Arthur and I went out in the boat today. It was the first time of the season.
The water was flat. The sky was partly overcast, but it was not unpleasant. Arthur decided to go out because he heard our neighbor Joe was going to be out – on a different boat. I think Arthur is a bit of a “go with what others are doing” on matters of seeking to catch fish. So if Joe was going to go try, well then he damn well better go try too.
I’ve observed before, that Arthur’s engagement in and interest in fishing is surprisingly social in nature. He’s always looking at other boats, speculating what and if they are catching, asking other people what they’ve caught and where, etc. And of course he is motivated by the catching more than the sport of it, too – he likes to have the fish caught and in the freezer. They are a currency that he uses to lubricate his social relationships with his far-flung friends and family down in the lower 48.
In fact, I often feel that with respect to the act of fishing in itself, Arthur doesn’t really enjoy it. He lacked the patience even when he was at the height of his faculties, and he quickly becomes frustrated with every single little mishap or unexpected complication in his procedures.
We never made it past Craig, today. First we had problems with the small motor (the “kicker,” used for trolling). That turned out to be an idiot-move on my part. The motor has a “lock” such that if it is in gear, it won’t start. And I was trying to start it in gear. And we were starting to take the motor apart. I can only blame Arthur in that it didn’t occur to him to check my efforts to turn over the motor with the starter using the ignition – where he might have noticed it was in gear.
Well, that got us off to a bad start. Arthur was grumpy.
And we had no end of difficulties with the downriggers. One simply wouldn’t work at all. The other seemed intermittent, and then he was fiddling with it and went and disconnected the coupling at the end of the wire. That had to be reassembled, which is detail-oriented work requiring fine motor skills. Arthur doesn’t have much of a supply of those, but the situation is rendered much, much worse by his lack of patience and very short temper. Soon he was cussing and throwing things.
When he gets like this in the house, I just leave. I go outside, or I hide in my attic. It passes – he doesn’t stew in it. But on the boat, there is no escape. And my very presence was one of the annoyances driving him mad. He sees me as barely competent even at the best of times, and the incident with motor before leaving the dock had only reinforced his utter distrust of my competence in the current moment. He found my efforts to help almost completely unacceptable.
He found uncountable ways to criticize things. Small things. “Aren’t you watching the shore? We’re getting too close.” No, I was trying to insert the wire in the end-assembly, I thought you were watching it. Et cetera.
To be honest, going out in the boat with Arthur has almost always been one of the most stressful aspects of my time here with him. He wants to be in charge, sees me as a hindrance half the time and an incompetent but tolerable neer-do-well the other half.
Days like today, I feel tempted to just let him go out by himself, and if that’s the end of it, so be it.
