I was watching in the lake when Pete caught a feisty sockeye salmon the other day. A few hours later I ate a small piece of it. A beautiful photo below, but not for ridiculously squeamish vegetarians.
That color, wow. I’m sure the photo can’t do justice. This is when Pete was filleting it back at camp.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything die before, or felt complicit in a creature’s death. To witness its last struggle and then hold its limp body awed by the beauty of gleaming scales – it was a very solemn sort of thrill.
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July 2, 2009 at 4:24 am
Rikki King
ridiculously semi-related thoughts follow.
i used to work with the guy Randy, who was very uneducated and slept with at least of my friends. basically, the kind of guy who makes really inappropriate sexual comments to you constantly, but is so freakin cool you let him get away with it. behind his back, we called him Hector. I don’t know why.
Though he was mexican and way more of a hip-hop type, he liked nirvana and we’d play the song “something in the way” on repeat. thats the song a lot of people have allegedly killed themselves too post cobain’s death.
one of the line’s is “it’s okay to eat fish, cause they don’t have any feelings.”
whenever vegetarianism came up, he’d make a joke about “it’s okay to eat fish, rikki,” but then the joke sort of evolved until whenever I was really, really upset, like some rude customer made me bawl by calling me a “pinche gavacha” or whatever, he’d always say, “It’s okay to eat fish, rikki.”
i havent in forever, except for a bite of a salmon i snuck at an exbfs house in the early 2000s. but whenever im really upset, sometimes it’s comforting to hear Hector say, “it’s okay to eat fish.”
in other news, my mom dated a guy who used to suck fish eyeballs out after he caught them.
carry on, now.
July 2, 2009 at 4:27 am
Rikki King
* at least two of my friends. Not me.
** late nights scrubbing grills in kennewick bowling alleys lend themselves to such strange sitches
July 2, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Susie
Wow! If the farm-raised salmon they sell at Costco looked like that, we’d scoff at how much food coloring they’d used.
Also, I am worried about Pete’s watch.
July 2, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Lisa Waananen
Pete found that watch in a lake.
July 8, 2009 at 12:34 am
Jill
That’s my man! He looks pretty good with a salmon in his hands, doesn’t he? Y-U-M.