By Julie Gard
In 1963, I knew a girl who fished alone. She snuck into the mess hall with her sly, crooked smile. I sat at a table with my parents and brothers, breakfast time at Mount Glory Methodist Church Camp’s fall family retreat. They argued over plans for the day while I watched her come in, just watched her. She ate all the eggs she wanted, standing up.
After breakfast, I followed this girl to the dock. She stood at its edge in firm boots and rolled-up jeans. Her legs were as strong as the dock pilings. She knelt and picked up her fishing pole, and it blended in with the naked trees. She stood out there all day while the families made felt collages and sticky leather lanyards in the mess hall.
The things she pulled out of the river with her wooden stick and strong string! Bits of seaweed, of course. Tadpoles, guppies, the occasional wayward oyster. And sailfish, walleyed pike, sour Atlantic cod. She caught fish never before seen in those waters. Lake trout and fluke in a river! She lifted them out of the Delaware with a long wind and a flourish and thought nothing of it.
She caught my favorite books, The Borrowers, The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Heidi, and the entire Nancy Drew series. They were leather-bound copies and hardly wet. She caught animals, ones that didn't belong in the river—waterlogged puppies, heavy cats with stripes, even a lizard, lanky and going pale to meet the color of the sky as she held him up against it and carefully pulled the hook out of his slack mouth. The creatures with legs walked down the long dock, shaking off water and passing right by me on their way into the woods.
She called out to me after a while. “I like trees,” she said. “My name’s Margaret.”
“Janie,” I called back, and she nodded, grown-out bangs flopping over one eye.
Copies of Look Magazine and Life, newsstand fresh, and cacti from Arizona, budding blistering red above the green. Smooth bits of tiger wood carved into unrecognizable shapes, black holes, gusts of wind, premonitions, daguerreotypes in carved cases, rusted cymbals, an accordion, a water-warped guitar, and an orange and magenta balloon. Margaret pulled my heart from the water, small and beating on the end of her line. She unhooked it, walked up the dock, and handed it to me. You could say that, under a scrappy pine, my life as I’ve known it began.
Julie Gard’s prose poetry collection I Think I Know You was a finalist for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and additional books include Home Studies and Scrap: On Louise Nevelson. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in Gertrude, Clackamas Literary Review, Blackbox Manifold, and other journals. She lives in Duluth, Minnesota with her partner, the poet Michelle Matthees, and teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. You can find her online at www.juliegard.com.
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