Three ways to fish

 

During Tet we had two weeks and more off. As we approached the holiday the class sizes dwindled, and after the two weeks were over, there was really no hard start to the classes again.

For Tet, I would travel from Saigon to the Mekong Delta to be with my adopted Vietnamese family. The distance was six hours by motorbike or seven by bus. There was still no train service to the Delta because no solution had been found for supporting the tracks and trains in the low country, and no money either for spanning all the rivers and canals and backwaters. The Vietnamese name for the Mekong was ‘Cuu Long,’ which meant the River of Nine Dragons, referring to the nine branches of the great river at the Delta where it emptied into the South China Sea.

From Saigon proper you drive out of the sprawling municipality of Ho Chi Minh City and through one province, Long An where I had a girlfriend once, and another province, Tien Giang, and Kien Giang and Dong Thap, into the village of Sa Dec, and we went deeper into the Delta to the hamlet of Cao Men. It had been a commune after the communists won the war, but that structure was gone thankfully.

In our hamlet for Vietnamese Lunar New Year, it was all hands-on deck, mostly, except for the elder men who drank provincial beer on ice or Russian vodka or rice wine. Even the retarded girl who was pregnant with the baby of an unknown local boy helped, and looking back, of course, it was she who helped the most.

My only task was to take it all in, sleep, lay in the hammock, practice reading in Vietnamese, and listen to what was probably the only rock ‘n’ roll cassette tape in the Delta, the Beatles’ “1967 – 1970.” The local kids loved “Hello Goodbye” and “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be” and that was how they learned whatever English they knew.

For the three days of proper celebration, fish was very important, and I was lucky to get an education myself without actually participating in the three local methods of fishing.

Sometimes we’d come upon women in conical hats squatting on a concrete footbridge over the canals built by the Americans during the war and still solid. These women fished with cane poles, but not the long 11-footers I had used as a kid, but stiff, short rods made of true cane and tipped with sewing thread. The bait was a rice kernel, and the fish they caught were minnows, very small minnows like crappie minnows that they lifted quick-like and kept in a bucket in the sun. The tiny fish were used for fish sauce or for frying crispy or for boiling whole.

On the hard clay paths along the canals we could follow the young men in the skiff who fished by electricity. In the skiff was a 12-volt battery and one young man would pushpole the skiff from the stern like a duck hunter and the other young man held two metal rods out at a distance from one another and there was netting between the rods, and he would lower the rods which were wired to the battery in the water and there’d be a zap! and the fish would rise to the surface on their sides and he scooped them up with the net and tossed them over his shoulder into the bottom of the boat. It wasn’t as effective as one might think, and the fish were always small, never more than a few inches.

The most interesting was when I was in the skiff myself and Uncles Numbers 10 and 12 were in the deep water of the canals alongside me with their hands on the gunwale. Then one or the other would disappear under the water searching in the muck and mud with his hands and come up sometimes with a small fish in his hand. That was going up the canal, them fishing blindly by hand underwater, but as we inched along, they were carefully making very deep footprints in the bottom clay and muck so that when we came back down the canal that was where the fish would often be found, hiding in their deep footprints on the bottom, so it was a little less blindly fishing but more technical in a way. The little fish, which reminded me of tropical fish in an aquarium, would seek the lowest, murkiest spot in the canal, being the bottom of a deep footprint, and the Vietnamese fisherman who were providing for us caught them down there by feel and by hand.

So that made me think. Man, that is impressive. So much of it made an impression on me.

It was not easy to explain that I was a fisherman, too, far away. And harder still to explain fly-fishing the icy-cold clear creeks for the orange and green and white native North American brook trout.