The e-mail conversation had nothing to do with mental illness, originally. Robert Ketley — a name you’ve seen in this magazine, and will again, now as Gearhead columnist — contacted the Editor to report his fondness for My Family and Other Animals, by the naturalist Gerald Durrell. It’s a book that Rob mentioned once here and that I recommended again last issue. Wrote Rob, “My mom handed me a tattered paperback copy of the book when I left the UK in 1985. We had shared this book for many years and it was our absolute favorite. She wrote the following note on the inside cover: ‘You can’t start a new life without the family bible.’”
That Robert’s well-worn copy came over from Great Britain intrigued me: the copyright page in my hardcover edition, scavenged from a used-book stack, sternly insists, “Not for sale in the United States of America.” I never did find out why, although the publisher’s imprint was a tiny crest that looked a little King Georgish, suggesting the possibility of a seriously long grudge. The more pressing problem, however, was that when I tried to buy My Family and Other Animals as a gift for others, I couldn’t find it, for a decade at least, until finally a paperback series of Gerald Durrell’s works came out. Among these was his first novel, Rosy Is My Relative — the tale of a timid young Englishman whose uncle wills him an alcoholic elephant. (I’m just a little suspicious that somebody made a movie of this idea.) Rosy is pure slapstick, but funny enough that two readings ripped me a six-pack of abs.
Anyway, like me, Ketley finds My Family and Other Animals “a wonderful antidote for trying times.” He, too, has considered giving it to people in need of levity in life, or near the end, as long as they still had laughter left.
From there we contemplated topics ranging from Winnie the Pooh — specifically, Rob’s adaptation of “Winnie the Pooh Sticks” for gauging current speed — to the fourth-dimensional implications of the insult “flat-earther,” which, at his end, involved something called “Quantum Entanglement” (a “real thing,” apparently).
Somewhere in there, Rob sent me a link to his favorite pattern, the Wobble Fly.” When I realized this was also my favorite tie, called by me by its Christian name, “The Tullis Wiggler,” I leapt to the obvious conclusion: Mr. Ketley and I are twins, separated before birth, born to different parents living on different continents in different years. And while I’ve no idea what he sounds or looks like, I’m quite sure we could swap kidneys and most-favored 5-weights.
I didn’t mention this epiphany to Rob: twins don’t need to explain such things. But our next subject surely validated my conviction.
Mullet. Mullet — not the hairstyle, you know, but saltwater and brackish water fish — is a tantalizing topic to say the least, though not at the top of many fly fishers’ lists. OK, so maybe not any of their lists; but schools of these sleek, strong, fast beasts now fill the river near Rob’s office, where, he says, “No one I know has ever seen them . . . and that includes biologists with decades in the field. I suspect El Niño is to blame. Anyway, I’m planning to go after them when the season opens in December (it’s a steelhead river). I caught some on bread in the UK, but haven’t tried for them with flies.” To this he added a sly invitation: “Any ideas that don’t involve tortillas or seafood salad? It’s freshwater, so chumming is illegal.”
“Tortillas or seafood salad” I read. Suddenly a “Say what?” creased my brows, which happens when I don’t say that question aloud.
It’s flattering when somebody remembers something you’ve written. It’s disturbing when you struggle to recognize the reference, in this case to a North County San Diego “Meander” published many moonlit tides ago. For the record, it was a curious fellow I met, an agate hunter, who offered those baiting suggestions, shortly before opening up about of his life as a Coast Guard gunner boarding drug boats in the Caribbean.
Long story, already told. To Rob, I could only confess, “Unhappily, I don’t know of any fishers who regularly catch mullet, except on bread in the Mediterranean, or with nets. All the species I’ve read about seem to be herbivores of some kind — a pity about that, since they fight and eat so well. Then again, there are always firsts, so you may want to design and tie algae imitations, or better yet, a line of ‘Ketley’s Finest Fruit Flies.’ Without any evidence whatsoever, I’m convinced they would like bananas.”
“I like the tropical fruit idea,” he responded, “but bananas in a boat is seriously bad voodoo. You know that. Steamed plantains maybe?”
Maybe. “Mullet do taste good,” he continued, “ but I won’t be eating any from the river. It’s heavily impacted by ag runoff and has chronically high levels of pesticides, herbicides, nutrients, and bacteria. Hard to believe a few steelhead still manage to run upstream and spawn.” But they do, and he believes in them, with faith enough that he’s “quietly” seeking funding to restore a stream nearly beyond repair. He sends a photo of a beautiful buck “rescued from a drying pool,” a fish deep red on its cheeks, crimson from belly to tail below the lateral line. “Running a linear trendline off the young-of-year and smolt data suggests they have about 10 years left, though the drought may have shortened that.” He suspects the river’s remaining steelhead will die out, “but hopefully we can restore enough of the watershed hydrology to provide viable habitat for future strays that will hopefully run the river by mistake.”
Does some of that language sound a little technical to you, reader? Did I mention that I still didn’t know what Rob did for a living, despite an offhand remark about his one-time position as “‘Head Garbage Guy . . . a title I gave myself when a TV reporter interviewed me and she seemed a bit sad. It made her laugh, so I kept it.”
I would have asked him directly, about then, if in the same e-mail he hadn’t included this: “Yes the mullet piece stuck with me,” as did essays about another subject: “Having spent a brief period working at a children’s mental hospital in London, and having two friends who were nurses at the facility, pieces that touch on mental health always get my attention. Your earlier Meanders for example.”
That twin thing again. Unbeknownst to Rob (consciously, at least), at the moment this message pinged my computer I was at work on a new project, part of which involves reviewing the same “Meanders” he remembers, along with notes about clients and incidents I’d written over decades. My reply:
Many of the mental health meanders are those I remember best, along with “Saving Grace,” a short story first published in FR&R. My career in that field lasted 25 years, ending in 2008. Even today I am haunted by clients’ stories. In fact, for the last month I’ve been examining vignettes I’ve written about them, motivated in part by dismay about the systems that continue to fail this population, in part by outrage over the grotesque characterizations of sadistic sociopaths deemed “schizophrenic” by defense attorneys and media. Just last night, I saw two programs that used “schizophrenic” and “sociopath” interchangeably. I’ve met thousands of the former, and hundreds of the latter, and this cavalier confusion is like insisting that since plantains and hagfish are shaped alike, they might as be one and same creature — who cares? (Never mind the bad biology/botany of that metaphor; they are that different, except for rare, nightmare cases when somebody is both.)
In effect, between six and eight million people — schizophrenics less likely to kill anyone than 18-year-old American males — live under a stigma for an entirely different and unrelated condition, a disturbance in consciousness that’s equated in these accounts with a wholesale lack of conscience.
The exchanges that followed between Rob and me likely run ten thousand words. Most are mine, many opinionated and didactic, some ferociously so. But Rob had his own interest. His time in the halfway house had marked him — “Like you, I have images that are burned in” — and he’d watched the impact on married friends working with troubled children. “They carried a psychological burden few people can imagine. I was sad, but not surprised, when drugs, depression, and infidelity tore them apart.” As for schizophrenia, two people he knew well and cared for suffered from the disorder, “Both very talented young men who will never be able to fulfill their potential.” Rob wondered about those fellows and behaviors he’d observed.
The first example I offered to illustrate a point that might help described an incident with one of the clients I took fishing in a program I started at Villa Fairmont Mental Health Center, Alameda County’s largest locked ward, outings I continued at Eden Day Treatment.
I’m tempted to insert that story here, but won’t. What I will add, however, is this:
A fishing adventure launched from a locked ward will cause readers over 50 to smile and nod, recalling One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Yes, well; then there’s reality. With the exception of people in the manic phase of Bipolar Disorder Type 1, those who suffer from serious mental illnesses don’t want to “go crazy” — they’ve been there, done that. That way lies many tears. What they want, desperately, is to get and stay sane. For some, fishing was something they had always wanted to do. For others, it brought back memories of better times with family. Either way, fishing represented normalcy to my wards, one of those “regular person” pleasures stripped away by diseases that steal essential hopes . . . of having a spouse and children, a career, a home and car . . . hell, just a damn sport or hobby to enjoy.
Here’s how it really looks.
Clients walk single file along the tree-shadowed trails of San Pablo and Lafayette Reservoirs. They walk quietly, carrying outfits furnished by the hospital and from my tackle collection, and when those break, spincast combos scavenged from garage sales.
Were they excited? Yes, usually nervously at first. Forests and lakes are alien environments to those used to the crowds, noise, and brilliant fluorescence flooding of locked-ward hospital hallways, an always-edgy environment patrolled by staff that supply structure, security, containment when necessary. In fact, every day they see or hear people forcibly restrained . . . but that is familiar. “Wild,” by contrast, can be fascinating or frightening, especially for low-functioning folks long institutionalized. Do squirrels bite? Those ducks swimming at me so fast and quacking so loud — what do they want? Will they hurt me? No? So can I feed them my lunch?
Things were different at Eden Day Treatment, when I took fishing parties out from what was then the biggest and best outpatient program in Alameda County — now dead. Clients were generally “high-functioning,” more relaxed, sometimes knowledgeable. One, a Barbie-dimensioned girl with — understandably — a chip on her shoulder the size of Ken, taught me that jacksmelt will, by God, take a salmon egg. And back at the center, how they talked about their adventures!
So do Rob and I: about striper fishing at San Luis, fly fishing the beach, the physics of line movement through guides; also genetics, brain diseases and damage, how the ears hear and eyes see and the mind interprets; and on. In time, I find out he manages a water system in central California. Or did until just recently, when he retired to pursue other projects, including writing. A point of pride and pleasure: “The central coast regional water board staff presented me with a framed, Norse-style ballad — The Ballad of Robert K. It chronicles my battle with blue-green algae and their lethal toxins. It’s not going to impress the Longfellow crowd, but it has a certain nerdy charm. I have never heard of regulators writing poems, especially for folks they regulate.”
Say hey, and mean it.
My conversation with Rob continues. This “Meander” does not.
But while writing this finale, I found a declaration that went something like this: “Of all the reasons I’m grateful to fly fishing, the one I appreciate most is the chance to meet some of the most interesting people I’ll ever know. What a blessing that has been.”
Amen to that. Here’s to your New Year.
