Catch and release

I guess we're kind of an odd family. One night this week when Macauley and I took Booker for a walk on the trail behind our house, we noticed a spot where the creek is usually a good 7 feet deep that had dried out to only puddles. In one of those puddles, we saw a large fish thrashing about, with little water to survive in and no place to swim to. We made a mental note to tell Dad when he got home from work. Ryan worked really late and just when he sat down on the couch to relax, we remembered to tell him about the distressed fish. He immediately got up, filled the cooler with water from the hose, and we all 3 (plus Book) trekked down to the creek. Ryan and Macauley scaled down the bank and Ryan caught the big fish with his hands and dumped it into the cooler. It only fought a little at first. Ryan said it reminded him of our cat Avrie, who we have moved to 6 different houses over the years, and who will fight with all her might not to be caught and shoved into the pet taxi but eventually just flops over dramatically in submission like, Take me. Do what you will. I surrender. We've had that cat for 13 years and only in the last 6 months has she begun to come to our laps on the furniture and not exist in constant fear of us. Like she's finally figured out that if we moved her with us 6 times we might actually want her and have no plans to harm her. But I digress.

Ryan found 4 other small fish in the puddle, which had evaporated even more since we'd last been there, along with a frantic minnow that he also grabbed. We ran through a scenario involving the big daddy fish telling the kids all that time they'd been trapped in the puddle to hang in there, that he'd get them out of this mess somehow, get them to fresh open water if they'd just follow him.

We put the cooler in the back of my 4Runner and drove over to Rivercut, where we dumped the cooler into the James River. The big fish lingered a little while and let Ryan pet it before he swam away.

So our good deed was done. Still haven't reconciled these events with the fact that Macauley had just had fishsticks for dinner that evening...