Summer’s coming on. By the end of it you’ll be 90. Your time draws short. You look in the mirror. No two ways about it, you’ve grown ugly. Your ears are huge and pink. Your jaw hangs there like a plumber’s wrench. Your cheeks are furrowed. Your eyes take all of this in. Your eyes are failing. They may crap out before the rest of you does. See what you can, old man. See what you can while you still can see.
Imagine yourself as a salmon, whose ruby flesh we humans find so delicious. You were hatched somewhere in the gravel of a highland stream. Your parents are dead. You feed on maggots bred in their bodies. You grow. You feed on creatures larger than insects. You grow. At some point, it could be years, you start swimming downstream. You remember the place you left. You remember it’s smell. Somewhere in your mind, your instincts, you know it as home.
Your body is changing. You were born a freshwater creature. Your breathing apparatus and your eyes and your organs were made for that environment. Now it all has to change. You’re leaving home. You’re going to sea. You swim from small stream to bigger stream to tributary to a river. At each intersection you note something. Your notes are more indelible than the ones we humans make.
You enter the ocean. It’s vast. It’s cold. All there is here is water. Is it a shock, the salt in your gills, the endless space? Does this too feel like home?
You adapt. Your vocation now is hunt and to eat. You become a powerful swimmer. You cruise the sea, thousands of miles, Oregon to Alaska and maybe as far as Japan, wherever there’s good eating. You put on fat to insulate yourself from the cold. You become extremely fit. You will need it. You fill your belly and avoid the fishermen and seals and orcas. You survive. Ahead of you is a mission. At this point you know nothing about it. Kill and eat. Avoid being killed and eaten. For now, that’s it.
For several years now you’ve been at sea. One day you receive a call, from whom or what you don't know. You turn and head eastward. You come to the coast. When you breach the surface you see rocks and cliffs and wetlands. You know where you are. You enter the mouth of the river. You smell in the water that tiny whiff of home. It’s like a line that draws you up, against the flow of its current.
You're going home to mate. Suppose that somewhere out in the vast Pacific you met the one you’ll mate with and you knew each other as homebodies. You swam in together and here you are now heading upstream side by side. Romantic but unlikely. You might make the journey with many other fish, but they’ll all likely be male. Your mate will come later.
You come to something amazing, a wall of water across the whole of the river. It blocks your way. You try to leap it but it’s way too tall. You try to swim it. Again it grabs you and slams you back down. The smell of home is stronger. You’re desperate. You look for a way around this obstacle, and what do you know? Against one bank is a set of little waterfalls a fish can easily leap, behind each wall a little pond to launch him over the next wall. God is good. One leap after another after another, and you’re in a calm lake with that smell of home a little stronger yet. You swim on. The shores of the lake narrow. Again the river, The scent grows stronger. The river branches. Home is up the narrower branch then up a stream then a branch of the stream. You swim on.
You have been, this whole trip inland, in fresh water. You’re changed. You’ve stopped chasing prey. You’ve stopped eating. Your stomach in fact has disintegrated to make room for something stranger. You live on the fat you put on out in the ocean. You grow lean and ugly. Your jaws narrow and curve like a pair of pliers. Your back grows a hump. Your flesh grows mushy and foul of taste. This protects you from all but the hungriest bears. You need to survive. You have stuff to do.
There’s supposed to be a a picture here of a healthy saltwater salmon, sleek and beautiful. Maybe beneath it should be a picture of a male at the end of his journey, a big hump, plier jaws bent inward and protruding like the nose and chin of a geezer. Maybe you’ll see these pictures and maybe you won’t. Substack publishing sometimes involves suspense. If no pictures, take my word for it, this geezer fish is ugly.
Now the females start arriving, and everything changes. Your newfound ugliness doesn’t matter a damned bit. The ladies aren’t that beautiful either. Doesn’t matter. This is not a visual experience. What is to come is a courtship of smell, you and she and your home. You swim to each other’s sides. Together you sniff out the turf. Together you find wonders. Other males try to horn in. The muscles of your jaws still have strength. You display the pliers. The others leave. Now you and she do your dance. You are part of the stream. She fans the creakbed with her tail. The hollow she makes in the gravels is just as it should be. The cavity where once her stomach was is stuffed with eggs. In you it’s stuffed with sperm. You’ve become a swimming testicle. Into the hollow she strews a batch of the eggs. You follow at her tail and you cover her eggs with your sperm. You stretch this part of it out. She still has a lot of eggs in her. You still have a whole lot of semen. You keep on for days. These days make your whole life worthwhile.
Then you die, side by side. You have done what you were sent here to do. Insects use your bodies for breeding grounds and cafeterias. Their maggots will feed your young.
Keep in mind that these are fish. Can you imagine a human able to be that perfect? Can you imagine being so in tune with your environment? Can you imagine being so in tune with the nature of your species? So much that we’ve lost, so much that we’ve complicated and fucked up, so much to mourn. Why would a geezer want to tell such a tale?
No easy answers. Ask yourself anyhow. You could call it an allegory, the changes, both in body and in focus; the patterns, birth and growth, entering the sea of adulthood, killing and eating, begetting, dying; returning to whence you came.
Spring is here. By now you’re hopefully immune. Get your old ass outside. Enjoy.
The Homestretch
Love this John
Love this John