February 19, 2025
By Lani Waller
What you are about to read is the story of a remarkable athlete named Robert “Gills” Jones. “Gills” was a nickname given to him because he never lost the rudimentary gill structures that all human beings exhibit in an early stage of their prenatal development. This phenomenon usually disappears as the embryo develops, but for whatever reason, this did not happen to Robert. When they turned him upside down and spanked the breath of life into him under the bright and illuminating glare of the operating room lights, they immediately noticed that he still retained the gills of a fish on each side of his throat.
This caused quite a stir and immediately after Robert’s exit from his mother’s womb, one of the new prenatal nurses said with a shaking voice, “Oh dear God... Oh, dear God. Shouldn’t we do something? Shouldn’t we call someone? Maybe the police? Maybe the federal government?” And as everyone looked at her, she fainted and ended up in another ward on the fifth floor of the hospital, usually reserved for patients with serious cognitive disorders that have little or nothing to do with fishing.
As they laid the new nurse on a gurney and rolled her away, another attendant then asked a very pertinent and appropriate question, “Why in the hell didn’t this show up in our x-rays over the past nine months?”
The physician in charge then suggested that perhaps it was a deliberate attempt to conceal the condition because every time Robert was x-rayed, he always had his arms around his neck and resting on his shoulders, thus concealing the presence of his fish-like gills.
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Things were further complicated by the fact that Robert’s normal breathing apparatus, his lungs, were of abnormal size and shape and they were capable of bringing extraordinary amounts of oxygen to his brain and body. No one could really explain this either, and Robert entered life with an advantage no one else ever had. He could breathe enormous amounts of oxygen from both atmospheres, water and air, and by the time he was 14, he could “swim like a “fish” and no one could keep up with him. Not even the dolphins at Disneyland.
But the responses to Robert’s advantages were not universal. Now, what? Some of his friends and associates asked themselves, What in the hell do we do now? He has a nice smile, and he can swim like a fish, but our nation was founded by normal people, and it is no place for those who are too different. They just confuse things and eventually turn to civil disobedience. How do we know what kind of man he could someday be?
Robert hired a famous attorney and applied for a place on the U.S. Olympic swimming team. The International Olympic Committee checked the rules very carefully and could find no restriction against the swimmer who had gills and in the end, he qualified for the competition.
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My own connection with Gills happened unexpectedly on a windy beach in Northern California as I was practicing my casting with an experimental new rod given to me by a well-known tackle company called Sage . It was made out of something called “graphite” and it felt more like a spear or harpoon than a fly rod, but that didn’t matter because it didn’t just cast the line–it launched it like a rocket. And Scientific Anglers had supplied me with enough lines to choke an elephant, including a new model called “Weight forward 11 weight sink tip.” Whatever that might be. But the line looked nice and I decided to keep it. So there I was standing on the windy beach on that fateful day, trying to stay vertical with more equipment than I could effectively handle. The weather was more than bad that day; it was incredibly bad–cold and windy. Around 4 o’clock, I suddenly heard a child screaming for help, but I couldn’t determine the child’s location.
To make matters worse, I have always been a bad swimmer and I didn’t know what to do. And then without warning, I saw a young man come running down the beach just a few yards from where I stood shaking in the cold wind. He paid no attention to me and his eyes were fixed on a point some 200 yards out into the rolling waves of the Pacific Ocean. His entry into the surface was something I will never forget. He hit the first wave like an arrow or spear and I watched carefully as he ripped off a blue handkerchief he had knotted around his throat.
My eyes grew wide as a saucer as I watched him cut through the 11-foot high surf like a barracuda–his swimming stroke was something I will never forget. His arms were not ordinary arms. They were like knives, slicing through the waves as he made his way toward the drowning boy still some 300 yards out to sea. Then suddenly, Gills disappeared. He was gone. I watched it with a pounding in my chest as I imagined the worst. They had been hit by sharks and were both going to die out there and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
Then suddenly there they were, ripping through the rolling swells of the Pacific, with their arms around each other as Gills continued his incredible swimming back toward the beach where I stood immobilized and holding my hand over my mouth.
Moments later, they were out of the surf, and Gills was holding his arms around the half-drowned child as they came up to where I was standing. Gills had tears in his eyes and the young boy was shaking like a leaf as I approached them. At first, I didn’t notice Gills’ throat. Something was wrong about it, but I couldn’t quite see just what it was. Then my eyes opened as I focused on the movement of his neck and chest. He was breathing through a series of parallel plates just below his jaw. His chest was heaving and I watched as the plates pumped immense amounts of ice-cold saltwater out of his mouth and throat.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to think. I just stood before them with my mouth hanging open as if paralyzed. Gills looked at me and smiled. I nodded my head and returned that smile, and as I did so, I noticed the child was a dark-skinned boy around 8 years old–maybe Mexican, maybe black. Maybe neither. Maybe Middle Eastern. Maybe a combination of all three. I couldn’t tell, and in that crystalline moment I suddenly realized that it didn’t matter. Our lives and our deaths are inevitably laminated on opposite sides of a coin, which none of us can escape or change. It has nothing to do with our money or the lack of it. It has nothing to do with our ancestry or race or gender. It is none of these things. It is something else: it is our shared human destiny.
Then Gills smiled at me as if he was reading my thoughts. Who knows? Maybe he was. He smiled, then nodded goodbye, and picked the young boy up and started the long walk back to the parking lot. I stood there for at least half an hour, trying to remember everything I had just seen and witnessed. It was important and not to be forgotten.
Time passed and I went my way into a life shaped and carved by my own perceptions, my own strengths and weaknesses, my own beliefs.
Several years later, I was sitting at home, just back from a fishing trip to Argentina. The Summer Olympics were being televised and my heart almost exploded when they announced the next men’s swimming event: the 100m freestyle. There he was, milling around the other swimmers as they began to warm up, the same young man I had seen several years ago, the young man who had saved a child’s life by risking his own.
The announcer was doing his best to keep the introduction as low key as he could and as objective as he could because the emotions were obviously raw and thinly disguised. The announcer said that a lot of Olympic fans had demanded that Gills not be allowed to participate because he was not truly human. He was a freak. Others said that he could participate if his gills could be sealed when he raced and that would put him on an “even keel’’ with normal athletes. But no one knew what kind of sealant could be used and debate soon emerged between the chemical companies, all of whom wanted the contract.
Some of the most vehement opposition had even appeared on the evening news to denounce what they called the moral collapse of the modern world and vowed they would protest at the Olympic ceremonies and bring the whole thing down.
But when the ceremonies finally began, everything seemed normal and organized. All of the athletes had marched in front of the cameras, carrying their national flags and it was obvious that Gills had a red bandanna around his neck. It wasn’t that he was ashamed or trying to hide anything; he just didn’t want to make any unnecessary waves at the opening of the games. That would come later, during the 100m freestyle.
This is what happened and it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. As soon as the freestyle contestants took their positions and the gun went off, everyone stood up in their seats as they watched Gills launch himself through the air like a harpoon. They saw the invincible and incredible tidal waves of Robert’s powerful strokes move him instantly into a 12-meter lead. The roar of the crowd was deafening. Even the screen on my television was reverberating and shaking. As the camera panned around the audience, it was obvious. Some were cheering and others were booing as Gills sliced through the water like a blue marlin. And, it was reported later that after the race was over, a significant number of women had called the Olympic Committee asking for Robert’s telephone number.
But none of this could compare to the conclusion of the fastest 100m freestyle event in Olympic history. Such a thing had never happened before, and more likely, it would never happen again because Robert never stopped at the end of the race. He just jumped out of the pool like a tarpon, ran through the exit door, and disappeared. As far as I know, he was never seen again, at least in the United States. I think the best part of the story is the fact that for one incredible moment, something truly great happened.
And in my opinion, it was nothing more or less than this: after 65 years of watching myself and so many others doing all kinds of things, normal, abnormal, and completely mysterious, I have come to believe that it is not the differences in us that matter the most. What matters most are the ways that we are the same.
