First Fish

I pulled it out of the water and flopped it on the ground next to me and screamed a very loud "WAHOO"!

Was it destiny that saw fit that I become a fisherman? I don't know. But if you go back to the first time that I went fishing as a young boy you might begin to wonder what life had in store for me. I was seven years old and my sister was six. We were at the Grand Cooley Dam in Eastern Washington. My sister and I had been fishing at the base of it for most of the morning. I know now that we should not have been there, but what did we know, we were children on a camping trip having a good time. My sister and I had to share a rod if we both wanted to fish. Since she was a girl, she was allowed to fish first until she either caught a fish or she gave the rod to me. Pete, the man who took us, placed the two of us in front of some water that was pristine clear and dropped down about thirty feet. About midway down into the water we could see many rainbow trout just hovering in the same place doing absolutely nothing. Patience lowered her hook into the water and put it right in the middle of them and waited. When the fish didn’t take her salmon egg right away I could see that there was going to be a problem. I was certain that based on the behavior of the fish that it could be quite a while before I was going to get a hold of the rod to do some fishing of my own. I got an idea.
“Patience, since I'm not doing anything, would you like me to go and get you a soda?” “Okay, but you better ask Pete first or you could get into some trouble.”
“I'll be right back.”
I ran to the van and asked Pete for a soda and got back as soon as I could. I wanted to be there the second she got a fish so that I could get one myself. I gave her the soda and sat down to watch the fish mill around some more. I thought that they were beautiful and I never tired of watching them. Patience sat there too. She was determined to catch a fish and equally determined not to give me the pole until she did.
Some time went by when I asked her if she wanted another soda, she said yes and reminded me to ask Pete again. I came back with it and sat down. My frustration was building the longer we sat there. Watching those fish without a rod in my hand was killing me. The bright morning turned into early afternoon. With the sun beating down on us, I asked her if she wanted another soda. Again she said yes and I repeated the trip that had been made twice before. Not long after she had finished that last soda she began to squirm and dance around, just a little. It was what I had been waiting for; that or a fish on the hook. Squirming around doing the pee-pee dance she was determined not to give me the rod. She was not at all patient, but rather, filled with a ferocious will not to give me the rod at whatever cost, and that meant, at that point, disregarding the fact that she needed to go to the bathroom very badly. I pretended that I didn't notice and a little while later I asked her for the fourth time if she wanted another soda. She looked over at me with a pinched and flustered face that told me she would relent soon, and that was the point to all of those sodas.
“Tim! I have to go to the bathroom! I'm going to let you hold my rod for me, but the second that I come back I want it back! If you don't give it to me I'm going to tell on you!”
She was smaller than me, and I knew that I could have just taken the rod from her, but she was like a stick of dynamite. You didn’t want to shake or throw it around, instead, you want to treat it gently because if you treated it right you could get it to do what you wanted it to do, but if you mistreated it, you’d be sorry. That was the exact same thing that I thought about my sister. I knew that she could make a lot of trouble for me if I didn’t behave like a good little gentleman, and she knew it.
“Okay, but if I catch a fish before you get back can I have it?”
“Yes you can, but you know that you aren't going to get anything!”
“Yeah, I know, but just in case I do, you promise that I can keep it?”
“Stop behaving like that, I said you could and I meant it!”
She leaned over to me to give me the rod and I was ready for it. I can see it play back in my mind in slow motion. Just as she was handing me the rod, I mean the exact moment that it was free from her hand and into mine and as my fingers closed around the butt of the pole, I felt the tug of a fish.
“Fish on!”
I was ecstatic! I had hooked my very first fish and it was a rainbow trout! I didn't mess around at all and reeled in the fish as though I was working on a meat grinder. I pulled it out of the water and flopped it on the ground next to me and screamed WAHOO! My sister suddenly didn't need to go to the bathroom. She was screaming too, but not the words that I was hoping for. No, instead she was screaming that it was her fish and not mine, which of course drew the attention of Pete. He came over and exonerated me and the fish was deemed to be mine based on the conditions of the agreement that Patience and I had made.
I never did tell anyone that I had gotten my sister the sodas with an ulterior motive; she, after all, wanted the sodas and I was happy to get them for her. Having to go to pee was a consequence of drinking them all. It wasn't my fault that she gave me the rod when she did, but I was glad that she had.
So, back to the original question; do I believe in fate or destiny? Whenever I get down and want to believe in something I think about things like that day becoming re-inspired that not everything is in our control, but some things are.