About thirty years ago, the summer we first started dating, my husband taught me to fly fish on a camping trip.  When I was a kid, my father worked 50-hour weeks at a job an hour away in Denver, and even if he had been home more, he didn’t know much about fishing anyway.  My mom and sisters loved dancing and dolls and playing house, so I had grown up jealous of my friend Mike’s tackle box and fishing stories.  And fish were mythical creatures to me. I knew that they existed and must live in the streams and lakes I encountered, but it always seemed a bit magical that beneath the surface another world existed where strange animals breathed water.

 Fishing was a major pastime for my husband’s family; he had grown up doing it always.  His dad had shown him the basics: how to tie a fly on, how, in theory, to cast.  But mostly, he learned to catch fish by himself, standing alone in cold mountain streams for hours, testing out flies and casts by trial and error, relying on his unrivaled stubborn persistence and a desire to make his father proud.  It’s very possible that he willed his first fish on the hook and out of the water.

I was a less apt pupil.  I caught a lot of things the first couple of times we went fishing, but none of them were fish: trees, bushes, my vest, my waders…almost my husband several times. But he patiently stood beside me for hours and hours in the thigh-deep freezing rivers, helping me untangle the line, unhooking my fly from stubborn inanimate interlopers, showing me the knots to retie it again when I forgot. He pointed out parts of the stream where the water pooled beneath moss and lichen-covered boulders or under fallen logs.  He knew the fish were there, even when after days of trying I doubted they could be.

It was summer and we were 21.  College didn’t start for another three weeks. We camped under two tall green firs, surrounded by blue sage; napped in a hammock while our waders dried.  The soles of my boots melted from the heat of the fire ring because we sat out so long under the black Gunnison sky, carpeted with a billion diamond stars. We had muffled sex in two sleeping bags zipped together on an air mattress that was always slowly leaking air. The crickets sang us to sleep above the constant white noise of Spring Creek, and the stellar jays and hummingbirds were our only alarm clock each morning. Somewhere in there, I fell in love with my best friend.

When I finally did get a fish on, the portal to that other world opened.  Everything happened at once: there was the quick flash of the trout’s white belly when it rolled at the same time that the pole yanked in my hands.  Then the line dancing taut above the water to the impossibly quick movements of the dark shadow hooked below. I could feel the panic in my hands and stomach; I couldn’t remember what he had said to do next, and the instructions that he shouted now above the rush of the water didn’t translate to words in my head. I didn’t want to lose the fish, but I was also scared to see it out of the water.

Then, almost as quickly as it began, it was over.  The fish was in my hand: its unblinking eyes wide and scared, its scarlet gills moving rapidly, searching helplessly for water.  It was slippery and smooth; strong and sinewy as it strained against my fingers, still trying to escape.  The mountain light glimmered off its scales, but it also seemed lit from within.  The trout’s back was a mirror of the river’s liquid mixture of brown and green, but its sides were marked with perfect red and black circles, outlined by white, then blue. Beautiful.  When I kept it too long out of the water, though, of course it died, and those colors faded; the light stopped shimmering on its scales, and it turned almost immediately to a muted black and gray.

***

The first hours after I told my husband I was nonbinary went about how I thought they would.  Although I had told my therapist, I was still 99% sure I would never tell another soul. But I knew I would not even indulge the one percent possibility until my youngest graduated high school—a point ten months down the road which conveniently left me plenty of time to back out. The universe had other plans for me, however.  I was pushed out of the closet against my own will one late July Tuesday morning in 2024, by of all things, a dream he had that I was gay, and the truth in my eyes that couldn’t be hidden when I gave inadequate reassurances to the man I’d been married to for 25 years that I was straight. It was as though, sensing that I might never willingly tell him, my subconscious and his held their own middle-of-the-night-intervention. I felt out of my own body when I finally uttered the words and watched understanding of their meaning hit his face.

My muted reaction, my failure to show emotion of any kind and my complete lack of tears hurt and frightened him.  In fairness, I think I was in shock—most of me had believed I would die with this secret–and he was certainly emoting enough for the both of us. I faced the situation with the dead calm, and yes, the relief, of a person who understands the waiting is over: that after a lifetime of fear, the worst has finally, finally happened. I was certain that my marriage was over. Sure that this topped the short list of things we had worked out over the years that couldn’t be forgiven or overcome.

It was like watching old, grainy black and white footage of a bomber being hit over Germany on the History channel.  The film starts with a dozen airplanes flying together in a “V” like a flock of geese.  Then there is the poof of dark smoke as a shell hits.  At first, nothing happens, then slowly, slowly, the plane starts to drop out of formation, its engine flickering with fire. The nose dips as the smoke gets darker, and you keep looking for parachutes to appear as each minute ticks by, stomach clenched, knowing not everyone will get out.  One, maybe two or three white chutes open, but now the bomber has started a flat spin and large, jagged parts of it are flying off in every direction.  It’s bizarre to watch lives ending with such terrible force and violence in absolute quiet and at such a distance.

Of course he stormed out.  Of course he came back. And after he banged open the bedroom door later that night, we talked for hours under the slow uncaring propeller circles of the ceiling fan while it cut holes in the pale strangeness of a light on after midnight. He grew up in the 80s with no confusion about being male or about his heterosexuality.  There had been no reason for him to pay attention to discussions of the gender spectrum or queerness; no stake.  Now, I had told him that who I was, who I had been for our entire marriage, was something different than what I had represented for so long. We were each learning a new language. Finding the words to communicate it to him felt nearly as hard for me as it was for him to hear them; to try to understand what they meant.  

In ways, it shouldn’t have been a surprise.  He knew me at 16; had marveled at how I hooped “like a guy.”  He’d seen the pictures of me at three, at five at 10—indistinguishable almost from his own childhood photos—short hair, broncos jerseys, camouflage pants.  He’d rolled his eyes over my clipped, unpainted nails, my disdain for purses and my love of sweatpants throughout our marriage. But labeling it made it real and strange and scary in a way it hadn’t been before.

We struggled through that night and several more like it.  Each was followed by agonized days of stilted interactions in front of our kids; with ordinary responsibilities that felt like torture to address, both because we were exhausted and because nothing felt like it could be normal again.  We were poignantly aware of all that was at stake: our marriage, certainly, but also our 30-year friendship, our kids’ mental and emotional well-being, our own, and our shared vision of what the future would look like as a family. 

 I asked him to read what I had written about growing up queer and about hiding it from my family, from him and from myself for so many years.  The first surprise: he agreed to read it.  The next:  he read all of it (I had thought he would put it down after a few pages). And then he cried; cried for me, for himself, for our family. I hadn’t believed he would be willing to try to understand how it had been for me. My biggest surprise: he told me that all those things that made me nonbinary were not only things he could tolerate, but that they were a part of why he loved me; he told me he didn’t want me to change.  He said that he loved me the way that I was, and that he wanted us to stay together. 

I had spent my whole life feeling ashamed of who I was and how I felt; longing to be told I was worthy and loved without an asterisk after my name. This was an acceptance even my mother had been unable to give, not something I had dared to hope he was capable of, and he was offering it to me even though my deception had cut him deeply.  Whatever trepidation I had about staying in the relationship vanished.  I knew I would not, could not, be the one to leave. 

Although we were both raw from so many huge emotions and decisions, and the months following my revelation were not easy, in so many ways, the world and our relationship expanded for me. As close as we had been, I had always held that secret part of myself back.  And that fraud permeated everything, including sex. In all the times that we were intimate over the years, I was always aware of a barrier, a wall between us of my own construction.  Sometimes I would try to get around or over or through it, but there didn’t seem to be a way. It kept me separate and apart. Now, without any conscious action or decision or my part, there was nothing between us—it was just gone, and we started having the best sex we’d ever had, and lots of it.  I’d always struggled to look into his eyes; to say what I wanted or to express pleasure.  Suddenly, I could give myself to him entirely, holding nothing back. We were soothing each other daily, eschewing words, assuring each other with our bodies that we still loved each other, that we still found one another attractive.

And I felt glimpses of real relief for the first time in 50 years; moments when the weight of my secret was lifted off my shoulders so suddenly that I thought I might levitate. When the feelings of being wrong, of being a freak and a monster vanished. And despite a black hole of examples in real life and in the media of other couples who chose to stay together, I began to furtively look forward to an authentic life lived post-revelation with him, being loved and accepted for who I was. When he would ask me questions about how hard it had been to be secretly queer growing up in the 80s, when he helped me shave my undercut, when he held my hand in public, I could believe we would be okay.

***

When my daughter was five, much to my dismay, my husband brought home a Plecostomus sucker fish without telling me.   Her younger sister was three, we had two wildly untrained dogs and one mouthy cat already, and I was slowly going insane trying to grow my law practice, juggling the household chores and doing most of the parenting on my own. But of course, she was thrilled.  So the fish was promptly installed in a tiny tank on her bookshelf.  She named him “Hide-and-Seek.”  As pets went, he was actually not too much trouble—he required only one or two algae tablets a week and he kept the tank mostly clean himself. 

But he did have the annoying habit of outgrowing his tanks.  He was no more than three inches when he first came home, but within a few years he could barely turn around in the small tank we had him in.  Weighing the cost and effort of changing aquariums against the guilt of watching him in his artificially cramped quarters was just one more of what felt like a thousand choices I made every day between being a better mom and being a decent lawyer.  On any given day, I would sigh away the guilt for the thousandth time and plunk my kids down in front of the tv for another marathon of Barbie movies so that I could meet a discovery deadline, or hope my client didn’t see me smoothing my skirt and brushing off the dog hair in the court parking lot after exiting my white mini-van (the same van with the dent in the door and smudged windows, car seats and sippy cups clearly visible in the backseat).  And because I wasn’t out, because I had buried my queerness six-feet-deep and was trying so, so earnestly to live out my life as a straight cisgender woman, everything I was and did felt performative–the ultimate imposter’s syndrome. Hide-and-seek’s rehoming was one more way I felt torn between what I should do and what I was capable of doing.

We did get a slightly larger tank at some point, which he almost immediately outgrew as well.  Exhausted by my inability to do what was right for him, I thought of letting him go in the wild, Born Free-style.  But we lived in Northern Colorado; a quick google search told me he would not survive a winter in our freezing water temperatures. So he stayed put where he was, looking vaguely miserable, if a fish can do that. 

The other frustrating thing he did was that he Just. Kept. Living. Despite his pathetic tank arrangement. Despite being all alone, but for the glimpses of my daughter that he caught through the silvery glass when she was in her room, or of me when I read to her at night or came in when she was at school to put away her laundry. Despite all my expectations for how long a fish was supposed to live. The years kept ticking by, one after the other.  Our lives swirled around him, mostly just outside his view from that tank on the shelf.  My daughter grew tall, grew breasts and long hair, started driving, started dating, went away to college. She turned 21 last March–still he lived on.

It was just this week that we finally figured out that he had died.  The tank had become inexplicably dirty a few months ago–green algae everywhere.  It occurred to me then that he might be dead. But when I checked, there he was, still attached by the mouth, upside down under his rock, fins swaying slowly side to side in the current.  So I kept dutifully dropping in algae tablets, adding water, changing the filter. It wasn’t until we drained the tank of all the water and he still didn’t move that it became clear he was actually gone. 

It is sad to live alongside something for 16 years and have it die.  I was sad.  But I was also relieved that I no longer had to think about him in that tank, that I no longer had the responsibility of keeping him alive; happy for Hide-and-Seek that he was no longer confined to a space that was too small for him, that he never should have been in in the first place. That wherever he was now, he was finally free.

***

Life post-reveal was not as simple as coming clean and fucking all the time, though.  Fear was a black, fire-breathing dragon, rearing up out of the darkness in our worst moments, against our will, making us both doubt everything.  I was sure that he would ultimately be unable to accept me as genderqueer.  That he would be ashamed of being with me once people finally knew; that he would ultimately find the masculine qualities I was no longer trying to hide unattractive and opt to make life simple again and find a straight, cisgender woman happy to take my place. But I was also equally afraid of going back into hiding; of stuffing myself back into the prison I’d lived in for 50 years.  The temptation was so strong to do just that. It was what I knew how to do—the grooves were deep and smooth from five decades of repetition so that in some ways, it would have been the easiest thing in the world, and I was scared that if I breathed wrong, I’d wake up back in character.

I was so ashamed of my masculinity that it was hard for me to accept that he was struggling less with my gender issues and more with my bisexuality; he was terrified that I would leave him for a woman.  He was smart, successful and attractive.   He made lots of money.  He had spent our entire marriage comfortable with the belief that he was king of men.  But the idea of being compared physically to a woman, of needing to compete against women when it came to emotional accessibility, and of the shame of me choosing a woman over him, haunted him.  It didn’t matter how often I told him I had always been attracted to women, too.  That having sexual feelings for women hadn’t meant that I was unfaithful in the past (I hadn’t been), or that it meant I would be unfaithful in the future.  He wanted to choose to love me despite the fear, but he struggled.

And the truth was that my sexuality was like a secret garden–it had always been there but had been shut up behind walls and a locked door.  Coming out had turned the key and allowed me entry to a strange and wonderful place inside of myself, where so many things suddenly made sense after a lifetime of confusion; where I was attractive and sexy to some people without needing to put on female drag. Where my jaw wasn’t just a little too square, my shoulders a tad too broad, my clothing a bit too butch. Where who and what I wanted wasn’t wrong, or hurtful; it was just a part of who I was.

What he wanted, what he couldn’t help from wanting, was for me to shut that door again.  But it felt too good, too magical for me to consider.  It was a coal-seam fire that had found air—combustible, inextinguishable.  Even though it hurt and scared him, the idea of repressing it again felt impossible for me.  I tried to explain to him over and over that staying with me couldn’t be conditional; that accepting me as nonbinary but not my bisexuality was like loving the sea but wishing the salt out of the water. Despite the pain it caused him, I clung to it like a life raft to keep from drifting back to my old, closeted self.

Trying to help him was like getting in the ocean with a drowning person. His fear manifested in grasping and control; he was adrift, panicked and thrashing, and when I would arrive and try to help, so often I was pushed under.  Although he had told me that he loved me for who I was, and I believe that he wanted more than anything for those words to be true, he kept sending signals, overt and covert, that he hoped I would go back to pretending. What he wanted was the one thing I couldn’t give him: for it not to be true.

Early on, a not entirely unfair comparison had been made between my deceit in not telling him for so long and infidelity.  I had lied to him for 25 years.  The logic following was that I needed to rebuild trust. The fine distinction–that being deceitful about being queer is different than deceit used as a tool to avoid the commitment of monogamy–was often lost on him.  What that looked like was his anguish trying to police not just my actions in the world, but more darkly, my thoughts, too. He asked that I stop reading queer romance novels. He freaked out when a “gay” song on my playlist came on in the car.

It began to feel like there was not a solution. Repair, trust and transparency are possible when it’s something that you’ve done to hurt your partner, but not when it’s who you are that causes your spouse pain. I felt like that cheetah at the San Diego Zoo who got too strange and skittish living in captivity.  In order to help calm her down, they put a yellow labrador in the enclosure with her; a therapy dog of sorts. Sure, they were companions.  I believe that they even cared for each other, deeply.  But the dog was a dog, who wanted dog things, and no matter how much they both may have hoped for something else, the cheetah was always going to be a cheetah. Even Disney would struggle to make that into a happy ending.  I started to believe that the fact of who I was would always end up hurting him, no matter how desperately we each wanted a different outcome.  That if we stayed together, I would be living my life always as an apology.

We limped along through the fall and into November, and then Trump was elected, riding to victory triumphantly on the back of $215 million spent on anti-trans advertising. When I woke at 12:30 a.m. election night and read enough on my phone to know he would win, it didn’t matter that I had been able to live half my life in the safety of a disguise that passed as female. It did nothing to assuage the terror I felt from the voice that whispered through my pillow and into my amygdala about what would happen next. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe, no matter how hard I tried to fill my lungs.  I lay there in the dark with my heart racing, mind blank with dread, feeling as though there were already nameless enforcers on their way to my house, coming to pound on my bedroom door and take me away.

I had been lulled into a dream living in Boulder County, Colorado, where the businesses were plastered with rainbow flags and my kids were taught religiously in school to use someone’s correct pronouns.  Now, I understood that all that had been a mirage. I had to confront the reality that while the people I encountered at the store, on the street, at airports, in the national park, at restaurants and movie theaters, may not have been wearing MAGA hats, still, most of them hated me just the same. This fact would settle upon me again and again as I went about my day, dripping itself into my lungs like black tar in the checkout line at the grocery store, or while driving to the bank, and I would start to gasp for air all over again.

***

When we moved to the new house, it had a koi pond, so of course we bought koi for it even though we had absolutely no knowledge or experience in how to take care of them. In the beginning, there was lots of trial and error.  The first autumn we lived there, I turned off the water pump in advance of a hard freeze, and the pond went black and still. The koi were in torpor, quiet and almost motionless deep at the bottom, settled in for winter.  But a few days later, I came home to find them all gasping at the surface, their mouths agape and their eyes bulging. Even in winter, even asleep, they still needed moving water to oxygenate the pond, to filter out the nitrate waste so they could breathe.

Maybe a few winters after that, we went through an epic cold snap.  The highs were in the single digits and at night the temperature dipped well below zero.  The pond froze completely over, a problem for koi because they need a continuous source of oxygen to reach the water. So, feeling self-sufficient and paternalistic, I stomped through the snow in my Sorels with a hammer and started aggressively banging at the ice to make a small hole.  I was quite proud of myself for being a good steward to them and figuring out a solution on my own. My husband yelled down to me from the deck a few minutes later, though, and told me that he’d just read on Google that breaking the ice like that also harms the koi—the shock waves cause physical damage to their hearts. 

Sure enough, a few days later, I spotted a large orange and white koi floating listlessly upside down, his fins barely moving.  My husband (who had always been the designated mousetrap setter, the confronter of racoons, the do-the-dirty-worker in contrast to my trap-the spider-under-a-glass-then-let-it-go-free-outside approach to wild things) was gone for the weekend.  I could tell the fish was suffering, was going to die.  I decided the right thing to do was to kill him quickly and that I (being the only grown-up present) would have to be the one to do it. 

But that was easier said than done.  When I put the net in the water, he didn’t want to go; he made desperate, sad attempts at swimming away while the other koi arced in tight, panicked circles around him. He was heavy in the net when I finally got him out and my heart raced with the dread of what I needed to do next.  I remembered vaguely seeing anglers stab fish through the gills to end things quickly, so I had brought out a kitchen knife.  But when I tried shoving it in several times, nothing gave; his scales were much thicker and stronger than I’d imagined. 

Although it was freezing, I was sweating and sick to my stomach.  I thought about putting him back in the pond, chastened and ashamed of my impotent gallantry which had only terrified him and made things worse. But I was worried that my assault had damaged him more and I couldn’t stand the thought of slipping him back into the pond and then thinking about him slowly dying in the cold water while I tried to sleep with a round stone of guilt lodged in my gut.  So I grabbed him with both hands around his thick tail, and I hit him awkwardly against a large boulder in the yard.  Not enough though–his gills were still moving, his eyes trained on me.  I hit him again, this time putting my hips into the action, swallowing my bile against the sick sound of his head hitting the rock.  Then again. And again.

Finally, he was gone. I didn’t want to put him in the trash can, and the ground was too frozen to dig.  So I laid him under a pine tree at the edge of the development, hopeful a coyote or fox might make a meal out of my murder, and in doing so, absolve me just the littlest bit.  When I told my husband and kids about the ordeal later, though, they were horrified.  They couldn’t believe I’d acted without their consensus, that I hadn’t waited to see if the koi would get better on its own.

***

The winter of 2025 was black and cold, too. Unapologetically following the playbooks of countless dictators before him, Trump took office in a flurry of overreaching executive orders. And my discussions with my husband continued to fail at solving the jigsaw puzzle of how to stay together without hurting each other.   It was an epic convergence of macular and molecular messaging: our country and my partner of two and a half decades, laser-focused on the perceived perils of trans/nonbinary people. And me, at a traffic-stop-gone-wrong in my life–without an answer, without a solution–on my knees in the snow, headlights blinding my eyes, arms out, palms up, no longer able or willing to hide the truth.

That’s when things got really dark.  It felt like the possibility of hope had disappeared.  Like all that was left was to watch every good thing:  the environment, the arts, women’s rights, racial equality, LGBTIQQ personal safety and civil rights, my marriage, my relationship with my kids…spin clumsily in slow circles and die.  I didn’t know what to do to make it better—nothing helped.  It was an impossible, crushing weight that could not be shifted, shared or borne.

I started cutting again—something I hadn’t done since my mother died. After hearing about another unchecked unconstitutional action or having one more dead-end conversation with my husband, the blood beneath my index finger’s skin would start itching for sunlight, and I would feel compelled–like Sleeping Beauty to the green spinning wheel–to unfold my buffalo nickel jack knife and press the silver blade to my flesh.  I’d draw careful lines, deeper and deeper, until the bright red blood would mark my place for me, a spot to glance at out of the corner of my eye or to rub my thumb against when nothing else would help—a focal point to channel the pain.  

I drank heavily; chasing those blessed few minutes of oblivion after the third or fourth round and before the hangover. I stopped reading the news; unfriended anyone who I even suspected had voted for Trump, then stopped going on social media altogether.  At 50, I was suddenly afraid to use a public women’s restroom again.  Afraid, really, anytime I went out in public. I tried to write, but the only word that felt like coming out was:  nononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononono.

At night, often, I would wake with my neck drenched in sweat from dreams of large dark rooms, full of fish tanks.  Some were huge, taking up whole walls, others less so, standing alone, and some were smaller still, sitting side by side on cramped shelves.  All of them were dusty, cracked and forgotten, the water dangerously low and cloudy, the glass dirty.  Inside, barely visible through the film, were brilliantly colored tropical fish with white scum trailing from their fins. They would gasp for air or float sideways, eyes panicked and blank at the same time, and over and over again, I couldn’t save them.

Despite the intractable weight of my despair, though, my daughters still needed me.  They needed me not just to decide to live, but to shine a flashlight of hope through a midnight blizzard for them to follow. To pretend, at least (because they had so many years left to live), that all was not lost.  And the dogs still needed to be walked. Eventually, a warm Chinook wind came blowing from the West down out of the Rockies–as it has for eons–to eat the snow and raise the temperature in between cold fronts.  

After that, one morning this April, the dogs and I clumsily exited the house in the newfound light of a daylight savings’ six a.m. As always, I felt chaotic and inattentive at first, trying to juggle three leashes and negotiate the stairs without falling.  But then I looked up. The sun was just starting to rise, and everything was still shades of blue.  The smell of the crabapple blossoms was dense and sweet on the cool air and the birds were finally singing about spring.  I took one long, deep breath, then another. I thought of the Ellis Peters line from The Summer of the Danes:

Every Spring is the only Spring, a perpetual astonishment.  It bursts upon a man every year…as though it had never happened before, but had just been shown by God how to do it, and tried, and found the impossible possible.

For those few moments, I could believe that an autocrat’s shameless pandering of hate won’t prevail. And I could believe that my husband and I will find an honest way to love each other.

Quantum entanglement theory says that subatomic particles remain deeply connected, even if separated by billions of light-years, and that a change in one instantly influences the other regardless of the distance between them.  Like that, I’ve started trying to string together moments like molecules. To counter each terrifying or damaging instance of the news cycle or my shaky marriage with glimmers of love and joy.  

Yes, the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military, yes he’s cut funding to states and universities who allow transgender athletes to play sports…but June 13, while Mother Nature literally rained on Trump’s birthday  parade, my husband and my daughters came with me to protest at the Denver Capital Building with thousands of other Coloradans who don’t have MAGA hats in the coat closets of their hearts.  Yes, two weeks ago my husband searched my phone and iPad, certain that I was on queer dating apps, but just the other day he bought an “ally” lapel pin.  He’s figured out pronouns and misgendering. He sought out a nonbinary therapist to help him try to understand, and to try to grow. The last thing he says to me every night in the bed we bought 26 years ago and still share is, “I love you.”

My life never stops being confusing and painful. I seem to be forever caught between the need for authenticity and not wanting to hurt the people I love with the truth of who I am. It’s an eleven-sided Rubik’s cube without a solve. But some days, maybe just breathing is enough; is its own act of resistance and love.

This week, we all hiked down from Odessa through the Fern Lake burn scar, where the pine trees are still shiny black and bare although it’s been nearly 13 years since the last of the fire was smothered by an early December snow.  But of course, life there has returned.  Now, it’s the aspens’ turn:  they are sprawling slowly out across the river basin, each piebald trunk’s roots connected intricately beneath the now-fertile soil to a thousand other poplars like it, their shimmering neon green leaves turned upward to welcome the sun that the conifers denied them for so long. And the wildflowers are painting the black earth every color of the rainbow.

The water at the lake’s outlet was so clear we could see half a dozen Greenback Cutthroats, swaying gracefully in the slow current, watchful for bugs, hungry after a long winter. Greenbacks are Colorado’s official state fish and in 2012 there were less than 600 left. Slowly, their numbers are growing. Their electric scarlet gills and sides are so different from the markings of the Rainbows and Brookies and Browns–it was tempting. When you see something that wild and beautiful and rare, there’s a part of you that wants to be closer to it, wants to grasp at it, wants to make it stay.

Not so long ago, I was talking with my dog-park friend, Wendell, about fly-fishing. Wendell is in his 80s and looks like a beardless Santa Claus.  I’m not tall, but he comes up to my shoulder. I’ve known him for years now, and although his wife of 50 years is ailing, he still always enters the squeaky green park gate smiling, his roly-poly ginger labrador, Tami, trotting at his side. This day, I was telling him that while I do like fly-fishing, I hate how hard it is to get a fish off the hook; that I panic, worrying I won’t be able to get it off in time and that it will die in my hands like it did that first summer so long ago.  He barely paused before shrugging and laughing off my worry with a twinkle in his eyes, telling me, “All you have to do is crimp the barb.”

The barb is the part of the hook that juts out in the opposite direction.  Like a metal canine tooth, it imbeds in the flesh so that the hook won’t slide free and let the fish off once it’s on.  I know this because I once spent six hours in an ER after I hooked my own finger, waiting for a doctor to cut off the barb, push the hook through and reward my clumsiness with a tetanus shot. When you crimp the barb, the hook lifts free much easier and the fish aren’t hurt as badly. But it’s harder for inexperienced, anxious fishermen; anglers who aren’t very good, and who need the unfair advantage of a barb to keep a fish on once it strikes.

Yes, crimping the barb makes it harder to catch fish, but I tell myself that some fish aren’t meant to be caught.  And sometimes I still do get one on. When I do, I’m all the more delighted for it.  In Colorado, the best streams to fish are called Gold Medal Waters.  They are “catch and release” which means that if you’re lucky or skilled enough to catch a Greenback, after you carefully pull the hook from its mouth, after you watch the light dance across its brilliant colors, once you have it, and hold it, you have to put it back into the swift-moving, glacier-chilled water, cradle it there gently, loosely, in your hands so that the water can run through its gills again–so it can breathe again–and then you have let it go.