Gone Fishin'!

Allie and I don't fish. We eat fish (for me this is a relatively recent development), but we don't catch them. We don't like killing things (with the exception of fruit flies and mosquitoes), and quite frankly, we think fish are kind of cute. But at Colinas de Poás, a nature reserve in the mountains, there is a fishing pond, and the young adults we are with decide they are going fishing. So we go along. I feel safe, because the fishing poles are bamboo shoots, and the line is tied onto the end, with a simple hook tied onto the other end. I'm no fisher-woman, but I have seen fishing poles in the U.S. and they are pretty fancy. One time in Alaska, my brother and dad spent hundreds of dollars on fishing gear, and didn't catch a thing. So I'm pretty sure I can sit here with my line in the water and not have to worry about actually catching or killing a fish. We're not even using worms! Just some kind of fish bate that looks like miniature dog food. I throw my line in, and we start snapping pictures. I'm smiling at the story I can tell... "Yeah, we didn't catch anything..." when suddenly I feel a tugging on my line. "¡Tira, tira!" Jordan yells. So I pull. I'm not reeling anything in- there's no reel, so I just yank up on the bamboo shoot and pull the line out of the water. To my utter amazement, there is a fish, flopping around on my line. He's definitely still alive. For some reason, I thought the hook would just kill him, but I guess that doesn't really make sense, now that I think about it. I'm enough of a girl, and at enough of a loss of what to do now, that I decide to follow my instincts, and I scream. Fabián laughs, but Jordan comes to my rescue. He wrestles the slippery, flopping fish off the line, and pulls back on the head to kill it. This makes my stomach churn a little, but at least now he's out of his misery, right?

Allie is watching the whole ordeal, and decides she's seen enough. No fishing for her. But something in me wants some company (misery loves company, right?...okay, maybe it's not that bad...) so I convince her that she at least needs to put her line in the water so we can take a picture and have proof that we went fishing. At long last, she complies. And as we snap a few shots, there is a tug on her line. "I knew it!", she exclaims. She pulls, and we all gasp at the huge fish she has caught. Her face is priceless. That's probably what everyone was thinking about me a few moments ago. We go through a similar process and with two fish in our bucket, we've had enough. We settle down to watch the others, and are pleased to note that Kimberly is not a whole lot more comfortable with the whole thing than we were. We snap a few shots with her face scrunched up and tongue sticking out as she pulls in a few fish. This helps us feel not quite as silly, but at the same time, most everyone around seems to be doing alright. We have someone else clean our fish, and put them on ice so we can take them home and...cook them...(I can handle fillets no problem, but cooking a whole fish?...this will be interesting).

Now, maybe this whole thing is just proof that Allie and I really are girly girls, despite the fact that we fancy ourselves out-doorsey. But it really has me thinking. I remember the lettering on a package of chicken breasts I was preparing back home that said "grown in California". I'm not a farmer, but I do know that you don't grow chickens. Somehow, though, it sounded better than raised- it helped me feel farther away from the fact that the chicken I was getting ready to cook had once been a living, breathing, clucking thing. It almost made the meat seem like a vegetable. In Costa Rica things from the meat markets with whole chickens and the fish with their heads still on, to, most recently, our fishing experience, it is clear that people here aren't so afraid to get close to the source of their food. This is probably really healthy. Pretending that meat is a plant can't be good for you. I've stumbled upon a stark cultural contrast. Back home we go to great lengths to separate ourselves from the process of raising, slaughtering, and butchering meat. Here it is still a part of life, and people don't seem to spend much time worrying about its unpleasantness. Jordan wasn't afraid to touch the fish (or kill the fish, for that matter)- it was just part of the process. I will admit that it freaked me out a bit to get close to that process, but I feel like it is something so normal that so many people do, and that my own culture has blinded me to. Maybe I'm learning more about myself than anything else, but I guess that's a big reason we seek to understand others. I got a lot more than I expected out of a little fishing trip. I wonder what I'll learn from cooking them...