“Only when I’m on a beach at night, watching the rods, and looking out into all that darkness, I feel at home. Right here amongst the awfulness, and the bursts of life and light and color, are breakdowns and breakthroughs. Hunger and total fullness. Hope and loss. Life and death and life again.”
In my second book, The Only One Who Knows, the main character, Minnow Greenwood flees back to her grimy hometown, a violent fishing village with an unusually high number of missing persons and shark attacks.
As the attacks intensify, she begins investigating—only to uncover some dark secrets, both in her family, and herself.
*
Fishing plays a central role in this story. My family are passionate anglers, and I drew on my own experiences, weaving them into the narrative.
There is so much beauty in fishing. My brother taught me that, though I’m not sure many people see it. They picture a grim-faced man casting from a pier while his miserable kids stand by, cheeks stung red by the wind. Or a lazy angler on a crowded beach, one hand dangling from a rod, the other wrapped around his stinking bait.
But that isn’t the truth.
Not even close.
One of my favorite things in the whole world to do is snorkel and spear fish. When I’m under the water, in the fish’s environment, my problems slip away, I slip away. I become more of them, and less of me. It’s been a real lifesaver for my anxiety, which I’ve suffered from since I was a kid. Over the last four years, the anxiety has gotten much worse. Rearing up in loud moments, and especially the quiet ones. Bringing me to my knees, time and time again.
Whenever I start to feel overwhelmed, focusing on my breathing through the snorkel helps ground me and slow everything down.
In my book, Minnow says, “We can’t seem to heal unless we’re knee deep in salt water.” I feel the same way. I was going through an awful time while writing this book and snorkelling truly saved me.
One hot afternoon, I was under the water, weighed down by problems, carrying them with me every length I swam.
Then I saw a fish.
An orange fish with pink eyes. And I thought, this fish has no idea what a divorce is. Has no idea what lawyers and mediators and awful paperwork is. My problems don’t exist here. Let them go.
And I did. I swam past that blessed fish, grateful for the lesson he taught me. Whatever problems I have, cannot be carried into the sea. They simply don’t exist there.
But on land, it’s different.
*
The first time my brother took me shark fishing, I was hooked. (Pardon the amazing pun.) It was high tide at midnight. There wasn’t a soul on the beach but us, and the waves crashing and breaking was the most magnificent sound in the world. We shared a blanket and a cup of salty noodles, watching plumes of steam curl up into the vast, dark sky, strewn with a galaxy of stars. What a feeling. I couldn’t believe the rest of the world was missing it.
And then the rod went off. That sudden, electrifying zing! In an instant we were moving, my brother racing down the dark beach as the waves crashed, rose, and crashed again, the night exploding into motion. And then, the victory! Hauling the catch onto shore, marveling at this beautiful thing that now exists here, on land, in our world. It’s incredible, that first meeting. Two worlds colliding.
And then of course, there are long bouts of silence. Days of it, even. It took me five trips to catch my first ever gummy shark. When they aren’t biting, when there is nothing but the lonely, glorious roar of the waves. Times where it looks like nothing is happening.
And yet, everything is, if you really look. The seagulls soar on the night wind, the spider crabs inch their slow way across the sand, and my brother and I sit shoulder to shoulder, watching the tide breathe in and out. We fall into long night conversations, about people we used to know, the one’s we’ve loved, the ones we’ve lost. The versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown, and the ones we’re still becoming.
To me, nothing feels more honest than fishing. Sitting on the sand in the dark, the night lit by stars, there’s nowhere to hide, it’s just you and the thoughts you usually try to outrun. Fishing forces you to be still. Long periods of silence, agonizing waiting. It can be hard to handle that. Handle the weight of your own thoughts. Out there, they seem louder somehow, as if the vastness strips everything back and leaves you face to face with yourself.
It will force you to reflect: Who are you? What are you wrestling with?
And is it winning?
I turn to fishing when I’m carrying a lot of pain. On shore, in the silence, where my thoughts run wild, I don’t try to drown them out or push them away. Instead of fighting against them, I work through them, cast by cast, breath by breath. I do the work, forgive myself for the stupid things I’ve done, and pray that I’m forgiven in return.
Then I tell them, you cannot stay.
I lift my eyes to the sky, the stars stretching endlessly above, my brother smiling beside me, and I realize how beautiful it is. All of it. Life.
Whenever I’m shark-fishing on a dark beach at night, eyes on the rod and staring into the vast darkness, I feel like I understand. I feel like I know the truth: life is beautiful and cruel, ugly and glorious. Fishing has shown me that. It’s helped me make peace with this life, with its pain and its beauty alike.
***
