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Show made me certain that he, too, was moving through the Pacific that morning. That he, like me, was "at sea." By mid morning we were deep into the ocean. Birds no longer followed our boat, having decided we had no bait to lose. With nothing in sight except the black water welling and rolling beneath us, the boat didn't feel isolated as much as framed, the horizon carefully cutting a box in which we trolled around. I ate saltines made saltier by the air. My mother had packed a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches, but like everything else on the boat they smelled offish. Too excited by the imminent release of the fishing lines, my brothers refused to eat. I was too seasick. The captain began untangling a mass of huge plastic lures in bright pinks and jellied purples. Spangles and glittered fringe worked to conceal the deadly four-pronged hooks, but they were there. As the captain knotted the squid:like lures onto the end of two-hundred-pound test line, I wondered from my prone position what fish would be desperate enough to eat something as unnatural as jellied neon. What are we going to catch? I asked the captain, after he had sent out six lines-four off the stern and two from rods placed high and off to the side of the boat. With the release of the lines, the birds returned, seemingly crazed with the possibility of food. They cartwheeled behind the boat, diving to the water and back into the sky, shrieking like ghosts or mothers who had lost their children. They were everywhere and all at once. Dolphin, he replied. I knew he didn't mean Flipper and was proud in my knowledge, hoping the 170 |