Fice and Rish

Remember this dialogue in The Old Man and the Sea?

"What do you have to eat?" the boy asked.
"A pot of yellow rice with fish. Do you want some?"
"No. I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?"
"No. I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold."

If you have read the book (and if you haven´t, do) then you know that that there isn´t really any yellow fish with rice. The old man is salado, and hasn´t caught a thing for 85 days. Yet it is comfort enough for the two impoverished fishermen to regularly perform this lovely ritual of pretending that the fish and rice exist, until it is so meaningful and suggestive as to be nearly symbolic.

Fish and rice-ism has been a part of my fishing imagination for many years, since long before I myself became an old man. I read the book, and I thought I got the meaning. During my years in Japan, the significance of F&R grew deeper for two unrelated reasons. First, the obvious reason, is that Japanese love to serve a simple meal of a whole or split salt-broiled fish and a bowl of white rice, with perhaps a few insignificant pickles on the side. From the start, this struck me as lovely and pure like Santiago´s fish, except of course it was real -- rich, oily delicious, and edifying. And then one day, to humor my girlfriend of the time, I went to a Picasso museum in Hakone that displays numbers of the artist´s handmade, hand-painted plates. And next to almost every plate, there was a photo of the hearty old fellow sitting with a smile of deep satisfaction in front of a plate with a fish skeleton on it, picked clean. Picasso got it, just like Papa.



One of the great delights of this past week in the Solentiname islands has been eating my fish whole, usually within a couple of hours of reeling them up to the kayak. The fishing was pretty good, so I ate pretty good. I threw back at least one rainbow bass that might have gone five or six pounds, and a few of three or four, but the first two and a half pound fish of the day was invariably a goner. I threw in a few pairs of crisp-fried mojarras for variety (or the cook Telma did, after I handed them over) and feasted more or less like an extremely lucky old man.


Fish and rice is healthy, and I think I am already feeling and seeing the benefits of it in my physical well-being. Aside from a bit of pickled chile and some fried bananas and steamed chayote, all I ate was large helpings of fish and small helpings of rice, which in these parts they measure out carefully in a cup and then mold it onto your plate. Breakfast was rice and beans and eggs -- perfect fuel for a dozen-mile day of paddling. I worked up to an 18 mile circumnavigation of Isla Mancarron and had a lovely little adventure out of it.


Though probaby my biggest adventure happened just yesterday, when I was forced to wade-fish while my boat dried out for packing. I waded and floated with my PFD out to a little submerged reed island and promptly caught a 2-3 pounder for dinner. I hung this poor sucker off a flagpost sticking up out of the rockpile (which is there to help boats to locate the shoal) and proceeded to keep casting, catching a few odd fish and a few times diving in after my rockbound lure. On one of these lure rescues, I noticed an odd triangular thing apparently floating nearby. What the heck is that? And then the triangle opened up, and chewed a few times, and I realied that one of the local freshwater crocs was swallowing down a fish not a hundred feet from where I was standing! Yikes. I´d seen these guys a couple times from the kayak and got slightly freaked out, but in this case I was truly concerned. If you wanted to goad an old lizard into a fight, then hanging up a dead fish and standing around up to your waist in the water would probably work well. But of course I wade-floated back to shore safely with all my feet and fingers, so that I can now type the tale here.

While paddling around Mancarron I made a strange catch: a cleverly submerged, illegal set net. the locals tell me that these are really harming the quality of the hook-and-line fishing, and I considered cutting it up with my river knife. But at the time, I had this odd feeling that someone was watching me from the trees onshore . . . so instead of destroying some old Santiago´s net, I went ahead and checked the length of it for any fish, of which there were none, live nor dead. But all this got me thinking about a great aid project for the area: a serious scientific survey of the fish populations, with a report recommending regulatory practices. People will say, probably rightly, that poor hungry islanders will not let regulations get in their way, and that the money to enforce them will never appear. But Never is a very long time, and anyway such a report would be at least as useful as the abandoned recycling plant created by one agency, or the ongoing groundwater well project by ACRA. If I can find a way to promote this idea, it could be a good use of my lovely months of unemployment, which are now a mere two weeks old and going great.



Not that paddling and fishing are bad uses of time. I haven´t cast a line today, but tomorrow I start down the San Juan with a big tarpon rig on the deck. Mmm, sabalo chorizo and rice . . . whether real or imagined, I go to find it soon!