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A Fish Story

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I grew up with a medium-sized list of things Christians shouldn’t do. Don’t get me wrong, there are many things Christians shouldn’t do, but this list was not exactly the Decalogue. On this list, probably somewhere in the middle below drinking alcohol and above playing cards, was going to the movie theatre. It wasn’t considered a sin per se, but it was definitely a sign of worldliness. I’ve never been able to negotiate the difference between sinful and merely worldly, but trust me, it exists. They said so, or at least, implied so.

So it was through a bit of serendipity that I first stepped into a theatre at ten years of age. Some cousins from Big City, Minnesota came to visit during the summer of 1975. They were liberals (no kidding, they really were) who had no scruples about the theatre; so, stuck in Small Town, South Dakota (population 650, give or take) and bored to death, they were going to the show that weekend, whatever it was. As luck would have it, it was The Apple Dumpling Gang (still one of my favorites). It was rated G, and I think my parents weren’t quite sour enough to frown and tut-tut at the cousins. Consequently, they were in a bind when, in front of aunt, uncle, and cousins, my siblings and I declared that, yes, that would be fun! Long story short, we went; which, I believe, broke down the barrier between yours truly and an event that would have a dramatic effect on my wee little psyche in the summers to come.

What, The Apple Dumpling Gang messed me up? No, this story is not about cute orphans and bumbling “desperados.” It’s about [cue ominous music] sharks. You see, 1975 was also the year Jaws was released. I’ve told this story many times, and every time I’ve said I was twelve years old. Who lets their twelve-year-old see a movie with graphic people-eating? But my fact-checking revealed the shocking fact that I was actually only ten. How I managed to finagle Jaws from my theatres-are-evil parents is still a mystery. Anyway, in those days and in that town, no ten-year-old was getting into a PG movie unaccompanied, so it fell to my sister, then seventeen, to take me. She was a better date than you might expect, jumping and gasping in all the right places, giving me mucho teasing ammo for days, if not weeks and months, to come. Her gasps grew to shrieks in my gleeful accounts of the evening. But I haven’t gotten to the good part yet.

It was either that same summer or one of the following two that our family met some other cousins, these from Even Smaller Town, South Dakota, at the Oahe Reservoir near Pierre, the state capital, where we camped, swam, and fished for a week. On at least one of those days, the wind blew something fierce, as it is wont to do in the plains states. Oahe is a big lake, so a big wind produces big waves — too big for fishing, skiing, or any small boating activity. But we were there to have fun, so rather than sit around outside our tents watching our potato chips and paper plates blow away, we did the only thing we could do. We went swimming. Well, not swimming, exactly. My uncle, father, cousin, and I put on life jackets and swam out from shore as far as we could. Then we just laid in the water and let the waves take us in. Up and down we rode for hours, on waves six to eight feet high, reaching the shore and swimming back out again.

There I was, laying on my back in the water, watching the waves tower over me, then riding to the top and surveying the lake around me and the approaching beach ahead. I could have just laid back and fallen asleep, it was so relaxing. Relaxing . . . relaxing . . . when suddenly, like a flash of lightning, the image of a huge shark thrust itself upon me. I nearly shot out of the water and hydroplaned to shore. Slowly, I got a grip on myself. “It’s a lake. There are no sharks. It’s a lake . . . it’s a lake . . . it’s just a lake.” My heart-rate slowed, my breathing steadied, and I was mostly alright. I laid back, shaken, nervous, and wishing for the shore, but pretty sure I wouldn’t be eaten that day.

Now, you need to know that Jaws had awakened an interest in me. From the day I saw that movie, I was hooked on sharks. I read everything I could find on them. I even got the novel and read it (and was disappointed with the discrepancies between book and movie). I knew that sharks have a cartilaginous skeleton, that they have to swim constantly to avoid drowning, have multiple rows of teeth that rotate forward to replace lost teeth, and that, rather than scales, they have a network of dermal denticles that sheath their bodies in a virtual external skeleton. Shark skin has the texture of sandpaper, and has in fact been used as such. Mark that fact, Dear Reader.

But I was not thinking of those things on that warm, windy day as I rode the waves to shore. I was trying to put all things fishy out of my mind, and had mostly succeeded. Riding to the top of a wave, I was relieved to see the beach within yards. Sinking to the bottom of the swell, laying face down now with my feet trailing behind, the top of my foot brushed the sandy bottom. I’ve never been a good swimmer, but I’m sure I broke somebody’s record that day. Spitz and Phelps had nothing on me. I hit the shore running, and collapsed just a few yards onto the beach.

That was the end of my “swimming” for the day.

My interest in sharks waned as years passed, but still, whenever I see something like this I think, “cool.” I didn’t enter the theatre again until 1979, for Hal Lindsey’s church-approved The Late Great Planet Earth. I don’t remember a thing about that one.

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