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Half​-​Ashore in the Dappled Sunlight

from My Big Break - volume 1 by Ben Seretan

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One night Justine dreamed about hell. She dreamed hell was right under her backyard, and in the dream she saw the devil come out of a trap door in the lawn while she was hiding behind a bush. He was small and red, and if you hadn't known he was the devil, he wouldn't have looked so bad. She decided she wanted to break into hell. She opened the trap door and snuck down a long flight of stairs, prying large jewels from the walls as she went. When she reached the bottom, she found a comfortable room. There were bookcases, a roaring fireplace, ornate furniture. And, in an armchair that fortunately faced away from her, sat the devil, reading a book. Behind the chair was a bag of treasure. She tiptoed up and grabbed the bag and ran back up the stairway, slammed the trap door, and piled rocks on it. Gloating over the candy and toys she could buy, she put the bag under her bed so she'd be sure to find it when she woke up. She thought: Hell wasn't so bad after all.

-Mary Gaitskill, from Two Girls, Fat and Thin

On a wet downpour Tuesday night I crack two eggs onto some broccoli. One of them is fertilized - the shock of the embryonic red against the goldenrod yoke and the nut brown shell and the vegetable green makes me do a double take. A flash of disgust. I quickly search online to confirm whether or not it's okay to eat a fertilized egg (do I mean it ethically or, like, physically?). Seems like it's okay, but the color of it is bothering me, it's unsettling, so I quickly stir the pan, breaking open the yokes and letting the colors blend together. I slap the lid on the pan and try to forget all about it, in a few minutes all trace of the embryo is gone, all cooked out of my sad, late meal, but then there it is, a huge chunk of shell that went unnoticed while cooking that, reminding forcefully, crunches between molars, right as the laugh hits on Cheers.

The first summer I spent in Alaska I took hold of an interesting opportunity to help the local science center with their annual salmon spawn at their hatchery. They had set up this complicated system of locks and water gates and a group of fish, on an every-two-year schedule, would swim back to where they were born in order to lay eggs, transform their bodies, and inseminate in the artificial river the science center had devised. Normally, in the wild, the salmon famously swim upstream, up into the clear-running, salt-free waters in which they were originally born. It is an amazing fact that this happens, how. The female fish lay their eggs along the banks of the stream, the male fish come around and somewhat haphazardly shoot their sperm around the general vicinity of the eggs, some are fertilized, they grow, and when they are mature enough they make their way back down the stream out to see. Poignantly, the adult fish, once they've done their part of the lifecycle, pretty unceremoniously die, and in that part of the world, where salmon are super abundant, it was not unusual to see big clumps of near-dead salmon nearly motionless in a calm part of a stream - one could reach in and grab them with little to no effort and the bears on the island on which I was living did so readily and enjoyed happy, well-fed lives (were you aware that "grizzly bear" is simply a brown bear with considerably less access to food and the omega-3 lipids found in salmon, they are quite literally grizzled bears but they are the same species, the bears I saw in Alaska were friendly-seeming and non-confrontational as they ate very well). I have a vivid memory of a beautiful golden retriever in a red bandana gleefully biting at salmon grouped at the mouth of a river, chucking them into the air with its mouth and proudly trotting their carcasses out to the rocky shore. The other thing about the end of these salmon's lives is that their bodies quite literally transform as they prepare to travel upstream, their snouts elongate, they become alien and more hideous, they grow a huge hump and a hooked, beak-like mouth. It is upsetting to see.

This is all what happens without the hand of man. At the hatchery things proceed very differently, and this is where my participation came in. I was not adequately prepared for what that would mean, although I was given a pair of yellow overalls and big rubber gloves. It smelled terrible and resembled the public bathrooms at state beaches, all shiny metal. So. The fish, guided by thousands of years of evolutionary instinct, travel to where they were born in late summer, following some primeval map of underwater smells and, I don't know, magnetic impulses. As this school of fish was originally born in the science center on the coast, they amass - hundreds and hundreds of them - in the bay just down from the building. Then, when the first lock is opened (imagine a canal), they swim towards the fresh water within, the gate closes, and they become trapped. From there they are gathered in a net and brought up into a special room where they are processed (this is where I was standing in my yellow overalls). First, they are sorted according to sexual characteristics - those that likely have eggs are sent down one metal shoot, those that have sperm are sent down another metal shoot. Volunteers at the end of each shoot - armed with a blunt, special club - then bop them on the head, hopefully with enough force to crack the skull and kill the fish. Both sexes are cut open from mouth to tail. The females' roe scoops out with little give, once the body is cut open the eggs fall out, as if they're ready and wiling to escape, as if they're excited for their future. The eggs - larger than you'd think, a lovely orange/pink color, almost like overcooked cous cous from an alien planet - are gathered in a blue plastic bucket. The males require more coaxing and what is euphemistically called the expression of a gland - squeezed in the right spot their cut-open bodies enthusiastically shoot sperm, and this too - nothing special, perhaps resembling something more like the stomach medicine mytanta than you're thinking - is gathered in a bucket. The salmon's husk bodies are chucked in a large container - they will be sold to a local fish processing plant, ground into meal, and likely sold to overseas livestock farmers. The eggs and the sperm are then lovingly handled, combined ever-so-gently in a rinse of warm, semi-salt water, and gently stirred about by a yellow-gloved hand. It is a tenderness in extreme contrast to the brutality of the processing of their bodies which, by this point, have been discarded and rendered lifeless. The eggs are then placed - delicately, with great care - in special, water-flowing tanks where they develop and mature to eventually be let out back to sea. But I had flown back to New York by the time this happened, I never got to see the little babies off.

It was stomach churning and intense work, a kind of labor that is familiar with both life and death in a manner which - even after this eventful afternoon at the hatchery - is still completely foreign to me. I have never studied medicine, I have attended scant funerals, I have never spent a summer working on a farm, tending to foals and calves and butchering chickens. I was vegetarian for like 10 years of my life. But I participated in all parts of this - I hauled the salmon as they emerged dripping water from the lock below, I killed hundreds - hundreds! - of them with a small club, I ripped their bodies open with the curved knife, I expressed their glands, I gently facilitated the non-sexual congress of their reproductive materia. I held their gore and odors in my nose and in my hair. I know now and I knew then that this was, in fact, an act of stewardship, that we were shepherds in this moment. We were caring for the school. We were ensuring they would reproduce, that their bodies were utilized. We were fulfilling their, uh, destiny. The way the eggs were fertilized produced way more embryos than would have occurred in a stream, the sale of the fish carcasses to the local processing plant went towards funding the science center (a great place, I also witnessed an octopus dissection there), it's all very easy to justify and endorse. It just feels weird when you're doing it. Blood on your hands. You start to wonder about your purpose in life. You think about reproduction and about what your sexual desires mean, what they physically mean, you think about how men cause 100% of unplanned pregnancies and how protections for those seeking abortions are currently at risk (specifically in places you have recently visited, and enjoyed, even!). There is an uncanny resonance for you in how the salmon bodies become viler, how they rot and swell half-ashore in the dappled sunlight once they've completed their task, how they populate the freshwater. You see yourself in how they swim upstream, against the current, and how they stay there, how they return to where once was, how they bump up against each other unwittingly in the mouth of the river, how their slick, scaled bodies are mechanical and animal and gasping in your hand with a club in the other.

That's all I've got, I hope you enjoyed it. It's pretty wild for me to remember these visceral salmon killings, something I hadn't thought about in a long while. I'm feeling very discouraged about this project, or perhaps a more general discouragement that has gently alighted on this duty I've assumed for myself. I wonder what to do about that. How do you do something you don't necessarily want to do but you will want to have done? How do you prevent your body from turning vile, your snout from growing long and gnarled? Do you also sometimes feel that the only things worth doing are easy and fun? Or is it worth it to push through your misgivings?

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from My Big Break - volume 1, released July 16, 2020

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Ben Seretan Climax, New York

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