Dominic Belmonte
My father adored fishing, and I loathed it. He used fishing as therapy time with his son in a rowboat, powered by his seaweed green Johnson motor lovingly tuned in our basement, angling a random Illinois lake to find sunfish, the occasional catfish, or, if fortune smiled, the muscular muskie. I would sit with terminal ass itch, wondering what in Yahweh’s name we were doing just sitting there, waiting until something lunged onto a hook disguised by an earthworm I was too disgusted to twist upon it, half-heartedly reeling while thinking this thing doesn’t want to be up here as much as I don’t want to be up here. My dad swung the line in, the five-inch sunfish gaping a request to me before he unhooked it with a quick wrist snap, regarding me with condescending pride, and tossed it back.
What was the purpose of this? Out here, with the humidity of an August morning, all I saw was purposelessness. I did not see things through my father’s eyes or understand him, regarding him more with fear than love. Back then, I did not understand that the delicate lap of waves on a rowboat weathered his internal storm. He served in the Pacific during WWII and landed on Iwo Jima after the celebrated, harrowing third landing of Marines when the Japanese force led by Kuribayashi unleashed furious resistance. My father was among the many veterans who didn’t discuss their experiences. He returned with a samurai sword and a bayonet, and we never knew if he picked those items up off the abandoned ground or a Japanese soldier he killed. So, my father saw death in war and said not a word, and my immature eyes did not see the anxiety in his. The long stares, the silences atop calm lake water, and the occasional struggle to wrangle fish soothed. But I was too blind from ass itch, and sun glare to even notice my father enjoying his time and his son under safer skies.
One afternoon, while barefoot, trying to steady the rowboat alongside a dock, I got a splinter lodged in my foot. In the flickering fluorescence of an upstairs cabin bedroom, my father prepared my foot for surgery by pouring whiskey on it, lighting his pipe lighter to flame his fish-scaling knife. Rhythmically, the orange flame licked the blade, with my father’s stern warning to “stay perfectly still.” Heated steel and whiskey-soaked foot defeated a deeply embedded piece of the pier. My father extracted it, and I got a sip of whiskey as a reward.
I hated shitting in the woods. My dad’s woodsman moods included not trying to find a suitable restroom in a lakeshore diner or bar. I was to go as the animals. But I thought there was a sizeable difference between a doe letting loose deftly and a boy looking around for what? A piece of ground flat enough or bug-free enough and without the casual eye of an animal or human to drop trousers and squat, in misery and disadvantage. The doe at least could sprint off if perceiving danger. My father sat nearby in the rowboat, keeping the motor up to avoid seaweed, staring out to the water, resting his eyes on the mist clouding the good spots he was anxious to go plunder.
Meanwhile, out of sight, his son tried to find a spot free of worry or discovery by savages. I watched for ants trying to raid my rectum, beetles who would fly into my exposed cavity, cinch bugs that would, as I was told by the lifers drinking in these lakeshore dives, swim up your urine stream and enter your urethra, causing untold damage to you and future generations. Since toilet paper was not part of the provisions, I looked around at the leaves and found none that would not leave some film, trace, or transfer of bugs or slime that would cause me further misery. I would leave such things be and wait for the rowboat seat to add miserable itching.
Once, on Pistakee Bay, near the Wisconsin border, I tried to bring the angry clouds to my dad’s attention. Deep in thought, he watched his bobber, hoping for that bass to fight. The storm came upon us swiftly, sideways rain and thunder crackling around a metallic boat. Dad yanked at the motor’s pulley. No sound. The wind pushed us; the waves bobbed us. No other craft was nearby because their owners could read the sky and were not trying to salve deep wounds brought by war, murder, or reverie. We drifted towards an island, and the sand held us. My dad heaved the boat closer to the shore, and we ran to the nearest tree. While the day began in the eighties, the storm forced a drop, and I was shivering, dry dung itching my ass and foot aching from whiskey surgery.
He would not admit we were fools unpracticed in the art of safe boating and fishing, now isolated on an island enveloped by booming thunder. If there was a time for honest conversation, admittance of fault, for anything close to revealing our hearts, wouldn’t this be the time? He didn’t ask if I was scared, or hurt, or injured in foot or ass or ego. His sole comment: “Well, Dominicky, we made a mistakee when we went to Pistakee.”
When the rain stopped, a man in a larger boat came by and towed us in, and a broad rainbow beamed over northern Illinois.
In my collection of photos, I have one of my father in Canada, unshaven for the week, beaming, with bass in both hands or a string of dead fish held by their mouths, his eyes proudly saying, “These, at least, did not best me.” He never looked happier with people, not his wife or children with him, salving wounds by wresting life out of a lake, holding it close, smiling, and in control.
Dominic Belmonte served the Golden Apple Foundation for Excellence in Teaching as its Director of Teacher Preparation in Chicago as its President and Chief Executive Officer. Dom is the author of three books: Teaching from the Deep End (2nd ed.), Teaching on Solid Ground, both published by Corwin Press in California, and The Age of Accountability, published by Myers Education Press in Maine. Dom earned his B.A. and M.A. in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was conferred Honorary Doctorates in Humane Letters from St. Xavier University in 2011 and National Louis University in 2017.