melanie hoffert

water land

On a cookie sheet at my feet lies a sunfish; it is the shape of a giant pumpkin seed, and its gills are opening and closing sporadically. Blood is pooling around its body. Earlier I had Googled: How to kill a fish humanely. I had found a video of a man who had swiftly killed a shimmery, three-foot-long fish from the Pacific Ocean, and I have just applied his technique to this petite panfish from Minnesota. Well, I sort of applied it. The fisherman held his catch, twisted the head, and the fish went limp. He used no more effort than had he been tearing a piece of bread. I decided to use a modified version of his procedure and cut the fish instead of snapping it. That way, I wouldn’t have to kill the fish with my hands—because, well, that’s just never going to happen. My version of the humane process isn’t working, though. The knife is caught in its neck. The harder I push, the more the fish thrashes. 

 “Honey,” I call my soon-to-be wife Emily, and then, “HONEY!” 

Emily comes around the cabin from the lakeside. She knows I’ve set up a fishing operation and has been keeping her distance. I look at her, look at the fish: “It won’t die. I need help.” 

“I actually can’t help you with that.” 

I know pleading is useless. Emily barely eats fish. Emily grew up in town. Emily isn’t that fond of nature in general. 

“I need a hammer,” I say and run past her into the cabin.

Her face curls in horror, “You’re supposed to be a vegetarian. What is going on?”

“Pescatarian!” I yell over my shoulder.

We are at our cabin—a sturdy rambler of a thousand square feet, with cedar shakes and crisscrossed-paned windows. The cabin is located on Silver Lake in Minnesota’s Otter Tail County, three hours from our home in Minneapolis. I had grown up visiting my paternal grandparents’ small red cabin, just a few miles away on the largest lake in the area, aptly named Otter Tail. My grandparents, North Dakota farmers, had bought their lake place in the sixties. 

My family’s house had been next to my grandparents’, on the same farmstead. Otter Tail’s twenty-one square miles of fluid blue, just ninety minutes away, was a dramatic contrast to the farm. While the fields sat still and dutifully grew the crops, the wind remade the surface of Otter Tail each moment in a washboard of wave and light. The mystique of Otter Tail’s perpetually shifting landscape imprinted upon me, as early places will. As a child, I would anticipate a weekend at the cabin as I would a letter from a pen pal. 

Each spring, when the snow melted on the farm, there were a few weeks when the prairie seemed to mimic lake country. My dad would drive slowly across the plains, surveying the land to see how long it would be before he could get into the fields. He wanted everything to dry quickly. But I wanted floods. I wanted roads closed to passage. I wanted flocks of geese migrating from the south to fill the sky like seagulls. The fields turned liquid with snowmelt and cobalt waves lapped ditches of dormant, yellow grass in those sacred weeks. I was thrilled when our prairie land became the ocean, became the Great Lakes, became Otter Tail. Nothing to this day matches the wonder of spotting whitecaps in a dormant cornfield. 

When everything dried up and tractors began to crawl across my imagined lake bottoms, I was once again landlocked until summer came, and we would finally drive to Minnesota each weekend.  

Since then, regardless of how far travel and work have taken me, I have always returned to the water’s edge, where everything is stripped to its essence in an elemental play of wind and waves. This is the only place where life makes sense to me, if only in quick impulses, and I find great comfort that I can take almost any road and it will eventually dead-end at a shore; at that movement; at that light. 

I had purchased our cabin on a whim, right before we packed Emily’s life and moved her from New Orleans to Minnesota. For years I thought it impossible to purchase a cabin, given the cost and responsibility. And then two things hit: midlife and Emily. She and I had both been in other relationships, mine over a decade long. Once one is released from a relationship that has ordered the universe, all known limits evaporate. And one day, out of the blue, I wondered what it would actually cost to own a little cabin. I sat down to crunch numbers, factoring in how much I could save if I periodically rented it. This is how, at the verge of turning forty, heading into a marriage I had never imagined possible, I found myself fishing—a plan that I now realize had been poorly vetted. Though when the idea came to me I thought it brilliant. If I can fish, I had contemplated, no matter what happens from here on out, I can feed myself. This logic built a chain-reaction of confidence: I could grow my own vegetables. Harvest honey! Build tiny homes! Keep chickens! 

Never mind that I can actually eat very little of my catch, due to mercury that falls from the air and is absorbed by fish flesh. According to the Minnesota Department of Health’s website, I can have weekly unrestricted servings of sunfish, yellow perch, and crappie or—not and—one serving of bass, trout, northern pike and walleye. Women considering pregnancy, not just those pregnant, and anyone under fifteen can have these fish just once a month. 

Mercury poisoning is, however, a secondary concern at this moment, as my pulse thuds in my eardrums and I consider what to do about the fish I’m torturing and the five others that are in a basket next to me. 

I know what I need to do to ease their pain. It turns out, though, humans are not always great about doing what needs to be done. 

When my siblings and I were kids, after Dad had finally wrapped up spring planting, my parents would pack the car each weekend and drive to my grandparents’ cabin. On our drive, I’d watch through the windows of our GM diesel van as the prairie eventually transitioned into lake country: flat fields bubbled into rolling hills, straight gravel roads unwound into ribbons of curved pavement, trees replaced grass, and finally, lakes glistened behind rows of cabins. The minute we rounded the last curve, I cracked the window to breathe the air, heavily scented with sun-roasted sand and rotten fish. When we finally came to a stop, I tumbled out of the van and ran barefoot across the lawn, skipping like a fire walker over prickly acorns, toward the roar of waves. When I reached the beach, I sank into sand as soft and sticky as brown sugar.

Those weekends at the lake, my siblings, cousins, and I spent our days slipping in and out of the water. By nighttime, we were tanned the color of baby kangaroos and worn to exhaustion; this is when the air swirled with the electricity of adults coming out of hibernation. Wooden screen doors slammed in the distance and neighbors came, their arms loaded with Tupperware dishes and drinks. Grandma lined the corners of a card table with peanuts and chips. After everyone settled in, feverous card games ensued and laughter echoed into the darkening night.

I'd study my grandparents' cards over their shoulders. They often whispered, "Okay, throw that one in," and I'd toss the card they pointed at into play. The game would escalate from a hush of concentration into eruptions of Nooooo as everyone threw their cards in defeat. One player would then scoop up the discarded cards to square them, while another raked in a pile of coins.

I fought sleep on those nights so that I could linger in the world of adults. This water land was a place where kids of a certain age could duck out of adults' view without worry. Sometimes I'd wander away from the card games and walk down to the shore to watch the torch-lit silhouettes on Dan's dock, two cabins down. I could hear beer cans splitting open like ripe watermelons from his parties.  

Dan was a bachelor who always had a woman on his arm. Watching him, I’d long to be an adult and have a woman at my side in this land of fire and wind and waves, though I wouldn’t speak this forbidden desire, to love another woman, out loud until I turned nineteen. I thought love, when I found it, would undoubtedly cure all ills. 

As these nights darkened, the voices faded and became visual rather than auditory, like smoke, and mixed with the sounds of night movement: canvas sails, flagpoles, boats, buoys, waves. When I could no longer hold my eyes open, I'd make my way to the cabin and curl up on the green shag carpet until someone carried me to bed.

It is now hard to comprehend being compact enough to float in the arms of another under moonlight; or that most of the faces at that card table are now gone, their lives lived; or that I am now nearly my grandparents’ age, older than my parents were then; or that I have my own cabin just miles down the road; or that love would find me at a time when I could legally marry. 

But there we all were, the adults laughing into all hours of the night; and me, drifting through the shadows in someone’s arms, the sound of waves nudging me awake; love and adulthood just ideas I had.

Yesterday, after I had watched the video showing me how to kill a fish, I decided I had better get supplies. I drove two miles into Battle Lake, a village of eight hundred people nested on the edge of a lake by the same name.

At Ben’s Bait, high school boys waited behind cash registers next to black tubs of bubbling water. Having no idea where to start, I walked up to a tall boy standing at the till. "What do I need?"

"For what?" he asked, avoiding my eyes.

"To fish.”

"For what?"

"For fish," I said.

"Oh, ah—what kind?" he said, glancing finally at my face.

"I don't know," I paused. "The kind that hang around my dock."

I think this is funny. He doesn’t. Blank-faced, he walked out from behind the counter and led me to the fishing gear side of the store. He grabbed a tiny plastic bag full of hooks.

"These will work for most anything," he said, handing me the bag. "You have a rod?"

"Yes—I picked one up for two dollars at a garage sale." Charming detail, I thought. He remained unmoved. 

"Don’t I need something to weigh the line down?" I asked.

He grabbed a bag of lead-colored weights. "These should work."

"What about a bobber?" He took a few steps to a section filled with bright balls.

"Here,” he said and grabbed a red and white bobber the size of a golf ball.

We walked back to the cash register together. I put my goods on the counter and studied him as he tallied my inventory. He was a little lumpy around the waist, fighting a few pimples, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, with brown hair. I scanned the rest of the kids behind the cash register—all boys, some with facial hair, some just at the verge.

“Oh wait. What do I use? For bait?" I almost forgot the most essential element.

"Depends what you want to catch," he said.

"Well, how about sunfish?"

"I'd use suckers."

He walked over to the line of tubs and paused at one swarming with hundreds of black, gyrating leeches. I've had two encounters with leeches in my life. And each resulted in me throwing myself on the beach, raising my foot in the air, and screaming for someone, anyone, to remove the slimy creature from my foot.

"So, yeah. I'm not touching those," I said as he stirred the tub with a net. "What else?"        

"Minnows," he said and walked to another tank. I peeked in to see hundreds of shimmering inch-long fish zipping around. Much more pleasant.

"Okay—what do I do with them? I mean, how, exactly, do I put them on the hook?"

The boy put a tiny net in the water and pulled up a few minnows. He grabbed one from the jittery heap and let it flip around in his palm until he pinched it with two fingers and held it in front of me. 

"You stick the hook through the gill and then come back through the middle of his head." He traced the motion that my hook should make. I couldn't imagine doing such a terrible thing but nodded.

The boy took out a plastic bag, used a hose to fill it with water, and then added three scoops of minnows; they fell like almonds. He tied the bag, walked over to the register, and rang me up.

I had driven by Ben’s for years but had never needed to stop there until now. I considered the countless versions of myself whirling by this building in time and space. There I am, as a kid on the way to the lake with my folks; as a teenager dying to get to the water so that I could ski with friends; in my twenties balancing first female lovers, first jobs, first city apartments. And now, here I am, midlife, engaged to a woman and buying bait.

The boy ringing me up had a cracking voice and was undone by eye contact. I considered right then how time would change him. How at some point, he may come back to this water land, like me, hardly believing how four decades of his life have vanished. You have no idea what a mind fuck time is, I wanted to say as I turned to leave.

Almost every day that I’m at the cabin, I’ll sling a chair over my shoulder and walk to the end of the dock with coffee or a cocktail. I’ll then sit and watch the lake, trying to process its impossible color, a hue that churns between blue and green, between being of this earth and of the cosmos. 

I know I am at a precipice. That hundreds of years from now, these moments will be an indecipherable thread of time before the lake’s demise. Silver’s water is still drinkable, still habitable; still untouched by several common invasive species; still not totally suffocated by nitrates. And, hey, still full of fish that I can eat—so long as I am careful. And so, instead of indulging in romance novels or People, my guilty pleasure at the end of the dock, besides fishing, has been reading water quality reports. I’m obsessed and—by some act of God—riveted.

I had heard that the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency had declared none of the lakes in the southwestern corner of Minnesota suitable for fishing or swimming. None. Bacteria, nitrates, and sediment were the cited causes—which are all primarily connected to agriculture. After I learned this, I found and downloaded the “Impaired Waters Report” from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resource’s website. The report has several water quality classifications, providing a report card of sorts for monitored lakes. The contaminated lakes in the southwest have an “Affected Designation Use” of “Aquatic Recreation” and a “Pollutant or Stressor” of  “Nutrient/eutrophication biological indicators.” Put plainly: the lakes are polluted, mostly by agriculture. They can’t be used for recreation anymore. And certainly not for drinking.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune published an article about the situation with a telling headline: In farm country, tainted water is 'just the way it is.’ As costs climb to treat water, neighbors avoid blaming farmers. The article captured the rural attitude that I know well, where people will go to all lengths to defend neighbors and local industry from outside criticism.

Once, when my mom and I were shopping in Perham, a small town fifteen minutes from Otter Tail Lake, I commented on the stink in the air while absentmindedly flipping through a rack of discounted clothing at a sidewalk sale. The town is home to a dog food company, and on that day, the smell of ground-up body parts was unmistakable. “Gross, dog food,” I had said to Mom. She put her hand over her nose and shook her head in agreement. The clerk sitting on her lawn chair reading didn’t even look up when she said, “I smell jobs.”

The news about the southwest haunted me after I learned it. Indeed, they loved their lakes—coveted them—as we do in west-central Minnesota. Clear water is a badge of honor around here, and people throw out their lake Secchi number, which is a measure of lake transparency, as they might their child’s acceptance to an Ivy League school. And yet, if passing over Otter Tail County by plane, one would see blue orbs of water embedded like interruptions within miles of fields. We, too, are in an agricultural region. And like my family, many who have sought respite at these lakes for generations are farming families. 

I sorted the impacted waters report by Otter Tail County. Of the seventy-eight monitored lakes in the county, twelve had the same designation as those in the southwest. Most of the rest, including Otter Tail, had an “Affected Designated Use” of “Aquatic Consumption” and a “Pollutant or Stressor” of “Mercury in Fish Tissue.” That was easier to translate. The fish are poisoned. 

Likely too small to monitor, Silver is not yet listed in the impaired water report. I had hunted for information and found a report on Silver produced by RMB Environmental Laboratories. On a calm, warm night a few weeks ago, I mixed a gin and tonic and got cozy at the end of the dock with the report in hand. I pored over statistics for Silver’s levels of phosphorus, chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen, pH, chloride, alkalinity, and nitrogen levels and was proud to see that Silver is within normal ranges for the ecoregion. In a measurement that calculates the algae living in a waterbody, Silver Lake is a Mesotrophic lake. The scale goes from the clearest, Oligotrophic to Mesotrophic, Eutrophic, and then Hypereutrophic. A Hypereutrophic lake is dense with green, providing habitat for fish like carp. To look into a Mesotrophic lake like Silver is a little bit like looking through a semi-transparent piece of green sea glass.

As I got further into the RBM report, my stomach tightened when I read that agriculture is one of Silver’s main threats:

Mapping analysis shows that 54.8% of the Silver Lake lake shed is disturbed by development and agriculture. The threshold of disturbance where water quality tends to decline is 25%. Silver    Lake is over this threshold. Some of the agricultural land is in pasture, which has less runoff potential than row crops. A more accurate estimate of disturbed land is 43.7%, which is still above the 25% threshold. None of this agricultural land is along the lakeshore, however, so there appears to be no agricultural runoff into the lake. Conversations with a lake resident confirmed this fact.

I found the citation about a conversation with a lake resident curious in a scientific report. I imagined a scientist with a clipboard, looking for potential runoff patterns, and Farmer Joe walking by, shaking his head, “Nah, that’s no problem here.”

How hard it is to internalize that farming—an alchemy between soil and plant so deeply embedded in my family’s DNA, from which I am a beneficiary—is the leading destroyer of our water land. 

When I was still a child, on one of those wet spring days, I finally did what I had longed to do while watching the field’s white caps: I swam. 

The water, up to my chest, was cold and gritty with sediment. My feet sank into soft mud that I knew would soon harden and become a sort of womb from which corn would grow. I swam with two friends, all of us screaming the way teenagers will, thrilled with ourselves that we’d run into a field so flush with water that it had actual waves. Our body movements mimicked astronauts’; with each step, the mud would threaten to envelop us, but we’d pull, jerk, and then regain the weightlessness afforded by water. Up and down we went, for as long as we could take the cold in this lake of our own invention. This swim, a spontaneous dip in our clothes, had been for me a lifetime in the making: I had finally willed my own prairie lake into being. Now that swim, that blend of lake and field, seems to me foreboding. 

While I don’t hear people talk about agricultural runoff around here, they do talk about a more visible threat: zebra mussels. The mussels are safe to name because they are foreign invaders from other states and countries, originating in Russia and the Ukraine before moving into the Great Lakes and then making their way to us. 

Zebra mussels impact a lake’s ecosystem. They gorge on microscopic algae, which sets off a chain reaction that depletes the fish’s food supply. Water clarity may increase from the mussels’ munching, but the impact to the fish population can be destructive. They also interfere with swimming because they have a razor-sharp edge, making it necessary to wear water shoes. Their long-term impact is not entirely known. 

Silver Lake does not yet have a zebra mussel infestation, but their presence is a foregone conclusion. In 2009 they arrived in the area at Pelican Lake, just north of here. And since then the mussels have taken thrill rides, latching on to boats and waterfowl, taking up new homes in Otter Tail, West Battle, and many of the nearby lakes. 

Right now when I walk through the water, the sand bottom is like velvet. I can scale the rocks that line the shore with ease. When the mussels come, I will no longer be able to do this without risking slices to my feet, my injuries minor in proportion to the harm inflicted upon the lake.

Do fish feel pain? When do they die? When is the point of transition? Is this sporadic movement simply an involuntary reaction of nerves, like I recall from butchering day at our neighbor’s, where headless chickens roamed the yard? I don't know, but I can't stand that this fish is still alive—even if only in appearance. And the others nearby are still moving in ungodly ways, expressing pure anguish. How do people stand this?

When I had asked around about how to kill a fish, several people had told me to bop the fish on the head. "That sounds terrible," I had said, eschewing their advice and proceeding to do my own research. But my snap-the-fish's-neck-with-a-knife method is clearly not working. With Emily still standing in disbelief, I grab the fish, hold it down, and hit it on the head with the hammer. As much as I want to end the process, I can't muster more than a gentle tap. It slides off of the cookie sheet and onto the driveway still flipping. "Oh my God. How the hell do I kill it?" I say. I grab the fish and hit it again, with no more strength than if I were stamping it with ink. I thought fishing would sit okay with me since fish are low on the food chain. I didn't account for how I might react to the butchering process. While fish might not be intelligent, they are creatures. Creatures with eyes. Creatures trying to breathe. I am not desensitized enough to not care. And yet, I am now thumping a bloody fish on the head with a hammer.

Earlier this morning, I found most of the minnows floating bloated and lifeless on the bucket’s surface. Flies had started a feeding frenzy. This should have been my warning. Proceed no further. This will not go well. Instead I took the bucket, walked to the end of the dock, took a deep breath, and cupped a minnow in my hand. The only saving grace of the fish kill was that it was much easier to spear a half-dead minnow for bait. I cast the line into the water, sat down, and took a sip of my coffee. I had expected to wait all morning, but within just a few minutes, I had a tug. I stood up, braced myself, and slowly reeled in the line. I pulled the fish out of the water; it wiggled, eyes alert. Through my gloves, I could feel the fish: hard, wet, muscular, and unpredictable. The fish kept coming, one after another. Fishing felt easy, until now.

I pull up a video on my phone about how to clean a sunfish. I prop the phone on a rock. I rake the blunt end of the knife over the body toward the head; the scales pop like corn off of a cob. Next, I make an incision near the gills and pull the knife down the body, detaching a thin slice of flesh. My knife is dull; the cuts show up like jagged tears. I work as fast as I can until the only thing left is a pitifully small morsel of meat.

The last fish is different than the sunnies, with an oval-shaped mouth and dark patches that look like liver spots. Prehistoric. It starts to squirm. I throw it back into the basket, run to the dock, and lower it into the water. I want some last act of restitution. It lies still, floats. Too late. I pull it out and take it back to my work area to clean it.

My stomach turns at the thought of eating my catch, but I know I must to honor their sacrifice. I rinse the flesh under cold water, dip it in egg, and roll it in flour and Panko flakes. I spread the pile on the grill, where it quickly turns golden brown, transitioning from fish to food. I taste a small corner—crispy and salty.

I put a plate in front of Emily. “I’m sorry. After what I just saw I can’t,” she says, poking the fish with a fork. “There’s just no way,” she says.

I look at her, shake my head, grab her plate and scrape her portion onto mine. “Think about how fresh this is—gourmet food right here,” I say, though I feel the same. I force myself to eat the scale-filled pile in front of me to recuse myself and to absorb the fishes’ mercury-laced flesh into mine.

After dinner, I walk to the end of the dock and sit in the spot where earlier in the day everything began. Watching this shifting waterscape, I feel unnerved, like I do in bad dreams with foreboding attackers. The pace of my stalkers is what gets me. They feel no need to rush. Instead, they take one confident step and then another—the end is already written. And this is how I feel—knowing that an inevitable future is coming. That Silver—this tiny blip of blue, in this water land of my childhood—is in trouble. And so I try to memorize how the lake catches the setting sun; how it twists light into fractured color: orange-rose, then a green-plum, and then a filter of sepia and taupe. I try to see, for those who will come after me. 

Perhaps I am pessimistic to think Silver is someday doomed. And yet, we have already ruined far greater marvels of the world. We are destroying our oceans, heating our only habitat, and we hardly flinch as spectacular species are lost to us forever. One would think, with our evolved conscience and our fine-tuned sensibilities, we would do anything within our power to protect these places that we covet. 

Stars start to bleed through the blackened sky. I close my eyes and listen. A fish breaks the surface. And then, “Honey, coming?” Emily calls through the night air, through the blue of twilight, through the mirage of time, through the memories of my childhood to me, the adult, sitting here now. Here, at midlife, I will marry a woman; a once impossible outcome, made possible in only the last bit of human history. I place my hand on my chest and suddenly know that I’m thinking about it all wrong. With Emily’s voice hanging in the air, and mercury-kissed fish inside of me, I realize that this lake and I are both poisoned and pure. We are both beholden to the whims of an imperfect but beautiful humanity. And in a land where so many roads lead to a new shore, nothing is ever a foregone conclusion.

MELANIE HOFFERT IS THE AUTHOR OF PRAIRIE SILENCE, WHICH WON THE MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD IN MEMOIR AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION. MELANIE HAS BEEN PUBLISHED IN SEVERAL LITERARY JOURNALS INCLUDING THE BALTIMORE REVIEW, NEW MILLENNIUM WRITINGS AND UNDER THE SUN, WHICH EACH SELECTED HER WORK AS THE RECIPIENT OF THEIR CREATIVE NON-FICTION WRITING AWARDS. MELANIE CURRENTLY SPLITS HER TIME BETWEEN HER HOME IN MINNEAPOLIS AND HER CABIN NEAR BATTLE LAKE, MINNESOTA WHERE SHE IS FINISHING A MEMOIR CALLED WATER LAND. SHE CAN BE FOUND AT: WWW.MELANIEHOFFERT.COM.