'Bred Crumbs

07:54 AM There are thousands of sentences in the English language I never dreamed I'd construct, much less utter truthfully, and here is one of them:

This weekend, I saw my boyfriend shoot a 36-pound carp.

Yes shoot, with bow and arrow. Apparently this is something you do if you grow up in Madera, a small town in the yellow part of the Central Valley where all is farming, hunting, and satellite TV. It's the kind of country a bleach-blond San Franciscan would feel completely out of place in if he weren't there with his boyfriend, and if they didn't have a fun and hospitable host. (And if he hadn't grown up in similar surroundings 2,500 miles away.) When you're with good people, you can easily gloss over the oddness of staying in a house whose walls are covered in giant animal heads, and having to sleep singly on family legacy "Ricky and Lucy beds," as Don, our host, called them.

Once you've accepted that, and eaten a fantastic dinner of smoked tri-tip and wild boar, and riffed Final Destination on the dish, and had pre-dawn fantasies of ripping the head off the rooster outside, then going out on a boat to shoot at fish is the next logical step.

I spectated, soaking up sun and warmth happily while Don cast for bass and Robbie armed for carp. Robbie hadn't shot in maybe five years, but when Don pointed out the giant – whose hugeness we didn't yet have a firm grasp of – Robbie nailed it in the back. Don shot one more arrow to make sure the fish was finished and dragged it into the boat, and the choruses of omigod began as the yard-long beast was stretched out before us. Despite the shallowness of the lake, and the disturbance of the boat, and the freakish high winds, Robbie had landed a monster.

It could have seemed weird, hunting fan that I'm not, to be proud of my man for offing the animal. But I was. Am.

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