The Minnows Were Our Bounty

Hurricane Katrina left our boardwalk snapped into several segments. Splintered planks drifted on the surface of the pond. Rather than reconstruct the pilings, my dad bought some big blue rain barrels, and floated the broken segments on top. My family, including our Great Dane, Earthquake, learned to balance as the boardwalk swayed on the barrels when we walked across, and a few of our closest friends came over often enough that they got used to it, too. 

Nicky was one of those friends. One boiling May afternoon, after grade school let out for the summer, Nicky and I crouched in beat-up flip-flops on the white-hot dock boards, squinting into the sun-warmed pondwater through sunglasses borrowed from our parents. I held an 8-ounce plastic cocktail cup from the stack I had found in the kitchen cupboard. Nicky gripped a kid-sized fishing net by its yellow plastic handle. Earthquake lay behind us, panting, dripping drool from his jowls, occasionally offering half-hearted “woofs” of encouragement. 

The hydrilla, beginning to die off, released a rotting reek. Great wads of algae and slime drifted and bubbled. In places where the bushy hydrilla clung to life, hundreds of minnows flitted and twitched, nibbling at algae on the leaves, chasing each other in zigzags, receding into the stalks when menacing tarpon and snook soared past. 

The minnows were our bounty. Nicky held the net very still under the water for several minutes until the most curious minnow ventured into the netting, then she snapped the net from the water, taking with it one shocked, gasping, flopping minnow. The sunlight flashed white and gold off its tiny scales. 

Nicky wanted to go after the biggest minnows, the ones that had burgeoned to the size of a thumb and were likely not true minnows but rather juvenile sheepshead fish. After about an hour, I got impatient and snatched the net from Nicky so that I could hunt the ones that allured me: those with flashy patterns, splotched black and white like cows or mottled dark gold and yellow like leopards. 

While I fished, Nicky filled the plastic cocktail cup with brackish pond water. This became the captive minnow’s new residence. Later, we furnished it with a few touches of home: a tiny layer of sand, a sprig of hydrilla, maybe a rock spray-painted gold or a seashell from the beach.

In our DIY aquariums, located on the granite floor in the corner of my bathroom, no minnow lasted more than a week. I found this week’s minnow deadweight at the bottom of the cup, sunk in the classic belly-up position. Another time, I thought my minnow would be happier outside. I found it sun-shriveled on the pool deck where it had jumped from the cup to escape the boiling water.

I did not seek companionship—the kind one might feel they find with a domestic pet. Rather, I wanted to hold the minnow’s little body, to feel the life pulsing in my hand, to possess the living animal and look at it in a clear plastic cup: I wanted to own it. It was this desire that propelled me to bring upon the minnow population such a nameless terror.

History and literature pin the urge to own as a manly vice, characteristic of male conquistadors, colonizers, and CEOs, and portray the temperance of women as the foil to man’s instinct to conquer. But there I was, a nine-year-old girl whose interests included ballet, My Little Pony, and capturing something in order to possess it. I needed to have the creatures I found. 

The urge to own is a human greed. In A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There, ecological author Aldo Leopold identifies this universal desire for “trophies” in outdoor recreation. Be they a buck’s antlers on the wall, a fish hanging from a hook, or a bunch of wildflowers wilting in a vase, trophies mark the owner’s skill in “overcoming, outwitting, or reducing-to-possession.” In reducing nature, we give ourselves a feeling of control.

Prominent British nature writer Gerald Durrell centered his novels around his childhood efforts to capture and keep as many different species as he could. Henry David Thoreau confesses in Walden that he was “tempted to seize and devour” a live woodchuck because he hungered for the “wildness which he represented.” Yet Leopold is the only outdoorsman I’ve read who chased that temptation down to its roots: we feel satisfied when we feel natural, and we feel natural when we own nature.

If the minnows were any indication that I would one day become a control freak, my nine-year-old self didn’t realize it. I was overwhelmed knowing that something so wonderful and tiny and beautiful as a mottled golden minnow could even exist. I didn’t know how to express my appreciation in any way other than by taking it. 

My parents put an end to the minnow-cide. The week before I started fourth grade, they surprised me with a 45-gallon tank in the corner of the dining room. My dad and I filled it with sand from the shores of the lagoon, bleached coral, and buckets of brackish pond water. Over the coming years, the tank hosted myriad creatures from Indian River Lagoon: Tiger the pinfish, Boomer the spadefish, an ornery pufferfish, and, yes, a dozen or so minnows—their lives considerably healthier than those of their predecessors. But the most enchanting resident of our tank was a creature I never expected would grace the murky, mysterious Indian River Lagoon.

Dad’s crab trap hung over the side of the dock, accumulating barnacles, algae, muck, and exactly zero crabs. Occasionally Dad would pull it up, see that it had attracted no crustacean besides barnacles, and throw it back in with a splash. One day, he called me out to inspect with him. While I watched, he ran his hand along what I thought was a particularly mucky bend in the wire. Then the mud that smeared off in his hand writhed and curled and shaped itself into a small bronze-colored seahorse. 

Seahorses, in my nine-year-old mind, were too whimsical, too ethereal, to deign to live in a lagoon where fertilizer runoff caused algae blooms, invasive lionfish lurked with their toxic spines, and raw sewage periodically leaked in from the city water treatment plant. The seahorse clearly had to join my marine menagerie.

We introduced the seahorse into our tank and added a second one that we found on the trap the next day. It wasn’t long before my sister christened them TV and Movie, because after dinner the family would draw dining room chairs up to the tank and, for hours, watch the seahorses carry on as though it was performance art. Never one to sit still for long, I bounced from one side of the aquarium to the other while the rest of the family gradually inched their seats closer and closer to the glass. 

Specifically, we loved feeding time. The crab trap wires also drew shrimp, each about the size of a staple and clear except the black dots of their eyes. I would collect eight or 10 shrimp and deposit them in the tank. At first, TV and Movie would watch languidly, their spiny tails anchoring them to the coral. Then one of them would bob, unhurried, towards a shrimp that had secured itself to the wall of the tank. The seahorse would hover beside the shrimp for a moment, holding itself in place with the hummingbird-like flickering of its back fins. Then, with a thunderous pop, it sucked the shrimp into its tube-shaped snout. Smaller shrimp disappeared in an instant; bigger shrimp hung halfway out of the mouth struggling over 10, 15 minutes, while the alarmed seahorse figured out how to slurp it down.

The minnows, for me, symbolized the leisure of long summer afternoons, the yellow-colored heat, the stench of rotting hydrilla, the glint of scales and sunlight in black water. And my family loved the seahorses because we felt secure seeing the fearsome predatory power of the marine world wrapped up into tiny, delicate trinkets. In keeping them in our homes in plastic cages, we imagined we had obtained natural living—richer, truer living. 

The week before I moved to college to study conservation biology, my dad took me on a dusk nature walk through the swamp and introduced me to every native plant we passed. Notebook in hand, I sketched, sniffed, touched and put names to 30 native Florida plants from wild coffee to black mangrove and made note of three mysterious plants that prompted my dad to say, “Huh. I’ve never seen that before in my life.” 

Despite his childhood menageries, Durrell later advocated that we should only keep animals in captivity if it’s the only way to save a species from extinction. Thoreau hunted for sustenance, never for trophies. In my journal I captured not nature but the experience of wildness, so that I could relive it at any time by thumbing through the pages. Our trophies, like Leopold’s, are our records of life in nature.

I started sketching and journaling about nature from where my fascination began: the minnows in the pond and the small animals swimming in the murky lagoon shallows. Since then, I’ve souvenired drawings and observations from the Appalachian foothills, the Rocky Mountains and Molasses Reef. My journals don’t put me in control of nature; they give me a place within nature, a life among each waxy mangrove leaf, each spine on a seahorse’s coronet, each shimmering minnow. ▩