“Hold the pole, Champ.” He grabbed the fish with both hands, carried it up the beach, and dropped it in the sand near the five-gallon bucket. Plopping down on the bucket, he gasped, “Please, get me a soda out of the knapsack, son.” Back in a flash, I opened it for him. “I almost lost that one.”
“Yeah, Dad, the fishing pole was in the lake!”
“I was talking about the fish, son.”
“Yeah, me too,” I faked the right response.
“How big is that fish, Dad?” He looked at it hard for a spell, taking a slug from his soda pop. “A good fifteen-pounds, if it’s an ounce.” For the next ten minutes, he drip-dried while I gave him the replay as the fish film rolled in my mind.
Dad looked at his watch, realizing the battery got wet. “Champ, I don’t know what time it is, but what say we give the fish our bait, except for the worms, gather up our belongings, and eat lunch in the car on the way back home?”
With the knapsack across his shoulder, Dad had four fishing poles, the five-gallon bucket with the worm bucket in one hand, and the stringer of fish in the other hand. I had the tackle box and a couple of poles. I walked behind him up the dirt path. I thought how it had been an exciting morning, watching that big catfish tail kick up dust as we went along. It was a morning I’ll never forget.
In the car, I told him, “I can’t wait to tell Mom about you going in the lake and catching that big catfish. I can tell her, right?”
“Sure, but you have to tell her about your giant carp, too.”
“Oh, I’m going to tell her everything, do you want another peanut butter sandwich?” A short time later, the car hardly came to rest in the drive before I hopped out and ran in the front door of the house.
“Mom, Mom, come see what we got!” I ran out the garage door. The shovel hung on a wall nail; I grabbed it off in flight. I passed Dad on the side of the house as he was taking the fish out to the picnic table to clean them. On the top of the bucket, Dad had laid the worm bucket. I picked it off the top and carried, it like a football, to the garden. Worms are one thing you can bury and not feel bad about. While in the garden, I dug an extra hole for the fish carcasses.
In the shade of the maple tree, Dad had the scrap of plywood, garden hose, big plastic bowl, knife and pliers ready on the picnic table. Pliers? I’d find out about that after getting Mom. I ran square into her when I cornered the house. She stopped me with a hug.
“I wanted you to see the fish before Dad got hold of them!”
“Sugar, that’s what I was coming to see. I heard you when you raced through the house. Why are your father’s clothes damp?”
“He ran into the lake like an elephant, Mom. You should have been there. Come on!”
“Honey, why are your clothes wet?” Mom asked.
He started, “Well—”
I interrupted, “Here’s your wallet.” I reached down the front of my shorts and pulled it out of my underwear. That set the stage for a funny recap.
Dad began cleaning fish, starting with the smallest, as we spun stories for Mom. We were dragon-slayers returning to the queen’s court with tales of battle for her amusement.
“Watch closely, Champ.” Dad, using his sharpest knife, slit the skin all the way around the catfish head. The fish was still alive. It flipped occasionally. I had some difficulty watching, but I understood that the fish had to die for us to eat. It made me feel good that Dad had thrown good fish back to live on once we had enough to eat.
He grabbed the head and worked his way around the cut, using the pliers to roll a short flap of skin away from the meat. He then got a good grip on the head with his hand and the roll of skin beside the dorsal fin with the pliers and forcibly pulled the skin down to the tail. It was like taking off a wet T-shirt. In one smooth motion the catfish was naked. Dad took a huge knife to lop the head off. Using a small knife, he cut the belly open by inserting it first in the poop hole, then running it forward. With his fingers, he pulled the guts out. Skin, head, and guts went in the five-gallon bucket. Dad placed it in the big plastic bowl after rinsing the body with hose water.
After all five fish were dressed, Mom took the fish in the house, and Dad cleaned up the picnic table area. I buried the guts and stuff in the garden and rinsed the bucket out.
Years later, I was a teenager in love. One Friday evening, I drove a young lady down to the lake to watch the sun set. It had been such a long time since I had been there. I thought the shoreline might have houses on it by then. Our area was in the midst of a development boom. I was happy to see the lake as I remembered. We got out and walked down the dirt path to the point, hand in hand. At the end of the path we stopped. She was prattling on while I was looking out on the lake, re-winding the mental film of my dad running down a catfish with a fishing pole attached to it.
“What are you looking at? The sunset is over here.”
I turned and noticed something I had overlooked, though I had fished there many times since Dad and I first came. There were six big willow bushes growing at the water’s edge. Two bushes faced the main lake, twenty feet apart. One bush was growing to the right of the point toward the bay. One bush overhung the water at the end of the point. In addition, two bushes grew, side by side, on the left of the point toward the channel where the catfish are.
Chapter 3 - My Pond
In the cover of darkness, our headlights poked a hole down a short, pure sand passage that for most was unknown; and those who passed before us would have just as soon it be forgotten. I got out of the car with a flashlight and walked the headlights into the black hole. I walked back toward the car, stopped short, and began to use the flashlight beam as a pointer. The U.S. Army had laid down segments of perforated, metal track to allow military vehicles movement across the deep soft sand. Wind-blown sand had covered much of the track and some sections were deep under the sand, caused by the weight of heavy vehicles. Jagged metal ends popped up here and there where heavier trucks had damaged the segment edges. My job was to help Dad keep the car on the track so we wouldn’t be stuck and to avoid the sharp ragged metal edges to keep from popping a tire. The first part of the road was the worst. Once we crested the small hill in the middle, it was easier to coast down to an oak hammock where roots and moisture made the sand firm enough to drive on.
Sequestered under a low blanket of live oak branches and tucked in behind an ancient arrangement of sand dunes, the sunrise appeared, as if someone greater than us simply turned the dimmer up and things slowly began to illuminate. It didn’t take us long to unpack our gear. We had three medium light spinning outfits and two canvas creels. The creels were identical with a multitude of pockets and pouches that were semi-organized with an assortment of lures and fishing paraphernalia. Armed like the platoons of soldiers that had rehearsed warfare amongst these dunes before us, we geared up to assault the fish.
The pond was just down a slope from where we parked. From our vantage point close to one end, you could see all the way across the width of the pond in the light of dawn. If you looked just right, you could see a reflection of light off the water at the far end. Vapor steamed a foot high off the pond, resembling a loose roll of cotton insulation, padding the surface. The pond was an oblong oval with a couple of small sandy points jutting out across from one another, roughly halfway along the length of the pond.
Once we got out from underneath the trees, there was a wide, well-rutted, sandy strip, obviously used as a course during maneuvers. The strip undulated left and right, making its way around the pond with many side trails coming in where two sand dunes dipped down together. Six or eight high struts across the strip got us to a sparse band of coarse clump grasses, scrub oaks, and individual mature pines that naturally fenced the pond. Swathes of young weeping willow trees rimmed much of the shoreline. Their limp branches draped over the water, the longest of which swept the surface in the faint breeze.