The Little Fish
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The Little Fish "No vale nada la vida La vida no vale nada. Comienza siempre llorando Y así llorando se acaba. Por eso es que en este mundo La vida no vale nada" Life is worth nothing Life is without worth. It always begins in crying And, as such, in crying it ends. For this reason in this world Life is worth nothing ~ José Alfredo Jiménez, Caminos de Guanajuato ~ "Que bonito es no hacer nada, y despues de no hacer nada, descansar." How sweet it is to do nothing, and after doing nothing, to rest. ~ Mexican proverb ~ Chapter 1: How I Got To Where I Am Today In the late summer of 1980, slowly, reluctantly I arrived at the terminally inescapable conclusion that it would be best to just leave the United States. Acquaintances, relatives and friends who were similarly spooked by Ronald Reagan's snowballing popularity merely mouthed emigration in compulsory and predictable conversation but I was the only one who was really going to do it. Looking back, it seems like such an impulsive and reckless decision for a twenty-two year old to have made. Jinxed with Jimmy Carter's national malaise, I was indeed prey to the pandemic. Chasing one futile opportunity after another, desperate and credulous, attempting one outlandish scheme or enterprise after another, humiliated in countless failed interviews; I was forced into accepting the risk. This is how it came down. Joe and Lorin are kicking their fetid tennis shoes on to the sandy southern shore of Lake Mendota, I am walking up to greet them in James Madison Park. A typical August afternoon, the atom- crunching sun burns in our faces like a blast furnace. Mortalities resulting from hyperthermia are seven times their average this summer in the Midwest; it's the deadliest heat wave in twenty-five years. I'm coated with a viscous film of grease and perspiration, a fish flavored slime. In order not to befoul our shower, the lake's a necessary detour, a preliminary rinse after another sweltering, brain-melting afternoon in front of the two big deep fryers. Massive thunderheads boil into towering columns to the northwest, making for an eerie spectacle, a hypnotizing display beyond the open water. Rolling cumulonimbus, so much at home over the northern prairie, whirl and rumble toward us menacingly, darkening a hellish purple squall. Karen’s Bernie is gleefully rolling his back over a decomposing perch. An uneasy feeling overtakes my gut, electrons gathering momentum and grouping for the strike. I feel the hair straightening from my neck. "How much longer can you stand frying smelt, day in and day out?" Joe asks. “Overtime?” "Well, let's take you for example," I retort, "your history and economics degrees come in real handy for your job, don't they?" Joseph is painting apartments for a local slumlord. "That’s exactly it!" Lorin is on his side of the argument. "We're closing the clubs every night, we’re getting too old for these young kittens, don't you feel we’re in a rut? A pathetic one? The world is measureless, immense, and here we are, cloistering our- selves in college bars, surrounding ourselves with sweet and dumb teenagers. You've been overseas and you enjoyed it, John. Just think missed tropical adventure when the temperature is minus twenty degrees here for three weeks in a row.” Lorin was raised in Teheran and Izmir, the second of three children born to Quaker schoolteachers. “Mexicans are very generous people and they really know how to have a good time. Latin American women are some of the most beautiful in the entire world my friend; coffee-colored, gorgeous, very sexy.” Lorin has always provided me with Quakerly advice and gentle yet prodding suggestions. How I’d like the slower pace of life south of the border. How many friends I will make from all over the world. “What's the matter with you, why don't you want to travel anymore?" They're trying to talk me into leaving town since I had recently disclosed my only offer at more honorable and lucrative employment. Only a meager percentage of those who finish school in Madison can make a modest living here. Every single fool who drops out or graduates from the University of Wisconsin wants to linger on indefinitely in Madtown as do all their cousins from Wauwautosa. Our waiters and garbage men have written at least one graduate thesis; some have earned more than one PhD. We're a highly educated town across all class barriers. Lorin had just been fired by the RTA after his second accident driving their busses. The position in question is coordinated between UW, the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), and a clinic in Mexico City that needs one mind and body trained in clinical microbiology, 4 preferably with knowledge of, or Spanish classes in their transcript passed with at least a C. It’s funded through the NIH so it may not last more than a year. This is, I guess, what I’ve been waiting for. I've been frying smelt too long, and now after I graduated, for a living it seems. This was not exactly using my education but I was still managing to have fun. I’m worried about relocating to Mexico City after what I’ve just read about it. Lorin is trying to talk me into going because two months ago he was in Guatemala helping to rebuild a village destroyed by an earthquake. He spent a week in the Mexican capital on the return trip and now feels like an expert on the subject. Lorin can speak Farsi dynamically; his animated Turkish astonishes the UW students who were born and raised in Turkey. Lorin’s Spanish is also well-polished. Women are reliably attracted to him. But he keeps wrecking bloody buses all over town and is now himself forced into contemplating a final jitney ride right out of town as well. My friend, the blond, blue-eyed beach-boy feels at home just about anywhere in the world - the playboy of the Middle East, the homebuilding hero of Latin America who says, "It's important to get out of the USA. You're lucky to get this opportunity, John; it’s imperative that you accept the challenge, since you have the opportunity now, don't let it pass, man!" One hundred thousand years ago during the Pleistocene epoch, mighty slabs of ice slowly and painstakingly scoured most of Wisconsin into a featureless plain. After successive intervals, the final episodes scattered an occasional landmark helter-skelter above the bleak, frozen terrain, for example the kettle moraines or the five lakes surrounding Madison, the capital. The last of the mastodons died. Relative harmony then existed between the countryside and its inhabitants until the advent of the Europeans. When they got to Wisconsin, they quickly cut down all the trees. After, the clear and abundant northern waters that had produced so much for the indigenous Americans were swiftly clogged and choked with topsoil, agricultural chemicals and manure running off from already the most fertile farmland in the country. An enormous population of gangly pond weeds and blooms of algae are 5 perennially overfed from this runoff, engorged as the nutrients accumulate in the lakes. Coontail, water celery, Eurasian milfoil, pond weed, all loving and thriving off of the heat and the cow shit. On three of its lakes, the city of Madison combats the problem with a harvesting contraption; an Everglades style flat-boat with a mowing paddlewheel mounted in the stern, a barge for the cut weeds in tow. But most of the vegetation ends up dying and rotting in the depths, consuming essential dissolved oxygen. The faster swimmers, the higher predators who need the most of it; trout, walleye, northern pike, and muskellunge slowly suffocate away, leaving the bottom scavengers, the carp and catfish, to survive the summer crop. Even the perch can’t handle it. This limnological phenomenon is known as eutrophication. Every ninth grader in our higher-than-average educated state can correctly pronounce and spell that word. Mendota's exhaling her foulest breath this afternoon, her most eutrophic belch, the weeds putrefying under the August sun, the dog rolling in rancid perch. The Old Man and the Sea, that's his nickname, since he bears a remarkable resemblance to Spencer Tracy. He loves Mendota so much he even wants to smell like it. "Sure it's a blast right now. I'm having a gas, you're having a riot. Wouldn't you rather leave while you still like this place rather than enduring a new, record-breaking winter? Slowly wasting with pneumonia, still having to work weekends at Goeden's? Why are my friends always trying to give me advice? Joe prods, nudges and digs. Lorin delivers a sermon. How sorry I'd feel for having squashed an opportunity to work in a foreign country. How I'd miss out on learning about a new culture, their thousands of years of history, unique anthropology, music and food. The pleasant climate, the plentiful beaches, the mountain geography, how it would expand horizons and open my eyes to the poverty, suffering and ironic generosity and beauty of the developing world and its communities. Snorkeling, pre-Columbian ruins, piña coladas on the beach, it 6 would just be one jolly good time after another. Hearing him go on like this does make me feel sheltered, and cowardly. The wind is picking up, and an occasional hailstone splashes into the lake.