THE NARRATIVE ARC

My Old Man and the Sea

Nauseating fishing trip represents the things we do for love

christina hughes babb
The Narrative Arc
Published in
7 min readJun 14, 2024

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A man fishing on a rocky shoreline, surrounded by crashing waves and a serene sunset in the background.
Avi Werde for Unsplash

My sister, her sons, and I are in Port Aransas with Dad. Mom has been gone a year, but I can still hear her warning me about the rip tide as she carefully arranges her seashell haul.

Wearing her tattered sunhat, I loll in an Adirondack chair. Body surfers, breaking waves and wind-whipped kites steal my attention from the book on my lap, All the Pretty Horses, which made Mom cry.

My dad and the boys tumble in, dripping, shedding sand, smelling of sweat and the sea, talking about tomorrow, a guided fishing trip on a chartered catamaran.

Dad: “Would you want to go?”

Do I want to rise pre-dawn, stuff my pockets with Dramamine pills and sunscreen sticks, board a boat with a dozen unfamiliar amateur anglers to bake and sweat while impaling small dead creatures on hooks in an attempt to lure larger living, often lovely, creatures into our arid homosapien hell?

“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s do it!”

Nature and love are fraught with danger and fish corpses and flies caught in bushes. And the rewards are worth every drop of sweat, blood…

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christina hughes babb
The Narrative Arc

Based on Actual Events: Award-winning journalist and essayist.