Canoe-Palooza Part Six

Philosophy of Fish Gutting

I have now watched my father fillet three fish at this point. Two he caught, and one of mine. The process is slow although I suspect it is because he is simply unskilled. He confirms this, but is unembarrassed by the fact. He gets the job done.

The process is both brutal and systematic. It is certainly not malicious but I still cringe at points, though morbid curiosity forbids me to look away completely. Startled by the thud of the fish’s head hitting a rock jolts me, and I can’t help but exclaim. It kills the fish in one quick pound on the ground but it still stings. The knife pierces the flesh at last and scarlet tears fall from the fish’s ivory belly, mourning its death with trickles of its own blood.

After the initial blood slides down the fat body and drips from the tail, the guts are removed. In a maneuver that seems complicated but is too fast and involved for me to see the details, the insides of the fish are suddenly not on the inside of the fish. On inspection, my dad notes that it is a female as he unceremoniously pulls out a hand-full of red eggs from what I had previously referred to as an “it”. She, as I now understood it, was an expecting mother.

Suddenly, a thought wormed to the center of my thoughts. It this how God does it? Assuming for a moment he exists—and I for one have no idea—no proof from personal experience suggesting either his presence or lack thereof (although this is a whole other thought process for a whole other day). Is this the method under which God operates? As a hungry fisherman, reeling in victims for above, taking them and scooping them up with his heavenly fishing net? Only later realizing the details of the life he has just taken; gutting not them, but the lives of the ones who loved them. How many expecting mothers has God taken away? Countless, undoubtedly. I have, of course, not killed countless fish mothers. Even saying fish mothers seems ridiculous, although it is not false. Does it put me in the same category? The same category as God? Hmm…perhaps false. Perhaps too assuming. But I cannot help to lament the fish that could’ve hatched from those eggs—if only because they would never grow to into catchable sized fish for me to vanquish.

The guts—eggs included must now be discarded. Flung back haphazardly, the intestines catch on a branch, hanging unapologetically from a tree. Accidental, I know, but the gesture seems to add insult to injury. Or death, in this case.