As best I can remember — and it gets tougher as the years pass — my first fishing trip was not to some little farm pond somewhere, but to Georgia’s Lake Sinclair. There was a family picnic of sorts, with grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, and somebody or other handed me a cane pole, with cork, split-shot and a worm impaled on an Aberdeen bronze hook. Eisenhower was president, and I was three years old when the cork bobbed, then sunk, and I pulled up my first fish, a bluegill.
That started a love affair with fishing that is approaching a half-century. I fall in love almost every time I string a rod or tie on a hook or lure of some kind. It doesn’t matter whether it’s rainbow trout or speckled trout, bream or redfish, largemouth bass, crappie or flounder.
I have two men to thank for whatever it is inside me that forces me to accept nearly every invitation to fish golf-course ponds or salt marshes, from the bank, the front of a canoe, the middle seat in a beat-up johnboat or the back of a $50,000 bass rig or saltwater flats boat.
One is a 77-year-old, and the other is his father, who I have missed nearly every day for the 20 years he’s been gone. I know up in Heaven, all of the bass are 6-pounders, and all of them are sucking in the popping bugs and plastic spiders he loved to cast with his fly rod. Up there, his tippet never breaks, either.
Not enough dads are taking kids fishing anymore. Our society has tended toward a more urban and suburban base over the past 30-odd years, and all the trappings of making a living have sucked the life out of a lot of fathers, leaving them weekend couch potatos.
Thankfully, my father never reached that stage — even when he passed the three-score-and-10 mark, he never sat still. Only in the last year or so, since he’s had a knee replaced, has he let anybody else even mow his lawn. When I called him the other night, he was working on fishing tackle for a Memorial Day trip to the coast.
When I was a kid, he carried me to the Chesapeake Bay on after-dark surf-fishing trips for bluefish. We fished in the surf and from the pier whenever we went to the beach on vacation. For my high-school graduation, he booked a trip to the bay to catch jumbo bluefish. Later, we waded Virginia’s Shenandoah River for smallmouth bass — him carrying a fly-rod and me an ultralight spinning outfit.
Those kinds of fathering instincts came natural to him, because they had been practiced on him years before by his father. They took trips to Georgia’s Satilla, Ocmulgee, Ohoopee and Altamaha rivers for redbreast sunfish — redbellies to us commoners — and they had probably fished every pond within 10 miles of the family farm.
When I got old enough and started spending more time with him, my grandfather toted me along. He paddled me — and I paddled him — countless miles in an old cypress skiff. He taught me how to use a fly-rod, setting up a Coke bottle 50 feet away and making me hit it with casts until I could ping it almost every time. Then he made it harder, setting the bottle up a foot or two behind the bottom strand of a barbed-wire fence, so I had to roll the line in there low. I lift a silent “thank you” to him every time I have to push a cast back under a limb or slide a dry fly into a 6-inch-wide crack between two rocks in a trout stream. I only wish I could paddle for him one more time.
I have no excuse not to be a fisherman. I had two of the best teachers possible. I am wiping away tears as I write this, knowing that only one of them is around to read this, and because it doesn’t amount to what a life-long “thank you” ought to be. It’s all I’ve got.
Dad, and Pa-Pa, you are and were the best. Happy Father’s Day.
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