Fish in a Well

Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism Board ​When I was a kid my parents used to take us to Newfoundland, a rocky island off the eastern coast of Canada, a land of pristine seas, icebergs, puffins, and moose. We went to visit our relatives. Hardy women who could fillet fish and make jam. Ruddy-faced men who drank too much and sang old Hank Williams tunes in their cozy kitchens. They all spoke with a variation of an Irish brogue.
 
My parents were born there. To their little Yankee kids, it was fantasy land. We grew up in New Jersey in a blighted urban landscape, a town with whose creek had become a “cric,” filled with garbage and topped with the sheen of petroleum. Our favorite place to play was an old trash incinerator that had been shut down when it was revealed to be raining hazardous particulates upon the town. But Newfoundland sparkled and smelled good. The rocky hills, the thick grass and the deep blue sea were more vivid because the air was clean.
 
My aunts and uncles lived in a town where everybody let their horses run free in the summer. They’d be hanging out in the church parking lot or in front of the only store in town. My aunts and uncles had an outhouse and a barn and an old tom cat. The trail behind the house was filled with yellow-streaked spiders. My uncles raised hares for meat. The male hare was gigantic. He must have weighed twenty pounds, with a thick dewlap. Needless to say, my little friends back in New Jersey did not believe me when I told them about the monster bunny.
Not my uncle's hare, but very much like it. ​Newfoundland was the first place I trudged through a bog, climbed up a cliff face and shot a gun (it was a .22 rifle). It was also the first place I’d ever been where you had to go outside in the morning and draw water from a well to brush your teeth, or in the case of the adults, make your morning tea.
 
The well had a fish in it. Every morning I went out more to see the fish than to draw water. I felt bad for it. My uncle explained that the fish ate the bugs in the well. That for a fish, it was a good, safe life. I felt a little better after that, but I realize now, I should have liberated that fish. I think it would have much rather lived in the harbor, even if it wasn’t as safe.
 
I remember that fish when I get discouraged being an independent author and freelance editor. To be an entrepreneur is a difficult road. I’ve made so many mistakes. I’m sure I’ll make many more. I’ve tried to hold my pages of lovingly produced prose up above the flood of books on the market, so many of them engaging and well-written. Social media is not second nature to me like it is to the young. There are times I loathe it with a nuclear intensity.
 
I try to hang on to the great feeling I get when readers tell me they loved my book. I tell myself that bad reviews have value, even when they give me horrible stomach aches.
 
Sometimes I want to hang it up. Get a better day job. Focus on my external career and not spend so much time in my head.
 
Then I remember the fish. Not the well fish. Just a fish. Who wants to live in a well, snatching safe paychecks from the surface of the water? Who wants to live in a tiny space, according to other people’s rhythms? Oh, I know, we all have to do it to an extent. But I’ll keep trying to swim in the indie ocean, because when I reach the open sea, the only boundary is my imagination, and that's hell of a lot of fun.   ​