Saved By a Fish: A True Story

 I am out in my writing room over the ocean. I am tired. Last night I made 24 jars of various jellies, ten loaves of bread and stripped out a king salmon for smoking, working until midnight. It's a normal schedule.We’re all up until at least midnight every night, since it’s still light.

I

    I am beginning the next chapter in my new book (Crossing the Waters: From Alaska to Galilee, Following Jesus through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt and the Seas). This one on the multiplication of the fish and the loaves. I am halfway through my morning writing time when I hear the ATV roar up to the door. Someone clunks to my door. It’s Micah, in his raingear, excited.

“Mom! We caught a huge halibut, Isaac and me! It’s over 100 pounds! Come and see!” He runs back down the stairs.
 I run behind him. He steps onto the ATV, I climb on behind him, letting him drive. We bump and twist over the grassy lumps then hit the beach, where everyone is standing around the tractor and the prize hanging from it: a halibut that’s at least six feet long. The crew are grinning, Isaac is telling the story again, how he went halibut fishing with Micah that morning, that it must have gotten hooked on their line  but then gotten free. There it was swimming dizzily dazedly near the surface, which meant it was nearly done for.








           



            He and Micah reached out and grabbed the tail put a line and a hook around it. They knew they couldn’t lift it in by themselves, so they just held the line and waited for help. Twenty minutes later a  skiff came and my other son and a crewman jumped in to help. It took four of them to slide the giant fish, now dead, into the skiff.


         “I think it’s about 120 pounds. What do you think Dad? Isaac asks. Duncan’s on the tractor, lifting the halibut so its nose hangs just inches from the ground.

         “Yeah, I”d say somewhere along there.”

        With everyone standing in their orange raingear, red bandanas, hats, the beach is alive with color and bodies and smiling. I am snapping photos. Everyone wants to stand next to the behemoth and claim it as their own. Isaac lifts Micah up to hang from the forklift next to the halibut. Snap, I shoot it. Then my daughter and all the boys gather around the fish with giant grins. 

     We are all happy that the morning and the ocean delivered something good to our hands. Fishing has been so slim, the nets so empty of salmon, we are discouraged. Every day I ask the boys when the come in, peeling off their sweatshirts, “How was it?” and their answer, “Not much. Just a few.” We are worried. We all have bills to pay. We all need fish. 

And now we have one fish. Just one. But a fish that can feed all of us for many meals, all through the summer.  We are wrong about its size, though. We measure it. It’s 6’2”. We look it up. A halibut that size weighs on average 210 pounds.

Duncan revs the tractor, the party moves from the beach up to the house where we will fillet it. The knives come out and now it’s a fish cutting party, with my daughter and I carving the  meat off the bones in huge chunks, the white flesh four inches thick on just the one side, and four inches thick on the other. 

      Halibut is a bottom fish, meaning it's a flat fish that feeds on the bottom, and swims flat in the water, like a stingray, moving like a wave.  I know the etymology of the word. It was one of my favorite etymologies to share with my students: haly (Middle English for "holy") and butt (bottom fish). “Holy bottom fish.” It was revered for its size, and saved for the most holy of Church feasts, Christmas and Easter.

For the next three hours, we are wrist deep in fish flesh, filleting the meat from the bones, then dropping the massive chunks into a bin, then into the kitchen where the meat is cut from the skin into inch sized chunks, then into bags and vacuum packed, with two bowls kept out. One for lunch. I will make deep-friend halibut for the ten of us today, and for tomorrow, halibut enchiladas.

Over lunch, our table is full with green salad with feta cheese and cucumber, a broccoli rice pilaf and two heaps of batter-fried halibut. 

          We sit before the table, salivating, grab hands, ten of us,. Duncan prays for us: “Thank you Lord for your provision every day, but especially today for this halibut. Be with us the rest of this day. Help us to do our work well.” And we’re off.  Three forks head for the platter of fish, The boys are stuffing their mouths, barbeque sauce is passing, cocktail sauce and everyone is filling their plate again and again while the ice tea melts and brownies bake in the oven for dessert and we talk of other fish, the biggest one we ever caught, a 350 pounder, and food and we know we are feasting.

I know this is not heaven, but it feels close----a miraculous multiplication that fed a hunger we didn't know we had. The massive fish awakened us from the stupor that falls when we have worked for weeks in the same place, doing the same thing with little relief or change. Our eyes glaze and we forget to look, to wonder, to say thank you to remember how miraculous our daily bread, no matter its shape and form. 

  

Leftovers were carried off the lunch table for another day.

And my new book, the chapter on the miraculous feeding on that Galilee hillside is fed as well, the fish appearing the very morning I begin to write it. 

This page was filled and served to this table, to all of you, my friends.

Look how many hands and eyes upon this one given fish, multiplied over and over ! 

Lord, pry our narrow eyes wide. 

Let us see you in every loss, in every wild bounty.

As we eat, let this sweetness, 

this goodness

these crazy undeserved feasts 

fill us with You

and make us hungry

 for You. 

Amen.