Fish Heads

The first act of violence made me squeamish.

“Put this hook into the worm—twice—so it doesn’t fall off,” my father instructed.

That morning, he had bought a bucket of dew worms from a little bait shop on Riverside Drive, near the Ambassador Bridge and across from the Detroit River. It was my first time fishing—and my first time fishing with him.

I didn’t like the feel of the slimy, squirming worm in my unsteady hand. Still, I did it. I would come to tolerate that part of the process. Threading a bobber, sinker, and hook onto the line required his patient guidance. Once we were set, we found a spot on the boulders where we could cast into the murky water.

Casting didn’t come naturally. At one point, I nearly lost the rod and reel altogether. But eventually, the bobber floated calmly on the surface—and I learned that fishing was mostly waiting.

I waited for the tug. A subtle pull that, when it came, meant I had to snap the rod back quickly and reel it in. At first, I reeled in only branches and clumps of underwater weeds. But sometime within that first hour, I caught my first fish—a small perch with bulging eyes. It panted in my hand, the hook lodged in its mouth.

My second act of violence was unhooking it. Not easy for a novice—and certainly painful for the perch. More wriggling. More slime. More awkwardness.

My father had brought along a metal pail. He dipped it in the river and dropped in my first catch. By the time we packed up, I was carrying a pail filled with 21 flopping fish.

Back home, I decided it would be a good idea to fill up the bathtub so the fish could swim around in a bigger space. My mother did not share my sense of compassion—or curiosity. I had to scoop them out, one by one, and bring them to the wooden picnic table in our backyard.

There, my father had laid out sheets of The Windsor Star for the next phase: “cleaning the fish.”

Enter the third act of violence.

He had all the tools—scalers, knives, shears—for removing the slime, guts, and heads. It was both disgusting and fascinating to me. When it came to de-boning, he didn’t trust my surgical skills. I was given another job: dig a hole near the rose bush.

A neighbor told my father that fish remains made excellent fertilizer. If memory serves, our cat later dug them up.

Something about that outing with my father now feels like an initiation—a quiet, visceral rite of passage. It marked a moment where childhood innocence was nicked, scaled, and gutted.

And in all the years that followed, I never caught 21 fish ever again.