The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant

“I was on the swim team at school, and to win her attention would do endless laps between my house and the Vermont shore, hoping she would notice the beauty of my flutter kick, the power of my crawl. Finishing, I would boost myself up onto our dock and glance casually over toward her, but she was never watching, and the miraculous day she was, I immediately climbed the diving board and did my best tuck and a half for her and continued diving until she had left and the sun went down and my longing was like a madness and I couldn’t stop.”

The narrator, in the grip of young love, wants to impress his crush, but can’t bring himself to walk over and speak to her. The passage makes clear the narrator’s maddening infatuation by describing his efforts in a run-on, stream of consciousness sentence that rises rapidly in intensity to a fever pitch; echoing the way that Sheila has grabbed the narrator’s heart.

“It was late August by the time I got up the nerve to ask her out. The tortured will-I’s, won’t-I’s, the agonized indecision over what to say, the false starts toward her house and embarrassed retreats— the details of these have been seared from my memory, and the only part I remember clearly is emerging from the woods toward dusk while they were playing softball on their lawn, as bashful and frightened as a unicorn.”

After going through the agonies of the truly smitten, the narrator puffs up his courage and approaches Sheila. The text deflates his overeager ambitions by comparing his attitude to that of a “frightened unicorn”—a delicate, mythical beast.

“Even by day the river was quiet, most of the summer people preferring Sunapee or one of the other nearby lakes, and at night it was a solitude difficult to believe, a corridor of hidden life that ran between banks like a tunnel. Even the stars were part of it. They weren’t as sharp anywhere else; they seemed to have chosen the river as a guide on their slow wheel toward morning, and in the course of the summer’s fishing, I had learned all their names.”

The narrator, whose summers take place in a natural setting, is intensely aware of its beauty. After years of practice watching nature, he is especially fascinated by the way stars reflect off water and the smooth quiet of the night sky. When something wonderful attracts his interest, he gives it all the attention of a devotee.

“She let herself down reluctantly into the bow. I was glad she wasn’t facing me. When her eyes were on me, I felt like diving in the river again from agony and joy.”

Deeply smitten by Sheila and eager to be with her, the narrator indulges in his new emotions. He describes his rapture when she glances at him in terms that evoke the great poets, invoking the heights of feeling that the reader understands to be teenage hyperbole.

“Now I have spent a great deal of time in the years since wondering why Sheila Mant should come down so hard on fishing. Was her father a fisherman? Her antipathy toward fishing nothing more than normal filial rebellion? Had she tried it once? A messy encounter with worms? It doesn’t matter. What does is that at that fragile moment in time I would have given anything not to appear dumb in Sheila’s severe and unforgiving eyes.”

The narrator discovers that Sheila thinks poorly of fishing, finding it boring. The narrator doesn’t have the self-awareness to realize that this is what he thinks of the things Sheila is interested in—they are simply wildly mismatched people. Instead, he responds by trying to hide his fishing gear, and, with it, his own good qualities.

“She hadn’t seen my equipment yet. What I should have done, of course, was push the canoe in closer to shore and carefully slide the rod into some branches where I could pick it up again in the morning. Failing that, I could have surreptitiously dumped the whole outfit overboard, written off the forty or so dollars as love’s tribute. What I actually did do was gently lean forward, and slowly, ever so slowly, push the rod back through my legs toward the stern where it would be less conspicuous.

A story that, until now, has been as romantically beautiful as a quiet boat ride down a peaceful river pivots toward humor. From the infatuated, quietly erotic tone of the previous paragraphs, the tale shifts into a bawdy phase, including three obviously lewd puns. The narrator’s dreamy infatuation shifts suddenly from elegantly dreamy hopes for success to awkwardly nervous fears of failure.

“Four things occurred to me at once. One, that it was a bass. Two, that it was a big bass. Three, that it was the biggest bass I had ever hooked. Four, that Sheila Mant must not know. ‘What was that?’ she said, turning half around. ‘Uh, what was what?’ ‘That buzzing noise.’ ‘Bats.’”

The plot shifts the mood from youthful yearning to humorous predicament, which pulls the narrator into new and unpredictable slapstick territory. After having carefully planned the evening’s events, the narrator now must improvise frantically.

“The bass couldn’t have encountered many forces in its long life that it wasn’t capable of handling, and the unrelenting tug at its mouth must have been a source of great puzzlement and mounting panic.”

“Puzzlement and panic” are feelings shared by the bass and the narrator as they do battle. The narrator has run up against a force he can’t handle—his love for Sheila—but he knows how to catch a fish, and his instincts pull him in that direction. For a moment he can sympathize with the fish’s predicament.

“The moon was out now. It was low and full enough that its beam shone directly on Sheila there ahead of me in the canoe, washing her in a creamy, luminous glow. I could see the lithe, easy shape of her figure. I could see the way her hair curled down off her shoulders, the proud, alert tilt of her head, and all these things were as a tug on my heart. Not just Sheila, but the aura she carried about her of parties and casual touchings and grace. Behind me, I could feel the strain of the bass, steadier now, growing weaker, and this was another tug on my heart, not just the bass but the beat of the river and the slant of the stars and the smell of the night, until finally it seemed I would be torn apart between longings, split in half.”

As the narrator must choose between his two favorite obsessions, his desire for Sheila and love of fishing clash in one frustrating moment. He is not yet knowledgeable enough to understand which feeling is a lifelong passion and which fleeting self-delusion, but he does understand that with Sheila lies adulthood and mature desire. He opts to put aside fishing, mistaking his own yearning for sexual experience with mutual interest or possibility.

“I reached down for the rod, hesitated, looked up to where Sheila was stretching herself lazily toward the sky, her small breasts rising beneath the soft fabric of her dress, and the tug was too much for me, and quicker than it takes to write down, I pulled a penknife from my pocket and cut the line in half.”

Enthralled by the chance of dating Sheila, the narrator gives up the biggest fish catch of his life. Were he to pull in the fish, he’d upset and alienate Sheila, who has declared her contempt for people who fish. Despite her inane chatter and their clear mismatch, her alluring beauty still bewitches his youthful heart, and he foregoes fulfilling a lifelong dream for a newer, equally enchanting possibility.

“Through a superhuman effort of self-control, I was able to beach the canoe and help Sheila off. The rest of the night is much foggier.”

The strain to hold onto the hooked bass while hiding it from Sheila tires out the narrator, and giving up the giant fish is a demoralizing defeat. Thus, the rest of the evening—an event he’s so looked forward to—happens in a blur. Had he bravely stood and reeled in the giant bass, Sheila might have been horrified, but at least he’d have gained one of his goals that night instead of none.

“For the first time that night she looked at me, really looked at me. ‘You’re a funny kid, you know that?’ Funny. Different. Dreamy. Odd. How many times was I to hear that in the years to come, all spoken with the same quizzical, half-accusatory tone Sheila used then. Poor Sheila!”

The narrator’s bold attempt to date an older girl doesn’t work out—he and Sheila aren’t really suited to each other—and he gets his first lesson in the importance of compatibility and shared interests in a relationship. Sheila look down on him, and the narrator realizes that he cannot simply desire women for appearance alone.

“Before the month was over, the spell she cast over me was gone, but the memory of that lost bass haunted me all summer and haunts me still.”

It turns out that the great love of the narrator’s life isn’t Sheila Mant, but fishing. She turns out to be somewhat shallow, while fishing inspires him with its deep connection to the beauty of nature.