Where the Fish Go

As a general policy, I do my best to avoid looking a complete and utter idiot. This can be a challenge. While I like to think I’m a smart person, I am also gullible, which has led me astray numerous times. Over the course of my childhood, I have believed such obvious falsehoods as “if a hurricane shares your name, you have to pay for the damage it causes” or “to dogs, shouting sounds like whispering and whispering sounds like shouting.” It’s worth noting that both of these were relayed to me by my older sister Rachel, who recognized my overly-trusting nature early on and capitalized on it, resulting in me screaming “good night!” at the family dog on at least three separate occasions and sobbing when 2008’s Hurricane Kyle made landfall.

Given how often my sister attempted to skew my understanding of the world growing up, it’s no surprise that I took advice from the famous quote, “better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” As I grew older, my silence paid off. It saved from admitting my belief in humiliating “truths” such as “when you fly on an airplane your luggage travels the whole way by carousel” and allowing others to take the fall in my place.

I began to learn more actual truths about the world and catch on to my sister’s web of lies. And as I learned more, I began to edge away from the counsel of the “remove all doubt” quote, sharing more and even attempting some of my own bullshit artistry on my younger cousins and friends. More importantly, I began to recognize other people when they were wrong. With this newfound skill, I encountered two people who released to the world their most absurd beliefs, and in doing so, eliminated any modesty I may have had.

The first person was my younger cousin, Jane (or Jayne, since I’m waiting to hear back from her on whether or not I can use her real name). When I was around twelve years old, right as I was beginning to recognize my sister’s lies and become comfortable with the truth again, I was eating dinner with Jane (ahem – Jayne), Rachel, and one other cousin, named Zach. *Jayne* would have been in fourth grade at the time, with Rachel and Zach both being in high school. Our conversation centered around stupid things people had done at school, a subject I was more than happy to discuss. Stupidity was always funny unless I was the perpetrator, in which case stupidity was never funny.

I had just shared a story regarding someone who had answered a question in class (“How many senators are there in the U.S. senate”) by quickly exclaiming “two!” with profoundly unwarranted confidence. Jayne attempted to one-up me with her story, exclaiming, “Yeah, people in my class are the same way – there’s this one kid who’s so stupid, he thinks that Washington D.C. is on the east coast!”

Rachel, Zach, and I grew silent. We leaned in a little. Clearly, we had misheard.

“What’s that?”

“He thinks Washington D.C. is on the east coast!”

Rachel, Zach, and I exchanged a glance. “It is.”

“No, he thinks it’s, like, somewhere over by Maryland and Virginia.”

Rachel, Zach, and I cracked a grin. “It is.”

I can clearly remember Jayne’s face, reminiscent of a nervous bird clutched in someone’s hand, eyes darting and panicked. Then, as we all broke into laughter, her expression morphed into a combination of awkwardness, shame, and pseudo-amusement as she tried to laugh her way back into our good graces. Fool. She would never be in our good graces again. Our family disowned her shortly after, and she was sent to work a coal mine in Siberia.

After that incident, I took solace in the fact that if I were to slip up and repeat something ridiculously untrue, I would always be able to fall back by making fun of Jane (I mean Jayne). At least it wouldn’t be that bad. At least I knew which coast Washington D.C. was on. At least I wasn’t that oblivious.

The thing I failed to realize is that the older one gets and the more one learns, the less leeway one has. Jane had leeway at the time; she was only in fourth grade, still learning about the basics of the world around her. If she were to say that now, as a junior in high school with over a 4.0 GPA, the punishment would be much more severe than being removed from our family and shipped off to dig oil rocks out of the snowy Russian tundra.

Which brings us to the second incident. If the first incident was a firecracker of confidence eroding away my humility, the second was something closer to the Trinity test.

I was a freshman in college when this occurred. Through my senior year of high school, I had heard stories that college had a certain way of making you realize that you aren’t as smart as you thought you were. Perhaps it is the fact that college classes are often more difficult. Perhaps it is the fact that college encourages people to be more open, which in turn leads them to reveal that most of their opinions and worldviews are stupid and wrong. Regardless, it wouldn’t apply to me. Surely, I was smart enough to not share my dumb opinions. However, in October of my first year, I abruptly saw what they meant.

For her own protection, I shall name the person in question here Jane 2. Normally, Jane 2 is a reasonably smart individual, capable of keeping up in conversations like the one we had that night. But every rule has its exception, and it only takes one memorable exception to be painted as a dumbass. For a reason unknown to this day, I was discussing Switzerland’s international relations with Jane 2 and one other friend. No, we weren’t high.

“They’re set up perfectly to be the last hold-out in any world domination scenario,” my other friend said.

“Yeah, I mean they’re surrounded by mountains, they have a good military, and they do nothing except make chocolate for everybody,” I added.

“Yeah, plus the dome,” Jane 2 said.

My friend and I stopped. “The… the dome?”

“Yeah, you know? That retractable dome they have around the whole country?”

My friend looked at one another, then back at Jane 2, who was staring back at us, just as confident as when she had first said it. Then her eyes were met with a moment of realization, and she corrected herself: “Or maybe it was a wall, that might be what I’m thinking of.”

Unlike Jane, Jane 2 showed no signs of uncertainty, no recognition that what she said was the most preposterous thing a human being had uttered since Kanye said he would run for president (either time). Under Jane 2’s logic, the entire country of Switzerland (almost 16,000 square miles, I checked) was surrounded by a massive dome – or wall – that was not only retractable, but also strong enough to stop armies from invading the country. Despite our questions as to how she came by this information and her lack of satisfying answers, she remained adamant. Switzerland was surrounded by a dome, sure as the nation’s capital was in Washington state.

My friend and I scoured the internet for several minutes, even going onto the second page of Google. We never found anything even remotely suggesting there was a barrier of any kind around Switzerland. We still have no idea where Jane 2 got that in her head. Needless to say, she was never in our good graces again. We publicly flogged her and catapulted her into the sun shortly after.

With the knowledge that I could surely never stoop lower than that, I grew cocky. If I went into college confident that my stupidity would not be revealed to me, the incident with Jane 2 caused my confidence to mutate into arrogance. Not only would college never show me that I was less smart than I thought, it was showing me that I was smarter than the others around me. The same person who was once convinced that Tropical Storm Kyle would drain his savings account was now the cream of the crop. Mama look at me now.

But, as is so often the case, hubris proved to be the downfall. I completely forgot my old mantra of keeping quiet to appear looking the fool. February came to Iowa City as a special-ordered shipment of frigid temperatures and biting winds, and the river sealed itself over in a tomb of ice.

My roommate and I were eating lunch one morning in Burge Dining Hall when I looked out the window and caught a glimpse of the ice-glazed river. The thought popped into my head, and before my more intelligent side had a chance to vet it, I asked, “I’ve always been curious about this, where do the fish go when the river freezes?” It happened just like that.

My roommate swallowed a bite of stale ham sandwich and gave me a hard, inquisitive look. “What are you talking about? They don’t go anywhere.”

“Do they just freeze in the ice then? Like hibernation? I mean, I’m not sure what else would happen to them….”

My roommate squinted. “What do you mean?”

In my very weak defense, I have never lived in a place with either small enough bodies of water to freeze over or cold enough winters to all for that in the first place. The coldest I have ever seen the temperature dip in my hometown is 40 degrees. None of this, of course, justifies my genuine belief that when a river freezes over, it freezes all the way through.

“Well, the river freezes in the winter, and I assume the fish don’t migrate somewhere else, so do they just… freeze with it?”

Oh no. I recognized the look he was giving me, and the dreadful feeling of shame flooded through me. It was the same look my sister and I had given Jane, the same one my friend and I had given Jane 2. Oh no. I was Jane 3. Oh dear God.

He smiled and watched me shrivel into my seat, not dignifying my question with an answer. No, it was not as bad as some of the other mistakes I had heard (cough, Jane 2, cough cough), but oh, how the mighty had fallen. This was not some lie from my sister that I had clung to. This was my own foolish brain coming up with a ridiculous explanation for something even a child could understand. This was my Switzerland. I had seen movies where ice was broken through to reveal liquid water underneath. I had heard of ice fishing. How, how, had nothing in my brain suggested to me that fish didn’t freeze solid in the winter until being released by the thawing respite of spring? College had chewed up my perceived intelligence and spat me out into the realm of people who didn’t know where Washington D.C. was or thought that Switzerland had an impenetrable Wakanda-style shield around its perimeter. How had I not seen this coming?

No matter. What’s done is done. I was ceremoniously executed shortly after. Frankly, I would expect nothing less.