On fishing

You may be wondering why you are sitting here in big boots and your grandmother's old anorak, with postcard mountains and a fjord in the background, while a red-faced man yells 'Row faster' and other declarations of love. Your trousers are soaked, sweat is trickling down your face and there's something wrong with the way you're rowing.

You row, set the nets, get up at five, clean the nets, and at twelve o'clock you eat boiled white fish without any good sauce on it, just the fish. In the afternoon there's fried mackerel, which is much better. You row while your dad sets the net. That is the arrangement. You've tried to change it, but that turned out to be a really bad idea, so this is the plan and there will be no arguments.

It's early in the morning, and in the afternoon you go out again, this time with a line, which is even more fun because there's such a nice competitive spirit about who gets the fish, and especially the biggest one. You pull and pull on the line, glaring at each other. Shouldn't a father want his child to catch the biggest one?

You're five and ten and twelve and fourteen; you row as best you can. You're either rowing too fast or too slow. ‘You're doing it wrong,' your father might say. He's reverted to his childhood dialect and is completely unintelligible. You can see his mouth opening and closing and hear sounds coming out, but they have no connection with any language you know. You set the nets in the evening and get up at five the next morning to take them out. You smell of the fish you've caught, and it doesn't matter how many showers you take.

You pass the time until you can go back to Grandma's and get good waffles and read comics, by scooping. With a slightly rotten wooden spoon, so most of it goes back. That's not good. Does your dad know it's rotten, or do you look like a slob because more water goes in than out? You scoop water and think about how nice this probably is. You do it all the time, there must be a reason.

The celebrations started during a Sunday dinner, you were five and wondered if kissing your best friend is what they call fucking? Your grandfather looked shocked and became even quieter than usual, your grandmother had to hide the fact that she was laughing, and your father said go to your room and there was no strawberries for dessert. This is when the rowing began. Your dad came up after dessert and said that everything is fine and that it's OK to say words like "fuck" at home, but not here, as your grandparents are Christians. ‘But Grandma laughed,’ you said, but he didn't hear you, and suddenly you were sitting unevenly in the waves.

This was your first encounter with the rigours of nature; fish don't necessarily survive if you just throw them back into the sea. Your father clean the nets while you save the fish he doesn’t want. You save the ugliest ones, or the small fish, or anything that looked like it might need a few more years. Everything your father discards, you try to save, wading out to the shore and throwing as far as you can. Far enough so that you don’t see them and feel you'd done a good deed. Just far enough for the fish—if they think—to have a hope of survival, but impossible conditions for that.

You set the nets in the evening and the next morning you are ready. The jaw feels like it is going to crack from all the yawning, but ‘it’s cold today, so here's a hat and a blackcurrant toddy in a thermos and have a good day at sea.’ And in some quiet moments, when you and the sea are behaving perfectly, you get to hear stories about an eggnog-drinking competition in the village's only pub, which your father lost. And how your grandmother started to read Hamsun when he did, because she was inspired by his desire to read. Or about the time when there were horses and chickens and pigs on the farm, and not just the roaring cows and the poor lambs rejected by their mother that scream every time you come out on the porch—because in your hand is the hot milk in a bottle that your grandmother gave you to feed them.

And you may ask yourself when it will end, this sitting in a small boat and smelling like a fish. And I can tell you, it never ends. Because you like it somehow. You think it would be great to spend long, light summer evenings on a tired boat in the fjord, with huge mountains in the background. You find yourself in problematic boat situations again and again, wearing big boots and an anorak, because you know how to row, and how to deal with a hectic man who has the honourable task of putting out the nets.

Published in Norwegian in the zine Cuntry by Dag Johan Haugerud and Kjartan Helleve.