Hook, Line, and Sinker

I would guess that my father was the person who taught me how to bait a hook, and often he would take my sisters and me to one or another local pond for a few hours of fishing. Mostly we used worms, though I remember my cousin taking me out one day and we used baloney surgically removed from my aunt's refrigerator. We got into trouble for that. And this was the same cousin who persuaded me that walking down the railroad tracks one sunny afternoon was a good idea--I was 4, he was 3--we got into trouble for that too. Someone found us standing outside of a bar, crying. That was my first ride in the back of a police car, and when we got back to the apartment we lived in, our parents fed us... baloney sandwiches. Then we got sent to different bedrooms to consider our sins.

But, back to fishing. I grew up using a bobber, probably because the small ponds we fished had nothing but small fish: blue gill, sunfish, the occasional catfish. I once hooked a turtle of some sort, which frightened me when I reeled it in. And once, fishing by myself, a muskrat surfaced, looked at me, and disappeared. That frightened me, too. My grandfather, though, was a true fisherman, and he and my grandmother took me to Ontario, Canada, when I was 12, and there we pursued walleye in the morning (no bobber, just a weighted line with a baited hook), which we'd then eat for lunch. In the afternoon we went after northern pike and muskie--big fish. We used lures for these fish, and though I quickly learned the art of casting and using my thumb on the open reel to stop the lure just shore of a log or the shore, too often I'd end up with a snag in my line. This, of course, caused my grandfather no small amount of frustration; he might have been embarrassed that I was even remotely related to him. He would turn out to be one of my true heroes, someone I could call a man's man. (I'd apply this to my father later, but only after years of battles and then, even later, deep contemplation.) We did not eat the pike and muskie, though I have photographs of myself holding them onshore. We must have given them to someone my grandparents knew.

Several years ago I stayed with my cousin at her family's cabin in northern Indiana, where we fished with worms and bobbers. I was happy to see that I could still remove a hook from a catfish mouth without getting my fingers pierced by the fish's whiskers, and I was even glad to see that I still felt some sadness for the greedy bluegill that swallowed a hook that could not be removed. I have fished other places, of course: for striped bass in the California Delta, for trout in Sierra lakes. I have not, however, delved into fly fishing, something my friend Shawn continues to both enjoy and write about. Shawn (and others I have known) possesses much more poetic patience than I ever will, a much better understanding of the art of fishing. I, on the other hand, am a plodder, suited to sitting and watching the white half of a bobber ride the crest of small waves.

I miss fishing. I miss watering the garden at night and getting up early the next morning to ply worms from the soft earth, and I miss casting a strand of filament out onto the water, hearing the plop of hook, line, and sinker as they begin their work, then feeling the first dip of the pole's tip as a fish samples the bait. And, I've come to miss watching my father remove fish from my hook, listening to my grandfather's admonitions as I sat in the boat, and watching my sons' faces when they, too, learned to fish. But, more than anything? I wonder just what the hell I was thinking a couple years ago when, on a quest to dispose of anything in the garage that was not being used, I disposed of a tangle of fiberglass poles and fishing line that had done nothing more than get moved from shelf to shelf for many years. Oddly, though, I did not dispose of my grandfather's homemade tackle box, which must be half a century old, or one of the open-face reels we used on that trip to Ontario.