New painting and fishing story (involving puppets)
Tales from a commercial Mississippi River fisherman
This story is from Tyler Kutscheid. He sells native river fish you might not normally eat, such as flathead catfish, buffalo, freshwater drum, and silver carp. You can buy what he catches from his website:
https://www.mississippifishfood.com/
Here’s his story, thanks for reading! I figured it’s only right to release a puppet painting on the morning of Minneapolis’s Mayday festival.
Nothing happens like you think it will and resting on certainty is like laying on a Mississippi sand bar – it’ll soon be riverbed.
My propensity toward control first showed up in kindergarten when handed a classic writing practice sheet. I saw the two big bold lines, a dashed line cutting across the middle, and knew I couldn’t create a tidy letter between them. Shifting anxiously, I squinted my eyes, looking for a way out and realized there was a second option: you could write in the negative space between each row – an area so small it demanded minimal fine motor control. I beared down on my pencil, knuckles turning white, and smiled as I created perfectly neat A’s and B’s – so tiny, so wieldy, so comprehensible.
My closet was a playground in which my secret desire for control could let loose, privately, away from judgement. I was constantly changing the permutations. “Is it better to organize by color or kind?” I’d wonder. “Should my pink sweaters go with my pink t-shirts, or does it make sense for them to stay with the other sweaters, as visually unappealing as it may be?”
While I eventually learned to let go of some of my control issues, the anxiety remained. In my 30’s, reeling from a fall out at work, a divorce, and general uncertainty about my ‘calling’ in life, I learned about a commercial fishery on the Mississippi River. In an act of great self blindness, I had spent the last 10 years teaching at an alternative project based school where deconstructing structure was its founding principle. And so, enamored by the chance to create my own neatly planned work days and driven by a deep love of regional food, I thought commercial fishing would be perfect.
That next summer, I drove six hours through winding driftless backroads, the humid air making the cattle dotted hills a lurid green. I arrived in a small river town named Savannah. Its main street, lined with bars pledging allegiance to river life: River Rats Pub, Sippi Side Grill, and Whiskey River. The buildings were covered in murals depicting a bygone era – steam boats, buffalo drives, and old time river rats – their legs kicked up, floating downstream, with a fiddle in hand. I was thrilled. The Mississippi, buffeted by giant, prairie covered bluffs, felt wild and full of possibility. A sharp contrast to the fatalism I saw in my own life. I walked into a processing plant imbued with the scent of catfish and to workers bandsawing enormous Buffalo fish, straight in two. “Hey, ahhh, excuse me, my name is Tyler and I’m looking to learn how to commercially fish,” I said. They stared at me, shocked and annoyed. “You know this doesn’t pay shit, right?” “Yeah, I got a side gig,” I said. “Whatever you say,” they responded, then started reeling off names: Gene? Nah, I think he’s still methed out. Carol? Carol! I haven’t seen Carol in a while, I think he’s M.I.A.. Ron? Ha, not a chance.” They finally got to RJ and said he might be willing to help.
I called RJ and he got straight to the point, “Yeah, I suppose I’ll take ya, don’t do me any harm”. “You been on a boat before?” “Oh yeah,” I said, “I grew up fishing.” I had no idea that this would be nothing like my dad’s 12 foot Lund. “Alright, meet me at the landing at 4:30am. And nothing pisses me off more than when people are late so show up on time. If you’re late, I’m leaving.” When I arrived the next morning at 4:25, proudly wearing my Grunden bibs, blaze orange, without a speck of fish blood or Mississippi detritus, I realized I was at the wrong ramp. Fumbling through Google maps, I was relieved to see the correct ramp just 5 minutes away. Driving 40 mph down Savannah’s main street, I made it by 4:31 and saw him 100 yards out on the Mississippi. I ran down the dock, frantically waving my arms and he begrudgingly turned around.
We spent the next few days hoop netting for Flathead Catfish next to Maple lined banks. After the first day, my arms exhausted and back aching, I fell asleep in my truck bed under a giant oak. I was so happy. I watched fireflies clumsily bounce through the air. They put all they had into their luminescence and you could see it fade as quickly as it started. That next day, I probed RJ constantly but all I could get were recalcitrant, one word answers. Finally, after my tenth consecutive question he said, “You just gotta figure it out for yourself.” That seems like a weird answer for someone who is supposed to be teaching me, I thought.
We pulled fish out of the water that I’d never seen before: American Eels, having traveled all the way up from the Gulf, Mooneyes, with their perfectly circular, sunny yellow eyes, and Paddlefish, a fish so peculiar that it made the whole experience even more of a dream. The river down here was so much richer than the boulder strewn stretch where I was from.
A classic commercial fisherman, RJ was rough around the edges, but I was grateful that he was willing to mentor me. He was also half my height and had, what some might call, a Napoleon complex. Once on a trip home from the Illinois River, I asked him, “What do you do for fun?” “Bar fights,” he said. “I love to fight, how about you,” he asked. “Oh, I don’t know, my partne....I mean girlfriend is a puppeteer so we like to go to puppet shows.” “Like muppets?,” he asked. “Yeah, sort of, she does stuff that’s a little more avant garde compared to the muppets.” We didn’t talk for the rest of the ride home.
My first day on the river alone was a shock. The river, surging and turbid from spring rains, felt violent and aggressive. The boat was unwieldy and utterly out of my control. The first few months included disaster after disaster. My hoop nets would get swept up by the river current or snagged in felled trees. There was an ever present fear of hitting rocky levees. I’d watch massive 30 foot Cottonwoods float down the river just feet from the edge of the boat. Entire sand bars disappeared in the course of a couple days. This is nothing like I thought it would be, I thought. Nothing was controllable. I felt small and at the mercy of the river. Pulling in nets brought equal parts thrill and chaos. On a good pull, I’d have six or seven Flatheads, some weighing up to 30 pounds. Their tails violently drummed the side of the 23 foot aluminum jon boat, water flying into the air while Yellow Warblers stared down from budding maples in confusion.
It took time, but as the months went by, I began to expect and, just a little, embrace the chaos of it all. I tried to prepare as best I could, but nature is complex and the variables were always shifting. Unlike a lake, I always had to reckon with the current. At first, I tried to fight it, charting my course in spite of its implausibility. But I quickly learned you have to embrace it. I had to lean into the dynamic nature and float along with it.
After my first season of fishing, I had the winter off. I was in a long term relationship and it had found a new level of tranquility. No more shouting matches on front lawns but we were both lonely. Then, one gloomy February Tuesday, she sat me down and told me she wanted to move out. I was devastated.
There is no way I can do this, I thought. I felt the weight of a thousand rash decisions and my inability to grasp anything solid. I was back in my childhood with nothing to hold onto. I was panicky, my stomach twisted and my knees buckled. I had lost control.
A couple weeks later, still reeling, still living in sweatpants, and on my 10th mediation app, the narrator mentioned the idea of flow: “Don’t grasp,” they suggested, “Attempts at control only create suffering, observe the pain, let the pain flow.” The river, always flowing, always searching for new channels, had flowed into me. I thought back to those first months on the river and, slowly, I was able to embrace unpredictability and chaos. I saw that the water was rising and the sand beneath my feet would soon be streambed. Instead of violently thrashing my limbs, exhausting myself before my eventual drowning, or reaching for the thinnest bankside limbs, limbs that would surely break under the weight of my pain, I would kick my feet up, relax my shoulders, puff up my belly and float along. I would find comfort in this.
The beauty felt deeper, though – rather than pointing me inward like some solipsistic heartbreak song, the river pointed me outward. It showed me that I’m a part of something bigger – that transformation is natural and good. That humans emerge from nature and embody its dynamism. That security comes from understanding that what is static dies and is reborn as motion. That I should enjoy that sunny afternoon on a Mississippi sand bar knowing that tomorrow, it might be gone.