The greatest fish I never caught was a monstrous catfish that could have weighed as much as 80 pounds. Of course, as I never caught it, we will never know the truth of its magnitudes.

It was night, maybe nearly 2 a.m. I was alone, sitting beneath an overpass on I5 in Stockton. Fishing and smoking cigarettes. You can see the overpass above, thanks to Google maps. What you cannot see, is the same place, 32 years ago.

It was pretty quiet; moonlight on still water. I was bored but half entranced by the silence and the situation. Nothing much had happened all night. A couple of nibbles. Then my rod fell over and when I picked it up I seemed to have a snag.

As I worked to retrieve my gear, I realized it was something massive. Probably a small log, I suspected. When it got close to shore, sure enough, it appeared I had snagged a log. As I ran my hand down the line to try to find my rig, the log came to life, flailing around like a damn alligator for a moment. I had no idea what to do. It seemed almost as large as I was. It might have been larger.

I jumped in the water on the other side of it (a really unwise move, especially in the mostly darkness) and realized that there was approximately no chance whatsoever of me dealing with the thing. It thrashed around a bit more, I jumped back onto the shore, it slipped the hook, and was gone.

Only I had seen it. At first I was swearing and basically having a minor breakdown over losing the fish. I knew it would become ‘the one that got away’, but there was much I did not yet realize. For example, that the fish could be a lot more valuable to me alive.

I was lucky that I wasn’t severely injured. I had forgotten a catfish is a dangerous animal with long, deadly spines at the end of each of its front fins, and on a creature that size, they are formidable. Whether or not they contain venom is conjecture, but they can kill you with sepsis all the same.

In reflecting on this event over time I slowly became aware that some kind of essential transaction took place there in the moonlight that morning— that I was a part of that creature, ever after, and it was a part of me. That something truer was gained than a trophy — a relationship, albeit tenuous — that within me like a seed would grow, and one day bring me to some relatively deep recognitions and insights.

We met in the dark. Worlds crossed over in crisis.

Why was I intending to kill it? Just for sport, actually. I had no intention of eating it; I was there to kill time. It was ‘something to do’ to keep myself feeling like I was alive in a fairly desolate array of subdivisions. The problem is this, on our world, ‘time’ is alive. And it might just be better… to keep it that way.

I now suspect that it was precisely in failing to catch this enormous fish that I acquired a sliver of … something priceless inside me … instead.

I think a part of me went with that venerable catfish, and that I was blessed by failure in that grand and cruel endeavor, because some aspect of myself needed his living spirit to receive a sliver of my own. And take it with him into the murky darknesses of his world and heartbeat.

And here you find a fragment, a mysterious figment in text of his life and spirit. Written somehow in my hand. A sliver of that giant fish still sings and teaches me inside, as if I am the place we met and he, in swimming there, now swims also in me. Late in the night, when I am alone. And the moonlight shines on brackish waters traced in smoke and limned in memory’s finer purposes.

We caught each other, now it seems, and somewhere… someday… we shall be released.