Here's a story I wrote about one visit to Pt. Arena.
First Fish
The first fish I ever caught was not a fish: it was a starfish. With twenty-one legs. Can’t get much more unfishlike than that.I was six years old, with my father on a short pier in northern California, the rocky coast of Mendocino County. My father had stuck a big piece of raw meat on a hook for me, part of a fillet we’d had for dinner the night before, a milky-white piece of fresh-caught rockfish. He’d stuck it on, cast, then handed me the pole—a pole meant for stream fishing, since that’s the only sort of fishing he usually did, a pole with a small reel and light line. He said, “Hold on tight and let’s see if anything bites.”
I held on very tight, digging the end into my stomach, not wanting to disappoint, not at all sure what to expect. Would the pole surge out of my hands if something did bite? What would I have to do? My father had given the reel a quick spin, and I had listened to the sharp, rapid ratcheting sound as it caught. He’d help me if anything bit. He wouldn’t make me do it all by myself.
So I stood there for a while, the pole nestling into my soft, red-sweater-covered belly, looking down at the deep blue-black water, the surging surface rippled with white streaks of foam. Then, tiring of standing, I awkwardly sat down, clasping the pole securely in my hands all the while. I dangled my legs over the edge of the pier, bright red sneakers, bought special for the trip, out of sight beneath my dungaree-covered knees. I waited expectantly, anxiously.
It didn’t take long before I felt a dull lurch. That was all, a single lurch. Nothing flamboyant, nothing that required my strength to hold. I looked up at my father. He was gazing out over the water, up at the cliffs. “Papa,” I said, “I think I caught a fish. Something grabbed.”
He looked down at me, then quickly he crouched down, gave the reel a tug. “Yep,” he said, after a testing moment, “something seems to be on there. Let’s pull it up and see.”
He sat behind me, the lower ribs of his chest close against my shoulders, his thighs hugging mine, his calves dangling alongside mine. He let me keep holding the pole but grabbed it himself as well, cupping my hands in his big strong grasp, and slowly started reeling the thing, my catch, my prize, in.
When it broke the surface he stood and lifted the pole above my head. The fish that wafted up before my eyes was bizarre-looking, a dull yellowish-orange thing, lumpily slimy, all squirming, writhing, tentacles.
“I caught a fish!” I cried as I jumped to my feet.
“You sure did, honey,” he said, and as he did, the thing, the fish, dropped one of its tentacles. Thump it went, on the wooden pier.
“Ew!” I screamed and jumped back.
“Don’t worry, sweetie, it’s okay. The fish is okay. It’s just stressed. How would you feel if some string with a hook on it came down out of the air and grabbed you up?”
I looked at him uncertainly. “I wouldn’t lose my arms or my legs, would I?”
He laughed. “No, honey, you wouldn’t lose anything⎯not even your pretty little head.” He ruffled my hair with a big hand. “In fact, the chances of anything at all like that happening anytime are pretty slim, so don’t worry about it, don’t worry about a thing.”
I knew from his laugh that things were okay, they were really okay, even for the fish. He wouldn’t laugh if the fish were in actual trouble. He’d throw it back in. Either that or he’d put it on a bed of grass, like he did with trout in the mountains, a little coffin filled with grass for the fish that would be our dinner. But this one he just watched wriggle on the planks of the pier.
“What kind of fish is it, Papa?”
“It’s not really a fish, sweetheart. It’s a starfish. You know what a starfish is; remember the ocher stars we dried last year? Those are like this one, even though they look different.”
I thought of the two dead, leathery, perfectly shaped orange-brown stars studded with white nobbly spines that my father had had in his study, propped on the windowsill, until the stink got so bad that my mother made him throw them away. We’d found them during our vacation the year before, pried them off the rocks, and my father had weighted them down somehow⎯I don’t remember how, and I don’t know how he got them to hold their postures so perfectly, so perfectly straight and stiff, since all the living starfish I’d ever seen were curled and flowing and tucked into themselves.
“But how come it has so many arms?”
“It’s just a different kind, sweetie. This one lives on the bottom and prowls around for food. It uses all those arms to smell with, and to hold on to its prey with.” He turned it over so I could see its feet⎯he called them “tube feet”⎯which were writhing in an ecstatic chaos. “Let’s count how many arms this one has, what do you say?”
And so we did, together we counted them, our voices harmonizing high and low. I performed the very important task of keeping my finger on the first arm we counted so we wouldn’t lose track. I felt its tiny tube feet⎯toes, really⎯grab on to my finger, gently sucking at it. They felt alive and delicious.
We got to twenty, and looked for the arm that had fallen off, but it had already crawled over the edge of the pier, back into the water. “Twenty-one,” we both said, as one.
My father laughed again, delight in his voice, and he picked up the animal. “Ready?” he said.
Ready for what, I wasn’t sure, but I nodded, because he obviously expected me to. And with that he tossed my first fish back into the sea.
During the rest of our time on that rocky, rugged shore, I would think often of that starfish. I would lie in my narrow bed in our woodsy cabin, my eyes closed, listening to my parents doing their evening-time things⎯washing dishes, rustling the paper as they read, discussing plans for the next day ⎯and I would think of that star crawling around the bottom of the sea, sniffing, sniffing, trying to find its twenty-first leg, and wondering what had happened to it. Wondering if it would ever find it and be whole again.
Here is a video about that sea star, known as Pycnopodia helianthoides, or sunflower star:
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