Photo by Suzanne Keating

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An Accidental Academy

We had traveled to Ekenäs, a town of Swedish-speaking Finns, for the best of reasons. And then we were blessed with luck, though it did not seem so at first.

We lived in Moscow, and Suzanne had been expecting our fourth child. But she could not find a maternity hospital she trusted there. So three weeks before the due date we rode the overnight train to Finland, bound for a hospital with a good reputation. My plan was to set up the family in an apartment, head back to Russia for work, and return for the big day.

Suzanne woke early the first morning with contractions. False labor, we thought. She had delivered three children already. We had seen this pattern before. Within an hour it was clear the labor was not false. We started walking for the hospital with our three children in tow. We had no phone. The town was asleep. We did not know where the hospital was. Soon Suzanne was in advanced labor on the lawn of a gray stone church. I wondered, Would she deliver this baby here? A car came by. I hailed it and we piled inside. The driver, a man in a pressed white shirt and red tie, looked at Suzanne. She was between contractions, perfectly calm. Another contraction seized her. She stiffened and moaned. "This only happens in the movies," he said and put his car into gear. Ten minutes after we arrived at the hospital, William was born.

What did this have to do with fishing? Living in Russia and having William in Finland created certain problems. We could not travel with him to Russia yet, because he had neither a passport nor the visa required to cross a border. And getting a passport and visa would take weeks. All plans were upended. I would not be going back to Moscow this day. We had begun an impromptu vacation, marooned on an island in the northern Baltic Sea.

The idea appeared that evening, as Suzanne and I sat in the apartment's kitchen, gazing at our newborn. A summer-session fishing academy would be held. I would teach the boys to fish, preparing for the lives ahead.

Catching On

Summer twilights extend nearly to morning in Ekenäs, where drenching rains inland drain past the islands and create eddies in a sweetwater flow.

It was June 18. I sat in the glow planning lessons in fishing and safety skills. Some would be easy, like baiting hooks, setting bobbers, and unhooking and handling fish. Others would take time, like learning to jig. And a few would be frustrating at first, like developing the timing required to snap out proper casts. There would also be important lessons-including filleting, which required handling a finely sharpened blade-that they would only watch. But fishing is not just an assemblage of skills. It is a mentality, a way of viewing your surroundings in fundamental terms, as a naturalist and a predator alert to the world. I would teach my boys about the food web and the life cycles of whatever fish lived here, and the joys and satisfactions, embedded in their DNA, of harvesting their own food.

At first the perch came slowly. But after a few days of plumbing the harbor, we found patterns-and bigger fish. I sensed that we had stumbled onto a boon. I am a lifelong and essentially addicted fisherman. Proximity to gamefish has influenced where I attended college, where I have worked, and ultimately where my wife and I decided to buy a house in Rhode Island, for our upcoming move back to the United States. And I knew something important as I set out to teach Jack and Mick during this unexpected window in family time: that no matter how many lessons I had in mind, without a cooperative and tasty run of fish, my informal angling academy could flop.

But Ekenäs, as it happened, had yellow perch. And what could be better? Perch are small and handsome and feed in packs. They strike hard but fight lightly. They prey on a range of forage, feed in varied conditions, are comfortable in the shallows, and are not especially selective. They have no sharp teeth, making hook removal safe. They would be my assistants. If I could put the boys near the perch, the perch would do much of the teaching themselves.

Within a week, Jack and Mick were moving from epiphany to epiphany. Mickey, his blond hair trimmed tight and bleaching under the sun, was fishing simultaneously with a rod and with a handline. He handled the second line instinctively, like an ice fisherman of yore, wiggling a small vertical jig with a piece of worm. He quickly fooled a heavy perch, nearly a foot long. It flopped on the dock and he dove on it like a loose football. He was 4 years old, a child adrift in time.

"Jack," he shouted. "Jack! Look!"