The Fisherman Who Counted Waves

• 3 minute read
• Ages 5-9
• Bedtime Stories

An old fisherman took his grandson out for the first time when the boy was seven.

They went before it was light, and pushed the boat off the sand, and got out past the line where the waves break, and then there was nothing to do for a while.

The boy was extremely bored within about four minutes.

Waiting

"When do we catch something?"

"Later."

"How much later?"

"I do not know," said his grandfather. "That is what fishing is."

The boy sat in the bottom of the boat and kicked his heel against the side and asked twice more, and then said that fishing was boring, which it is, and which everybody who has ever fished has thought at some point on their first morning.

His grandfather did not disagree.

"It is very boring," he said. "That is why I am going to teach you the only useful thing I know."

The counting

"Count the waves."

"Why?"

"Because they come in sets," said his grandfather. "Not one at a time. They come in groups with a quiet bit between, and the sets are not all the same, and if you count for long enough you start to feel the shape of it before you can see it."

So the boy counted.

He got to seven and then there was a flat patch. Then he counted five. Then a long one that he lost count of somewhere around eleven.

He said this was not a pattern.

"It is not a pattern," his grandfather agreed. "It is a rhythm. A pattern repeats. A rhythm does not repeat and you can still learn it."

The morning

The boy counted waves for two hours and forgot he was bored somewhere in the middle of it.

The sun came up while he was counting and he did not notice it happen, only that at some point everything had gone gold and he could see the bottom of the boat.

They caught four fish, which his grandfather said was a poor morning, and the boy thought was four more fish than he had ever caught in his life.

Coming in

They came in on the tide in the middle of the morning and pulled the boat up the sand.

And the boy, walking up the beach, stopped and looked back at the water for a moment, which he had not done on the way out.

He was counting.

He did not decide to. He had been doing it for two hours and it had simply carried on by itself, and he went on doing it for the rest of his life whenever he was near the sea, and he never once found it boring again.