Big fish

There’s this metal art piece near the river in the city I live that depicts a fish. Some friends and I sometimes gather with picnic blankets on the grassy lawn that surrounds the piece. We don’t particularly care for the art, but the spot is out of the way enough that no one bothers us there while also being fairly accessible. It’s also within walking distance to a pub with gender-neutral toilets, making it ideal for a group made up mostly of disabled and/or queer people.

Nonetheless, the art piece, affectionately called “big fish,” has acquired an almost sacred reputation within our social circle, though we know little about who made it or why. Actually, only recently did we learn that the “innards” of the fish are made of stained glass. You wouldn’t know this from looking at the thing, as it’s so dirty that only a small amount of colour bleeds through the grime.

Since neither the city council nor anyone else seems to care for big fish, I put forward that perhaps we should take it upon ourselves to (carefully) clean the thing. Someone else mentioned that we should maybe bring big fish a suitably pretty and biodegradable gift to honour it. But we’re all talk. Probably we will do neither of these things.

It’s funny how people can make a mundane place feel pseudo-venerated. I think of dens friends and I would occupy as children, favourite trees that provided us shade on hot days, or the field next to some ruined building where I used to get high in college. I have spent lots of time and consumed many things I shouldn’t have in outdoor “spots” made beautiful by the people who frequented them. Though to be clear, I now much prefer a café than any patch of grass.

Recently, one of my fellow big fish admirers told me she’s making plans to go off-grid. She says she just needs a couple years to get some “stuff” together, and then it’s a life of self-sufficiency for her. She would not elaborate on this further. More talk, probably. She does like to chat nonsense occasionally and, to her credit, she’s gotten very good at it over the years.

Still, I get the fantasy. A few years ago I would daydream about living in remote places. I’d watch documentaries about polluted Russian ghost towns, Alaskan settlements where the sun disappears for months, and islands in the middle of the Atlantic with populations in the dozens and think, yeah, that looks cozy. I guess I wanted not to be bothered, or maybe to lose myself altogether.

I don’t daydream about these places any more. Any place can become sacred or feel like home, but you need people. Moreover, you need your people. And I can’t help but think the kind of fellow weirdos I call friends are probably hard to come by in the middle of an ocean or north of Juneau.