by Anna Maxymiw

Filleted

There’s no way around it: fishing is like sex, and sex is like fishing. There are the same constants—the slippery, the tactile, the indescribable. Like when you’re pulling a walleye out of the water, trying to get a grip on its belly so it doesn’t stick you with its fins and make you bleed down your wrists. Like when you’re first naked with a partner and trying to suss each other out, feel what stokes each other’s slick and slide. There are textures and scents and physicality. You use palms, teeth, tips of fingers. You learn to be good with your hands, with the flesh, with the flick of a wrist. You hook and release.  

Put your knife behind the fin with the blade pointing down. Slice down to the backbone without cutting through it, then turn your knife sideways to point toward the tail. Cut straight down the spine.

It started when I was 22 and spent a summer as a housekeeper at a remote fly-in fishing lodge in Northern Ontario. I worked alongside a muster of sturdy young men who tended the dock, parked the boats, and guided guests on the lake. Who existed in the outdoors, free to come and go as they please, while the female workers made the beds and cleaned the toilets and served the meals. Who walked around in sleek-looking rain pants, had tanned hands with strong knuckles, bright eyes with white sunglass circles around them.

At first, I was skeptical of those boys. Coming from a big city, I thought my writing degree and my metropolitan upbringing made me more valuable, in a way. But this was the bush, the wilderness, the great equalizer. No one up here was better than anyone else: we were all just existing, working ourselves as hard as we could and falling into bed every night. And there was something about the movement of male fingers when sorting through tackle boxes or expertly threading a line through the guides of a rod. The waterproof bib, the parka, the tall boots: this was the uniform of the man who was willing to work hard, who would trawl through a fishing hole over and over again for that one sweet hit. It was new to me; it was thrilling.  

I begged one of the twentysomething guides to show me how to fillet a fish, and I accidentally and immediately fell in love with him, with everything, as we leaned over a splintery paddle on a sandy beach, a walleye in front of us. He knelt above me, his wide-brimmed hat casting a dark halo, as he guided me with the knife, his voice impatient but his hands forgiving. As we felt around in the silky pearl-coloured meat, our fingers grew glossy from the flesh, from how hard we were concentrating on the corporeal. Together we searched for the pin bones: those bones that float, unattached, in the middle of muscle. Bones that are designed to make a fish tense up and swim as far and as fast as possible. Bones that pricked my fingers in a plaintive rhythm as I moved my hands quietly along their curving pathway.

When it was all over, my fillet was poorly done, but it was mine, and I had the sticky palms to prove it.

A few years after our summer working together, his girlfriend googled me on a whim and found a poem I wrote about him teaching me how to fillet, me masturbating in my bunk that night thinking about his hands on mine, the texture of the pin bones across my fingertips. There was a bad fight, and we never spoke again.

Now that you have the fillet sliced off the fish, the next step is to take out the rib cage. Put your blade at the edge of the rib cage and slice along, about one inch in. Keep the edge of the knife close to the bones so you don’t cut into the meat.

Eight years later, I return to the lodge as a guest. I have a book coming out about my summer working there, and I want to see if I got my details right, if I’ve kept my love for long days sitting in a boat and the unforgiving land and the wide-open bowl of a sky. If I’ve kept my love for the housekeepers, the dockhands. For the guides.

After I get off the floatplane, I make my way through the camp, hugging the people I know, shaking hands with the people I’m meeting for the first time. I feel like I’m existing in two places at once, because being back here is a wistful mix of stepping back in time and hurtling forward: I feel like I’m 22 years old again, but I’m not. I’m 30, and life at the lodge has gone on without me. The workers are still so young, but I’m older, harder, ostensibly wiser.

Eventually, there’s just one guide left to meet; I can see only his back, from where he’s choosing lures for his guests. From here, with the green of his lodge uniform, he could be any one of the young men from my summer, and my heart twangs. And then he turns around to shake my hand, and I’m frozen, unspooled between eight years ago and the present by the wide-set eyes, the tanned cheekbones, the angles of his face. For a dangerous moment, he’s my own lost fishing guide, the one who held my hands as he made me slice along a walleye’s rib cage on a hot beach, the one who cut me so close to the bone. The two similar male faces are overlaid in my vision: glinting teeth, teasing eyes, slow pike-like grin. And then he introduces himself, and I’m desperately grabbing for his hand, feeling my body try to anchor to him in this familiar and unfamiliar space.

Throughout my week as a guest, I get to know the staff. I quickly fall in love with all of them: their youth, their sleepy eyes, the storm of their raw emotions that pulls all of us into its thrall and reminds me so much of what it’s like to be isolated and worked to the bone for nine weeks. The housekeepers and dockhands and guides are all so vital and varied and kind; they allow me to befriend them and let me back into the staff dining room where I used to eat, let me play euchre with them in the staff cabins where I used to sleep and joke and waste time as best I could, just like they’re doing now. These young people are working so hard, as ever; they’re becoming fierce and funny and peeled, the truest versions of themselves.

And they have that same hope and humour. One afternoon, I’m reading a book and listening to the housekeepers giggle about who they have crushes on—at the moment, it’s a fortysomething guide they’ve nicknamed the Dreamboat. One of the girls tells me how, on a rainy afternoon, he taught her how to fillet in the back of the toolshed, so as not to let his catch go to waste.

I want to ask her: Did you fall in love with him then? Did you find yourself emotionally splayed? Do you know that what happens up here isn’t real?

Instead, I say: At least you know that if a man can fillet well, he must be good at fingering.

She laughs so hard I have to burrow my face in my book to hide my own smile, because I should know better.

Point the blade down on the other side of the rib cage and slice down the whole length; grab the rib cage and rip it out. Hold the thin end of the fillet with your fingernail, and cut to the skin. Keep the knife close to the skin and go all the way down to the end.

My own teasing guide follows me around camp for seven days. He yanks my braid when I’m trying to untangle my reel; he claims me as his partner when I invite the staff to play euchre in my room; he throws me over his shoulder to end an argument. He rubs me the wrong way, but I also look forward to seeing his snarky grin every morning, watching him dock his boat every evening. I keep thinking of eight years ago, the same problems: two people from different cities, different lives, pulled to each other in this spellbinding place.

On my last night, the two of us quietly duck out of a staff party; he wants to show me his favourite spot to stargaze. We sit on a rickety bench overlooking a bluff where the ragged northern shoreline meets the lake, craning our heads back, counting the satellites moving in dizzy patterns. I alternate between trying to search for the North Star and looking at his profile in the indigo-tinted darkness: the brim of ball cap pulled down, the strong nose, the flash of teeth as the occasional word unfolds his mouth.

The dark makes it easier to tell him how I see fishing and intimacy, how I find similarities in every small and slick movement. Still, I can’t bring myself to tell him how I fall in love with every guide I meet, how the sight of rubber boots and waders makes me hot and strange inside, reminds me of all the things I’ll never be.

Yeah, he says, moving a hand in front of his body, slowly, curling his first two fingers up and toward us. Our thighs are barely touching; I can feel only the slightest rime of his heat. My teeth are clattering, my hands wrapped around my rib cage. It’s all about the hook, isn’t it?, he says. He crooks his fingers, searching for the Gräfenberg spot, setting a hook on a finicky walleye.

After a moment, he speaks again. You have to find it, he says.

It?

The thing that makes you not think. His hand is still outstretched, fingers curled. Maybe it’s fishing. Maybe it’s something else. But you need to find it.

The situation feels thick and tricky, so I tear my eyes away from his hand and stare up at the sky to try to diffuse the swelling in my chest and the heat in my pelvis. That’s when the most beautiful shooting star I’ve ever seen blazes a creamy path across the Milky Way. At my delighted and dumb sound, he snaps his neck back, too, and we silently keep our heads tilted up as the cold soaks into our bones, as we understand our situation, as we sit beside each other, not quite touching, all the way down to the end of the night.

Now you have a fillet, but there’s still a tiny row of bones to cut out. You can feel the bones with your fingers: they go about halfway down the fillet. Cut through the fillet on either side of the ridge of pin bones and take them out.

When I fly out the next morning, I can’t bring myself to give him a hug in front of everyone, but he hangs off the wing strut of the floatplane until the prop is about to start and he has to let go and step back. And then I realize that fishing is not just sex, because it’s also, somehow, love: you catch them, and you lose them. You don’t set the hook and it slips from you. One of you gets cut to the bone every time.

Anna Maxymiw lives in Toronto. Her work has been featured in such publications as The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, Maclean's, and Hazlitt. Her first book, a memoir about working at a fly-in fishing lodge, was published with McClelland & Stewart in May.