Free Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon by Cameron Pierce Page A

produced. She’d always resented her father for saying that, considering she’d still harbored aspirations of being something at the time. The resentment had rubbed off on her thoughts about Harvey Van Norman, even though she’d never met him and it wasn’t his fault for being instrumental in the development of Los Angeles. She often wondered what she might have become if she’d lived in an age where anything was possible, like the twenties. She might have been a famous dancer, or the Amelia Earhart of the sea.
    Anisedias emerged from the forest carrying a fishing pole and a stringer of small trout. He kissed Llewellyn on the forehead and started a fire. She warmed herself beside it while he cleaned the fish and wrapped each fish in tinfoil. He set the trout on the coals and they sat there in silence until the fish were ready to eat. Then, as they ate, a deafening sound encroached, followed by a wave of something white and blue, something so immense that it ate them up and made them part of it, transforming the world into a murky, tumultuous place. They were quickly separated by the force of the thing that had consumed them. That was okay too because love was never going to carry Llewellyn far away from this town, but this thing, this incoming tide, would take her wherever she wanted to go, on and on forever, even as she sank further under.





 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    I was born a collector. From the ages of seven until about twelve, the heart of my angling fixation boiled down to one question: Can it be mounted? I wanted to hang a trophy on the wall beside my father’s ten pound bass and his pair of deep red Kern River rainbows. I collected action figures, football cards (at age ten, a list of mine was published in Beckett Football Monthly ), Goosebumps books, and nearly anything else with the remotest collectability, so naturally I was also inclined to collect the fish kingdom as well. Sometimes my old collecting habit paid off. I convinced my father to drop thirty dollars on a hand-painted, hand-carved nine inch Castaic Lure Co. trout. That model, which ceased to be produced by hand in 1996, now goes for as much as three-hundred dollars. Mine remains in mint condition. My card collection, primarily consisting of rookie cards from the sixties through the early nineties, might be valued at several thousand dollars. And yet there was nothing I wanted to collect more than a trophy fish of my own to mount on the wall. In 1996, the same year as the value of my Castaic Lure Co. trout skyrocketed, my father made a promise he would soon regret.
    We were fishing Buena Vista Lakes outside Bakersfield, California. Even though Lake Webb, the larger of the two lakes, was primarily known as a boating and jet ski lake, we tended to fish there instead because fishing pressure was lighter and the fish tended to be bigger and more plentiful. We spent innumerable days catching crappie and bluegill, brown trout and rainbow trout, largemouth bass and striped bass, blue catfish and channel catfish, with hardly anyone else fishing on Lake Webb. If we hiked around to the reed-lined far shore, we were pretty much guaranteed to have the shoreline to ourselves. We were doing just that one May evening in 1996. We walked along the bank, throwing six-inch white curly tail grubs between the reeds for largemouth bass. As daylight ran down, I pitched my grub out into the water and began retrieving it with subtle twitches. During the retrieval, a big fish boiled on top of it. The fish didn’t take, but that hardly mattered. I had its number now. I cast back out and almost as soon as the grub hit the water, the fish exploded on it. My rod buckled. The fight was on. I’d finally nailed it, a monster bass worth hanging beside my father’s bass. There was no way he could resist mounting it. The fish peeled line, making several impressive runs. We didn’t have a net, so my father stripped down to his underwear and