Bethany Reid Reviews What Water Holds by Tele Aadsen
What Water Holds
Essays by Tele aadsen
A Review by Bethany Reid
Tele Aadsen describes herself as a “commercial fisher, writer, and lapsed social worker.” Let’s add to that list, poet. She wrote these essays for Oregon’s annual FisherPoet gathering, and I can easily imagine them being shared with—performed for—an audience. Whether or not a reader has personal experience with boats and fishing, Aadsen immerses us in her watery world. Like the salmon she reveres, the ones she makes a living catching, and those “finning free” (p. 64), we too emerge from her vivid prose dripping with “jeweled scales of emerald, amethyst, and opal” (p. 8).
What Water Holds is, as are all of Empty Bowl Press’s books, beautifully made. The cover, by Sitka artist Lisa Teas Conaway, features a floating bird feather and rippling salmon, and so many blues: blue sky giving way to a surface panoply of blues giving way to water’s aquamarines giving way to depths of blue-black. In twenty-six essays organized into five sections, Aadsen takes readers on a journey from when she is a “an underdressed three-year-old” admiring a king salmon caught by her grandfather, to when that child is a deckhand and co-owner / operator of a fishing vessel, and old enough to be measuring how much longer she can physically keep up with the work. Aadsen celebrates the fish, and the industry, while refusing to flinch from the conundrum they present for a person of conscience:
Salmon are more than a commodity; they are silver-robed ambassadors of home and hope, risk and return. They are ancestors shared across cultures, linking sea and land; they are the matchmaking elders who bring so many of us together. They are gods creating and sustaining us, one fish at a time. (p. 22)
Given climate change, given how precarious life on our planet has become for so many, let us, like Aadsen…regard standing witness as our sacred goddamn duty.
The essays capture what it feels like to be a boat kid, what it feels like “fishing while female,” what it feels like to do such work with one’s own hands. There are essays about how to live in a human community, and essays about what non-human creatures teach us about being human. The science of warming oceans and species decline is central throughout, but always threaded with flashes of pure poetry. Consider this passage from the title essay, where we learn that Aadsen’s veterinarian parents built their own salmon-trolling boat, the Askari, taking Aadsen to sea with them when she was only seven years old:
I don’t remember seeing the black trimaran enter the Seward harbor, don’t know if she staggered in, dazed, or glided swanlike and proud. I don’t remember meeting skipper Brad or deckhand Gary, the experienced mariners my parents hired to help us cross the Gulf. . . . I don’t remember climbing aboard the Askari. I’ve combed every corner of my mind, searching for a glimpse of that seven-year-old girl abandoning the earth, stepping from dock to deck for her first time. Hard as I try to conjure that virgin sensation of the ocean’s infinite give-and-take, the flexing underfoot my first indication that all foundations are not built with the same permanency, that moment is gone. It’s the motion that lives on. An ever-present rhythm deep in my heart, as if the ocean sang me a lullaby, words I’ve forgotten but a tune I carry everywhere. Maybe that’s why our first meeting is gone: it’s impossible now to recall a time when the ocean didn’t move within me. (p. 15)
The repetitions and near repetitions, the synonyms for lost memory, the play of sound and sense, pull us through this passage, lull us with waves of music, just as the Askari skimming the ocean lulled Aadsen as a child.
The presence, the pre-eminence, of music is a deliberate choice. Aadsen admits, “I could spend the rest of my life searching for the right words to describe the kinesthetic concert that is a salmon moving through the sea” (p. 21). Not only the siren-song of the sea, but the voices of fishermen, her partner Joel ad-libbing lyrics as he works, and the voices she first heard as a child, coming through the radio on her parents’ boat:
I tuned my ears to hear what they said in everything they didn’t. The balance of being able to whine for days, with an underlying optimism that kept their hooks in the water. The artistry of casual, unself-conscious profanity. I aspired to mimic the precise weary intonation of a perfectly groaned “Christ on toast.” (p. 96)
If you need further proof of Aadsen’s ear, and her poetics, turn to the final essay, “How It Ends,” and read aloud this long, italicized prose poem:
Praise salmon. Praise king and coho and chum; praise the herring, baby black cod, and armhook squid that nourish them into thick-bellied silver ingots lining fish holds. Praise all links in the food chain; praise all who work to protect each link. . . . Praise the saltwater hosting our hooks. Praise clean rivers and rain forest that incubate salmon and nurture them into their strong, seagoing selves. . . . Praise the sun sinking into the sea and cresting into a new day. (p. 141)
In the epigraph to What Water Holds, we find these words:
. . . being an audience is a sacred goddamn duty. . . . What I need is to be there when the glass is being handed around, as the room sways and gasps and moves its feet, to witness an artist make a moment in time ring out like a bell and fall silent.”
—Megan Emerson, tugboat operator
Tele Aadsen witnesses a life lived on water and reminds us that we are all witness—audience—to the music and artistry of a larger world. Given climate change, given how precarious life on our planet has become for so many, let us, like Aadsen, like her audience at FisherPoets, regard standing witness as our sacred goddamn duty.
Bethany Reid’s stories, essays, and poems have recently appeared in One Art, Poetry East, Quartet, Passengers, Adelaide, Kithe, Descant, Peregrine, and Catamaran. Her fourth full-length collection of poems, The Pear Tree, won the 2023 Sally Albiso Award, and is due out this winter. Learn more at http://www.bethanyareid.com.
What Water Holds
Essays by Tele Aadsen
Empty Bowl Press,
Chimacum, Washington, www.emptybowl.org
ISBN 978-1-7370408-1-1
2023, 160 pages, paperback, $18.00