It is 1997 and I am 8, my father is in his 30s, what I'd later realize was slightly past the peak of his life. I am just at the cusp of building my own and realizing who I am.

I'd grown up too fast; my earliest memories are of my parents fighting, screaming, threatening to leave over the stupidest thing. Google didn't exist and it is funny to think a search would have made some enduring peace between them, when in reality it would have driven them apart even quicker.

Search results for "cheap divorce attorney" immediately come to mind, along with dating sites and strangely cropped photos on a profile page.

My memory is good and even that long ago feelings are intense, if I close my eyes I can remember my brother in his wheelchair, crying out, straining to reach to feed him blueberry yogurt and oatmeal, fruit. He is older than me and strong, wiry from his lack of coordination, what he wants he muscles his way toward across the floor. I learned quick to avoid his hands, the softness or maybe the color of it lured him in and he'd grab, tangle it in his fingers and pull it, and the rest of you toward his mouth in a surge of pent-up energy, like a snapped mousetrap, no warning.

Neither he nor my sister, who'd grow up damaged and hateful in her own way, were here today.

My dad and I were close then, two people on different paths but still longing to get away, even for a few hours.

The day is humid, overcast, cool. In brief patches the sun breaks through but in between those windows, the belly of gray clouds overhead grumble and it hisses a fine rain down onto green grass and gray water. Tires grumble over pavement and he parks, I get out of the van and grab a bait bucket full of silver fish, a white Styrofoam container of worms and a pole.

We walk over the pavement onto grass. We both know where we're going. There is a dam with an artifical lowered outflow on the other side of an earthen levy and an overhead bridge that provides shelter from the rain. Underneath it there are boulders, cool and sandy to the touch, I sit on one with a flat surface and bait a hook.

My father does the same and within two hours we have a wire stringer basket full of bony, wriggling fish with wide pupils and blue-gray flecked sides. Though he doesn't say it, each is another substitute for something more expensive we can't comfortably afford. I don't know what the daily limit is, and I doubt he knew either. It was abnormally good fishing.

We pack up our things and as we do, people who arrived after us, start to move into our places, jealous of out catch. My father had remarked under his breath at some point previously they hadn’t had any luck, and I noticed now how quickly they picked over the rocks to cast into the dense school of fish and take their fill. He offers them our remaining minnows and they accept with a grumbling thanks.

We walk back toward the van, watching out for goose droppings over the grass and struggling with the weight of the basket when I turn back and see the flashing lights on the road at the top of the levy. Some people have gathered at the edge of the lake but seem reluctant to go in. My dad turns to watch, but it is impossible to tell what exactly is going on.

We later read one of the men, the oldest, had snagged a plastic bobber on a submerged log and waded in to retrieve it, maybe only knee deep. Whether he slipped on the seaweed, it grew thick there beneath the surface of the water, like moss, or was pulled in is unclear. He was pulled rapidly under the surface where he became pinned to the water outtake piping underneath the lake, we read it takes the lake engineer nearly 30 minutes to arrive and longer to turn off the flow and allow the man to drift back up to the surface.

It is too warm to imagine the water's chill could have slowed down the damage, saved him in a strange twist of fate, and he cannot be brought back to death.

We see many other things in other trips: a falling plane jumper with a faulty parachute, a meteorite falling into the Pacific, horseshoe crabs and haze over a Californian saline sea.

Unprompted this day at the lake comes up so many years later, how it trumps so many happier moments can't be explained, but regardless neither of our recollections of the day have faded and the facts remain the same.

Noteworthy: the fishing always tanked in that spot after the man’s death so it was rare we'd even consider it as a choice fishing area again, as did many other anglers and eventually it became overgrown with rose and raspberry canes, inaccessible and forgotten unlike that day in memory.