Subtitled: The Fish That I Killed. Here’s how it happened. My oldest brother (we’ll call him Bro One) was studying geology at the U of M and got an amazing opportunity to work at a jade mine in Casper, Wyoming, over the summer. At that time, he had the basement bedroom and I was still in high school. As the fourth out of six children, I was next in line for having my own room, so I was thrilled to find out that I was going to get his room for the summer. The “catch” was that I was also going to be responsible for taking care of his fish while he was away. He explained to me that they would need daily feeding and showed me how much food to give them. I’m guessing that there were about 40 or so tropical fish in the tank. I asked him if the tank would need cleaning or if the water would need to be replaced. He assured me that it would not, which filled me with relief. It sounded like a pretty easy deal and I started out with confidence.
About three weeks into the gig, I noticed that the water in the tank was getting less clear and seemed kind of dirty. I was a little worried about it, so I consulted my second oldest brother, Bro Two, who assured me that it was no big deal. And then the fish started going belly up. Not a lot at first – the disaster started small. I found the first one, got it out with the net and flushed it down the toilet. This was disquieting, but I hoped it was an isolated incident. A couple days later, another one floated to the top. This time, I observed that there were several more fish in the tank that were looking decidedly unwell and a little shaky in their swimming maneuvers. Bro Two proved to be a useless consultant (sorry, Bro Two, but it’s true) as he was mystified by why they were dying and had no advice for me except to keep fishing them out and flushing them.
As the weeks dragged on, the death toll kept rising and the water got murkier and murkier. I began to be oppressed and burdened in spirit by this turn of events, imagining Bro One’s great anger and disappointment when he got back (“you had one job!”). The fish started haunting my subconscious and I was almost nightly visited with vague and disturbing dreams about dead fish floating in the water, their beastly little white stomachs the only thing visible in the dark water. By the time Bro One came home, I couldn’t see to the back of the tank anymore and had no idea if there were even any fish left living in that death trap. I dreaded having to tell him how badly I had failed him, but it turned out that his attachment to the fish was a great deal less than what I had imagined. “Oh,” he said casually, “I should have figured that might happen if the water wasn’t kept clean.” I really could have wrung his neck at that point, having spent a good portion of the summer obsessing about those dumb fish.
You’d think that experience would have turned me away from the whole fish aquarium experience for life, but one of the science curricula we used with the kids had a unit in which you were supposed to raise guppies. Seemed easy enough, so we bought a few, bought the tank, the filter, the gravel, and one little suckermouth catfish to clean the sides of the tank. The guppies immediately started dying off. I am an inveterate fish killer, I guess. I called the pet store lady and she said, “You’re not putting shells in the water, are you?” It turns out that’s a bad idea and I wondered why this important detail wasn’t given to all new fish owners. Once we got that cleared away, we saw an improvement in the life expectancy of our little fish community, but those guppies were still more fragile than I thought they’d be. Eventually, we had no fish except the stalwart and faithful catfish, which I sold back to the pet store.
This has been True Stories with Lynniebeemuseoday. I hope you won’t have nightmares about dead fish now.
I’ll probably delete this in the morning, especially if it’s gone belly up.
Lynniebeemuseoday 