It rained the first time I went fishing with the woman who would become my wife. The water soaked through our clothes, and I wondered whether she would stay, but I could not leave. I’d brought a bucket of spoon-sized silver fish called shiners, acquired from a scuffed white tank at a gas station, and I couldn’t go home until I’d hooked each one through the lips; flicked ‘em into the gray, stagnant water; and found out what lurked beneath the chop. All day the sky spit at us. So did the fish. Cast after cast, they’d steal shiner after shiner. But their nibbles gave me hope, and I’d saved the fattest, liveliest one for last.
I wasn’t after cutthroats or sturgeon, since they don’t exist in my childhood home of South Florida. But thanks to released overgrown pets and forgiving tropical waters, any given cast there can yield a 150-pound redtail catfish from the Amazon; a spotted tilapia from West Africa; or a feather-bodied clown knifefish from Southeast Asia. The kings are peacock bass — a colorful, hard-fighting species native to the Amazon River basin with three bold, vertical stripes — but I’ve always found their superiority too narrow. The real joy of fishing can be found in the ambiguity. The uncertainty.
That feeling when a fish first bites, and the rod bends, and you might pull something from the water you’ve never seen before. For a few transcendent seconds, you’re riveted to a moment. No urge to check your phone. No conversation to be had, aside from the requisite, “Got one!” Just you, and whatever fish you’re fighting. Shiners dangled beneath a bobber, especially, provide real theater. The bait does all the work, wiggling into view of waiting predators. The tension grows. Anything, at any moment, could burst from the reeds and make the reel wheeze. When it does, the world melts, and you forget everything except the hope of what’s to come.
Like when something snarfed down the fattest, liveliest shiner in the bucket, on the last cast of the day. The rain and the gray sky and the soaked clothes and the bad luck vanished as I set the hook and reeled until three vertical stripes flashed in a flurry. A peacock bass — the biggest I’d ever caught, it turned out. What a thrill it was to see it, finally, and snap pictures. What a thrill it was to share it with someone who, I knew for the first time that day, would stick with me through anything.
And what a thrill it was, most of all, to have waited for it.
This story appears in the June 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.