My Vineyard Gazette colleague Ray Ewing is kind in the way that you hope people will be but often are not. It took me some time to accept this, to truly believe it — that the jar of homemade salsa verde he brings you is really no trouble, that he actually wants to mentor you and two other twenty-something Gazette reporters in Magic: The Gathering. That when he extends an invitation, he wholeheartedly means it.

Accepting an invitation from Ray also invariably leads to the kind of fun that feeds the soul. So, when he invited me squidding on a Friday night in Edgartown Harbor, it was a foregone conclusion that I’d say yes.

It was a clear night at the gas docks. By day, boats roar in and out of the station to guzzle diesel, but by night it’s blanketed with a remarkable stillness. The lights of downtown Edgartown twinkled in the distance, and the only sound was the faint echo of some post-wedding revelers.

Ray had two fishing rods waiting. Handing me one, he explained that attached to the end of the line was something called a squid jig: a candy-colored lure that looks like a minnow or shrimp, but is hung with sharp, pronged hooks to catch the squid’s tentacles when it tries to strike. Flicking the rod up and down with the right rhythm creates the perfect ruse.

It must be an especially brutal defeat, thinking you’re getting your next meal and being stabbed in the arm to become a meal for someone else. It reminds me of a line from the Alanis Morisette song Ironic, where the ultimate irony is that none of the so-called ironic situations she recounts are actually ironic, just unfortunate. But getting caught by a jig disguised as food is both ironic and unfortunate, I think, if you’re a squid.

We didn’t catch anything for the first little while after dropping our lures. The current was driving toward us, pushing all life elsewhere. We moved to the other side of the dock, where Ray shone a flat light the size of his palm through the wooden slats, lighting up the water with Mountain Dew–ish fluorescence. Suddenly, there they were. The number of squid beneath the surface seemed impossible — a cloud of tumbling translucent bodies, coming into view and then evaporating, like ghosts.

“There’re so many, you could walk on them,” Ray said.

Before long, we were pulling squid out of the water with astonishing frequency. It was like a relay race from the dock’s edge to Ray’s five-gallon bucket; if one of us was depositing a catch, the other had one on the line. I started to crave the rod’s tug. I hovered my catches above the bucket to inspect them: smooth, alien, their milk-white flesh almost celadon against their dark, inky insides. They frightened me, and they were beautiful.

Ray brought his camera to the docks that night, as he does everywhere. When I caught my first squid, he insisted we capture the moment. My face in those photos, the joy in it, looks just as it does in pictures from when I was five, sitting in my dad’s guitar case or dressed like a lion at Disney World. I remember it crossing my mind that night, the feeling, a fully-formed thought: I’m so happy.

There was one thing about the ritual that made me uneasy — the moment a squid realizes it’s been caught. Pulling one above the surface triggers a few futile squirts of water and ink, a Hail Mary attempt to escape or fend you off. My pride in each catch was muddled with a pang of something else, perhaps guilt. I wondered on the drive home whether I was right to feel that way. I still haven’t figured it out.

Maybe it was karmic retribution when I stabbed myself in the thumb with a jig, leaving behind two pinprick-sized wounds that later morphed into a single angry lump. I lost another jig completely after the current swept my line under the dock, where I got the hook stuck. (Instead of shaking it free, I just reeled and reeled, thinking I’d hooked the biggest squid of all time.)

“I’m sorry,” I told Ray. “I feel awful.”

But he just shrugged with classic Ray coolness, told me not to worry about it. And I knew he meant it.

 

Emma Kilbride is a reporter for the Vineyard Gazette.