Big Fish (Not That One)

My little brother hasn’t been sleeping. I know this because I’m staying with my folks up north in advance of his high school graduation and most nights I’ll notice light from the crack under his door at 4 a.m. and hear him noodling on his guitar. He’s practicing for his performance at the ceremony, where he’ll be playing More Than a Feeling by Boston*. That’s totally fine. I did the same thing, except with frantic typing, banking on the reward of sleeping for 18 hours after. That’s what we do. Blow off school work in the name of fretting about school work, then do a month’s worth in the worst long weekend of all time.

My problem is the same one everybody has, which is that he’s clearly still 6. Every couple hours my brain will play back a thousand memories at once; of him camping out with me in the living room insisting we watch cartoons and conking out as soon as I turned them on; lining up his stuffed animals and taking their portrait shots on an old point-and-click; watching Stevie Ray Vaughan videos and playing along on my dad’s tennis racket. Somebody ripped me off because that was definitely last Wednesday. It doesn’t make sense. Our parents are empty nesters now. My dad’s retired. I know what an IRA is (Irish Republican Army). My God, that time is gone and I barely got to use it and I used it wrong.

The isolation of where we are, Redding, doesn’t help. I get too many opportunities to remember this stuff. It’s so quiet I have to hear my own thoughts and talk them off a ledge. Nobody I know has even heard of this place. Everybody thinks I’m in Redlands, somewhere in the Inland Empire. This place is palpably different. It doesn’t feel like California. As far as I can tell, nobody here wants anyone else to ever know they exist, and it feels like living on the moon.

There’s a sadness to it. The unemployment has always been high, and the stagnation is like a permanent recession, a town on pause, shipwrecked in the ‘90s. We had one of the last Kmarts and I actually worked there. We had one of the last Blockbusters (a terrible store that bled you to death on late fees that we went to every weekend). This is where chains, and the town is half chains, wind up when you thought they died, like a grandparent going to a nursing home in another state without telling you. I always hoped my brother could be someplace with something more.

The stillness is isolating and confusing. My brother’s with me now but something about him is leaving. He’s still in the same room I lived in as a teen. I walk in there and squint and don’t know what year it is. Everything’s still here but I don’t feel like I’m here. It’s like I’m intercepting a grainy radio broadcast from 20 years ago reflected off a satellite. This isn’t nostalgia, it’s more like losing my grip on time. Like if I walked back to my high school my teacher would be waiting for me and he’d reprimand me about that calculus final that yeah I cheated on when I quietly left a janitor’s entrance just a bit ajar so I could go back in at night and scan the answers from the teacher’s edition. 

The gravity of it all has been making me sick, the pencils down feeling of mistakes I can’t fix. This isn’t my home anymore. I can’t keep seeing the bleaching memories of everything that happened here. I want my brother to know life can be sporadically miraculous and not just a series of rooms and that the good parts are gonna be worth the bad parts even though it’s usually bad parts. We gotta get out of here and see something beautiful. See some land. 

So on Memorial Day me, my brother, my mom and her husband who I won’t call stepdad because come on you can’t say stepdad when they got married when you were 30 and they didn’t tell you, piled into the truck and headed north. Vaguely toward gold country, to Burney Falls, then to some ice cave, then to a lake in Modoc County, population 8,700. 

The whole trip was gorgeous and more people would know about it if the region weren’t so hellbent on seclusion. As we drove, our “small town” gave way to real small towns with one gas station and some houses a mile off the highway, then to deserted trailer parks, then nothing. We drove a full hour toward the cave without seeing another car. We just saw trees. A billion trees. Fucking trees. You couldn’t even see the horizon. This was my dad’s territory when he handled claims, this whole drive, and I realized it would have made me much more insane than it made him.

Eventually we hit snow. End of May. California. Snow. Finally we parked just to stretch our legs and I headed out alone into the forest on some serenity through nature kick. Maybe a quarter mile out I heard crunching steps, branches jostling, and stood still, heart racing. I felt ill. The nature wasn’t working. All I could think was if I died I just wouldn’t exist anymore. Then I realized it was a deer and weird noises are always deer. This dream of finding inspiration and spiritual connection with my brother gave out and I wished I was on one of the really stupid parts of Hollywood Blvd., just so I could be annoyed by other people I could prove existed. I’m an idiot. I’m an idiot and I hate trees.

Back to the truck. Finally to the ice cave. The ice looked like crystals at a hippie gem shop and it was beautiful and the ancient volcanic detritus all around us made it look more beautiful. Then we pressed on to the lake but couldn’t get there because the snow had become totally impassable. Fantastic, let’s hurry on back, no reason, I just have emails to answer probably. Big day tomorrow.

But there was one more nothing to get to. We were gonna go to the train bridge on Lake Britton from Stand by Me. Beats the hell out of me how anybody scouted it. Felt impossible to find.

I figured it would be just as empty as every other place we went, but there was a truck parked directly in front of it, and there was a twentysomething couple in the truck bed getting out their fishing equipment. We all got out anyway, except for my brother who fell asleep, because we’re here anyway, what the hell.

Guy turns to us and talks. Really thick accent, the kind people look for when they’re casting hillbillies in southern shows. Smiles.

“Now goddamn if that ain’t the biggest fuckin’ fish I seen in my goddamn life!”

He’s basically jumping up and down.

“Look at that! Look at that goddamn fish!”

I smiled back at him and went to go look at the water. 

“See it? See that black outline? Looks like a big black blob. Yeah, put on sunglasses.”

I do, and the water’s pretty murky. I secretly think I’ll never see it and I’ll just politely lie and we’ll head back to the truck. 

“Just hold on a minute, you’ll see, you’ll see.”

Right then, I do. I have no idea if it’s actually big but I remember the fishing minigame in Legend of Zelda and know that’s definitely what the outline of a Big One looks like.

“Hoooooooooolly shiiiiit,” I say, and I’m not faking it, he just has a contagious accent and it is indeed crazy to me that I can see a fish at all from this far up. It’s somehow crazier than seeing a whale in an aquarium, maybe because it’s discovered, not on display.

Everybody is gathered on the ledge just gawking and I say I’m gonna go try and wake up my brother.

“Yeah, yeah, go get ‘im, he’s gonna wanna see this sonofabitch!”

I wake up my brother and he gets out of the truck like he’s wading through molasses. He puts on his sunglasses too and we start peering again. He doesn’t say much and he’s not emotive because of being a teen, but he points down.

“Hey, is…”

“Wow! Yeah, yeah! That must be a breeding pair. Damn, it’s just as big. Goddamn, a breeding pair. That’s somethin’ else, that’s somethin’ else.”

Then the guy and his girlfriend inched down a steep trail toward the lake and we all headed home. Kept going home through a billion more trees but all of a sudden they got perfect, because they were part of the same planet where we saw that big ol’ fuckin’ fish, and my brother fell back to sleep.

*I can’t stand Boston and I suggested he do a Steve Albini tribute instead. He said he’d love to do a Steve Albini tribute but this whole thing was the school’s idea.