Anyone who says fishing isn’t really about catching anything isn’t being romantic, they’re just being lame. And when you take a four year old fishing, you’d better damn well catch something. Or you at least better damn well have a plan.

This realization set in after three hours of casting our lures across a small farm pond. I boiled desperately untangling monofiliment mazes from around the spinning reel and the line guides, burned through almond butter and jelly sandwiches too fast too soon, hiked over the deciduous hardwood hillside when things got too restless, hung the hammock on top of the hill and got sprinkled on by a passing shower. The dog almost ate a hook. Back to fishing and I notice my son splashing in the mud at the pond overflow, as I’m retrieving my last cast slowly over the leaf-littered shallows where the aquatic meets the terrestrial to the sharp song of a red-winged blackbird, oh-ka-leee.

It wasn’t yet much past one. Still lots of daylight left to burn. And that’s when I noticed an amphibian that looked like a three-inch alligator stalking my lure that was just as big as it, thrusting and nosing at it in an inspiring display of predatory fashion.

“Tommy! Come and see the salamander!”

I continued to dance the soft yellow plastic worm back and forth in the shallow water, enticing the small predator to perhaps latch on so we could land this thing-something, finally-once and for all. And then much to my amazement, the little salamander, like a fearless little greco-roman wrestler, lethally wrapped all of her little legs around my lure and out of pure reactionary excitement I yanked her out of the water on to dry land so Tommy and I could have a closer look. We were ecstatic as only four year olds could be, but the little amphibian, who may very well have been older than Tommy at this point, must have been as confused as ever.

It was a red-spotted newt in it’s amphibious, adult stage. Its tail reminded me of an eels engineered design, rudder like and serpentine. A bright yellow belly with black speckles and red spots running down its back in two rows should have been our evolutionary warning to not mess with this little monster; but as it were, we had. Tetrodotoxin is the neurotoxin located in the skin of this salamander that can have deadly effects for predators of the newt. Life is nuanced like this I guess.

It is a good thing that blinding speed is not one of the newt’s characteristics. As is meandered around in my cupped hands for a few moments, we had a good opportunity to study its beautiful complexion. Otherworldly up close. Of course, she tumbled to the ground a few times in attempting the exchange between Tommy and I, and then I decided before she got too dehydrated that we should put her back, and so sent her on her way vibrating back into the wild.

Maybe a little premature.

“Dad, you need to catch another one!”

The sun had come out now in full force and I began to sweat as I scanned the shallows for more newts. I hastily suggested that Tommy take a few more casts himself, attempting to change the pace and the topic a bit while I bought a little time, but it wasn’t fish he wanted, it was salamanders. Truth be told, there was a healthy population of them on this particular stretch of shoreline, and after a few minutes, two more came swimming in fearlessly from the deep, stopping within plain sight, taunting-like and floating daringly like a little green astronaut in space.

I reminisced about a passage from Chris Hadfield’s book An Astronauts Guide To Life On Earth, where he writes that, “Physical and psychological adaptation to a new environment, whether on Earth or in space, isn’t instantaneous. There’s always a bit of lag between arriving and feeling comfortable. Having a plan that breaks down what you’re going to do into small, concrete steps is the best way I know to bridge that gap,” (173).

“Dad, we need to get them!” Tommy skipped and high-stepped back and forth with his hands clasped in an innocent desperation. Enthralled with the possibility of all that life might bring.

I decided to take advantage of the newt’s Jaws-like prowess of its environment. For fifteen more minutes I jigged my lure in front of that pair of newts in the hopes that one would latch on in the same grappling manner as our first successful catch. This tactic was moot. We had unfortunately educated them by now, and I was the one feeling a little uncomfortable all of a sudden. After some thought, I came up with a simple, even prehistoric plan. Because the newts were still somewhat intrigued by the dancing lure, and their main predatory instinct was still to dart and stalk after it, I would lure them into the shoreline close enough so that I could splay out on the grass, slowly protrude my arm into the water and scoop one out swiftly, in much that same way a grizzly swats salmon from a river. Tommy thought this was an excellent idea, and so did I. And as I settled down onto the muddy edge of pond, the wet ground soaked into my clothing, and like a lightning strike, we landed our second newt.

“Dad, can we keep it forever?”

As it turns out, we are all bold little creatures. Much like the newt, we live our lives in complex stages, morphing and changing from one stage to the next. We are moving from the pond to the forest and once again back to the pond so to speak, developing different characteristics, maintaining old defenses, and thriving in the different environments we find ourselves floating in. Whether we are ready or not for the things we face, we are curious creatures, all of us.

On the drive home, Tommy was nodding off in his car seat as the the pond water in my Nalgene bottle mixed with pieces of cattail and grass sloshed around in between his legs. And a few centimeters from the bottom of the bottle hovered Sally, calm as a cucumber, floating weightlessly, seemingly un-phased by all this hubbub, an expression that I read as ready for whatever the hell life would bring her way. I yelled for Tommy to stay awake and not dump that thing on the floor of the truck. Hadfield’s words turned over in my mind yet again: There’s always a bit of lag between arriving and feeling comfortable.

The deal was to release Sally into our own spring-fed creek in our backyard forest. An attempted negotiation at forever with Tommy, and a healthy environment for Sally. So we hopped out of the truck, showed mom, put our rubber boots on, jumped in the creek and started sloshing uphill towards Sally’s forever home. It was in a small clearing pierced by sunlight and the call of chickadee, arched over by brambles, moosewood and small hackberry that we dumped out the contents of the Nalgene on a brilliant mat of moss: cattails first, then the clumps of grass and a few small rocks, and then out came Sally.

She held her chin up gracefully, looked downstream and then upstream. Unabashedly unencumbered, she then waddled off into the sweet, quick flow of water.