Grunion to the Death

Every year like clockwork my family would go on some foray into the great unknown for two weeks and come back sunburned. On this particular occasion, I was fourteen years old, prepubescent, and ugly. In fact, I was so ugly and prepubescent that Cousin Kim, who never quite fit her boobs all the way into her swimsuit, called me Worm.

For this year’s vacation experience, we would be staying at the home of Lou and Ann Dachs, a cultured couple who owned a modern home up in the hills of Malibu, California, a matter of an hour from our suburban house in Northridge in the San Fernando Valley. Lou and Ann were going out of town that summer, the summer of ’86. I don’t remember where they were going, only that my dad offered his able services as the Dachs’ house-sitter.

Now, Lou and my dad had worked together for years, and so it should have occurred to Lou that my father should not have been the steward of choice for his ritzy Malibu home. Dad’s first move was to transform the house-sitting experience into a family get together. Instead of merely taking care of the generous lawn and two over-sized cats, Tiggy and Migsy, we were taking over, and what we were taking over was a museum.

The house was split into four levels. On the entry level, through wall had a hypnotic view of the ocean, and in front of the wall stood a pedestal with a two-foot tall bronze sculpture of an object that looked like a bird. The furniture was of smooth dark leather, and there was a fish tank, a fireplace, and art and vases with ornate, dead arrangements. I’d never been in a house before that had things that you weren’t supposed to touch.

My mother’s side of the family from the Pacific Northwest was the main component of the family get-together and would be staying on the ground floor. The attendees included her parents, Granny and Crapa, hailing from Yakima, Washington, and her younger sister Auntie Carol, and Auntie Carol’s two daughters, Cousin Kim and Cousin Kari, all from Anchorage, Alaska, who were around the same age as me and Mike, my older brother.

In all McNeill family vacations, it was of utmost importance to have an itinerary of some sort. For our house-sitting stint in Malibu, my father came armed with a tiny, square clipping from the Los Angeles Times. He longed to post it on the refrigerator, but the Dach’s refrigerator had no magnets and was a clipping-free zone. As an alternative, Dad put the clipping under the mod salt shaker on the kitchen table and made reference to it constantly. It was the calendar for the phases of the upcoming tides, the schedule of the grunion run.

What I knew about grunion was that they were small fish that flapped up on the beach to fertilize eggs in the middle of the night. During the grunion run, the idea was to scour the beach for the fish, disrupting their mating ritual, and catch them. This activity seemed gross at best, but was soon to become the centerpiece of the vacation experience.

Now, Dad often spoke of the grunion run with nostalgic delight, tales of which were met with serious skepticism and horror by the members of the house-sitting party. Not even my grandparents who were usually moved by the acquisition of food found in nature, were not inspired.

When the time came, all the relatives packed into a couple cars in the middle of the night and headed to the beach.

When we assembled on the beach, my Dad was immediately on his hands and knees in the surf peering up and down for signs of grunion. The family stood around nonplussed. My grandfather, Crapa, named for his monopolization of bathrooms, had labeled this excursion a “snipe hunt” and “a fool’s errand.” Dad, however, had no problem being labeled a fool and instructed the children enthusiastically, “You’ve gotta look for the silver on the water. Go on! Get down to their level! Get down to their level! That’s the only way you’re gonna know when they get here!” Even in the dark, Dad wore his USC baseball cap, and in his semi-recumbent posture, looked absolutely ridiculous.

Cousin Kim, impervious to embarrassment herself, got down on her hands and knees. The pair seemed ludicrous, and though the family knew that the Los Angeles Times concurred with Dad that something marvelous would actually happen, the pallor of disbelief hovering over the crowd was too strong. I stood there with an empty pail, which I was instructed to hold, and waited impatiently to get out of the cold night air and get the hell out of there.

Kim sprung up from her position and dashed farther down the beach. Out of sight, she started screaming, “I got one! I got one! I got one!” When she returned, Crapa held a flashlight out for her to display her spoils which she held proudly clutched in both hands. There it was! A grunion!

Everyone got in on the action. I went berserk. The beach glinted with the silver of the tiny fish as they spawned—or tried to. I raced my back and forth on the beach, capturing fish after fish after fish. I felt exultant. Feeling the joy of being a predator, and in that moment, I was as close to hunting as I ever would get, and I liked it. The buckets kept filling and filling until we had a haul of about 300 fish.

We went home and put the catch into a series of coolers, on ice. What did we plan to do with them?

Well, eat them, of course.

The next day, the job of processing the grunion fell to the children. The kids were set up on the manicured lawn, each with their own station. I was opposite Kari as a de-header. The next child in line would have to disembowel the tiny fish, and finally, the children on the end, Kim and Mike, were the de-scalers. After their work was complete, the mountain of scales reached to their thighs.

After the kids were done with the processing of the fish, it fell to Granny and Auntie Carol to prepare them for breakfast. The little silver fish were breaded and fried in the Dachs’ swanky frying pan, and the heaping platter was served up at the sleek, mahogany table with the eager family gathered round.

Crapa was the brave one. He plucked a grunion right off the top and started eating. The crunching of the grunion’s bones could be heard by all assembled. The platter was passed, and all the children were expected to take a serving of the previous evening’s bounty, bones notwithstanding.

I made a valiant effort and bit into my grunion with as much gusto as I could muster. Chewing warily on the tiny fish, crunching down on the miniature bones, I became nauseated and excused myself. I ran up to Level 3, to the master bedroom’s bathroom and puked.

I returned to the table and refused to eat what was on my plate, at which point Granny uttered one of her standard epithets, “You crappy little kids!” In the Depression-era mind, it was a sin to waste food, and her little suburbanite grandchildren she considered spoiled beyond repair, although she loved us just the same.

This hoarding of food went so far that all the remaining grunion were packed up in freezer bags and prepared for distribution to all the family units. A third would go to Yakima, a third to Anchorage, and a third home to Los Angeles. So strong was the power of this principle of thrift that my mother nor my father offered a peep of protest.

The grunion ended up in the freezer in the garage for years. My father finally had the courage to throw them away when more space was needed for storage for a party. My grandparents never threw their portion away; after Granny passed, Mom and I found the grunion at the bottom of their industrial-sized freezer.

I guess even the bone-crunching was too much for them.