My little brother and the ugly fish

As children, my brothers and I would wander outside for most of the day, partly because we belonged outside as well as knowing that our mother would put us to work had we stayed inside. The house we lived in was in the middle an Idaho farm, full of potato fields and irrigation ditches. Our backyard lay on the border of the Arco desert; we would stand on the edge of the desert and look on as it went seemingly forever. During the month of November the irrigation ditches or canals as we called them, would empty out. At the bottom of the canals would be puddles full of fish. Most of the fish were bottom feeding sucker fish, with a few other types of fish in the mix. A sucker fish is one of the ugliest creatures known to man, with a long scaly body, big bulging eyes, and a sucker type mouth on the bottom of the head. As a fisherman, a sucker is always an unwelcome catch, and is often killed or given to Mexicans before being considered to be thrown back into the murk. One late fall day in November in 1996, my brother Russell and I convinced our younger brother Spencer that these sucker fish needed saving before the puddles dried up. We found many, but eventually Spencer found one that must have been ten pounds, and uglier than any I had ever seen. To this day I still have nightmares about my younger monkey-like brother holding this giant, ugly monster half his size, its hideous mouth pulsating as it hung there seemingly motionless. I remember his compassion as he was eager to help the ugliest and lowliest of creatures, with trout being at the other majestic end of the spectrum. I remember thinking it amazing that he could treat a sucker fish with this much respect, yet people all over cannot treat other people with even that much respect.