Long before salmon were farmed in what militant pescatarians call, marine le pens, always netted and frequently knotted, each fish swam free. They roamed across oceans, disregarding borders, dismissing geopolitical implications of their prospective hatching. They had room to breathe. That’s why having gills comes in handy. You don’t have to worry about keeping your nose clean.
At this time, there were vipers, sniping at one salmon in particular. I should add that they weren’t actually vipers, since such an interspecies critique was unheard of back then. No, these were members of the global salmon community. There were only a few steady gigs for a salmon.
You could do everything right, go to the right schools, study hard, stay out of trouble, and still end up on someone’s plate. There were plenty of fish who embraced this outcome in the hope of achieving greater fame out of the sea.
But one salmon didn’t want to be on a plate, or a can, in a taco, or in cake form. He wanted more. What he really wanted was to be a writer. That alone offended many of his friends back home. They didn’t like that he wasn’t adequately deferential to his native culture. The truth is, he agreed with the average salmon on most issues. On an issue like Roe he was quite radical. Being objective for a second, he could understand the appeal of eating salmon. But caviar? That was too far.
He told tales out of school. He imagined himself a sea turtle or a tuna. He even had kind things to say about a certain trout. When for most of his brethren, that was like a Irish Republican speaking highly of an Orangeman at the height of The Troubles. It simply wasn’t done.
He’d tell everyone, especially his agent, “I’m not a “salmon writer, I’m a writer.” Readers found his books in fiction, not oceanography.
They sent every fisherman this side of Ahab after him for what he wrote. Boatmen and amateur anglers, and everything in between. But they won’t catch him, not there, not that way. He left the sea a long, long time ago.
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