the fish, splashing around and chasing after it as it darted under rocks and ducked into the branches of the willow that skirted the creek.
There we were, jumping around and yelling and chasing this fish, just missing each time as the water altered the trajectory of our gardening spear ever so slightly. Finally, after getting so close a bunch of times, I hit it. Or, I thought I did. The spear didn’t go through the fish like I thought it would. But its movements slowed, and it stopped hiding and kind of fluttered around for a minute and I picked it up and it was slimy in my hands and I carried it over to the picnic table and laid it there on the table. It was dead now, with its gardening spear wound and no oxygen; really, the wrong kind of oxygen, being breathed through the wrong respiratory system. I had a pocket knife, a tiny little knife on a key chain that also held my little Phillies baseball player key chain. And I figured, why not, so I started to cut the fish with my knife. It felt weird when it broke through the scales, like cutting through the hard crust on a loaf of bread, only the insides of the bread were fleshy. I cut a square, like a window to the inside of the fish.
What were we looking for? Did we expect to find fish like my mom puts on the dinner table, filleted and gutted and cleaned, cooked nicely all the way through? Maybe we were hoping to find something more, some sort of evidence of a fishy soul that would rise up in front of us, and wings and a halo would appear seemingly from nowhere, but we would know that they came from heaven and the fish soul would float away playing a soft, sweet, fish melody on his gold fish harp.
The fish had no soul. All it had were organs, and worms in its stomach but really the worms were intestines. The dark, bile color of the intestines contrasted sharply against the bright orange of the scales and made me feel sick and sad at the same time but I didn’t know why. I looked at my knife and there was blood on it and I wiped it off on the table, trading the blood for bits of the rotting lumber that flaked off and stuck to the blade. I wiped it once more on my shorts, folded it up and put it in my pocket. Then we gathered up our fishing rods, our shoes, and walked home.
posted by Jonathan McGee at 9:55 PM
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