My Dad Took Me Fishing One Saturday
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Thursday, November 24, 2011
My Dad Took Me Fishing One Saturday!
We lived in a small Midwestern Ohio town with a population of a staggering 800 people.
The town was mostly a few shops and homes and a lot of farms, streams and woodlands surrounding everything.
It was the kind of place that Norman Rockwell paintings might be made of. The air, back when I was a kid, was 50 percent fresher than it is today.
I revelled in the freedom of Summer days!
My Dad was a plain and simple man of the soil. He worked as a grave digger for the local cemetery and although he did not earn very much, we managed to eat and keep a roof overhead. That was about the extent of it. We were dirt poor other than that.
But we had the richness of a loving family. That was worth it all.
One day, I was cracking some English Walnuts from the tree in our back yard when Dad appeared and announced that he was taking me fishing.
I had never been fishing and he made it sound like fun.
He handed me a brand new fishing pole he had gotten at the hardware store, and off we went, down the streets toward the edge of town where we would intersect the wooded areas and the... creek.
Yes, the creek! The creek where the turtles and the crawdads and the snakes and the fish were.
The very creek with the deep pond and sandy beach where all the local boys went to skinny dip.
The creek with the slippery, sometimes moss-covered flat rocks and the abiding sensation that if you waded it barefoot, a crayfish would latch onto your big toe with those threatening pincers and never let go.
Ah! The wild imagination of a kid!
We arrived at what my Dad obviously considered "A Good Spot" and we began the arduous and gut-wrenching task of baiting our hooks with... fishing worms! Ugh!
I hated putting fishing worms onto hooks. It made me queasy and a little sick to my stomach so, Dad did it for me.
I was a total wimp.
We sat and baked in the Summer sun for awhile, keeping a wary eye on the red and white "Bobbers" at the end of our fishing lines, now immersed in the murky depths of the creek, waiting for that "Nibble."
Suddenly Daddy let out a "Whoop" and his line began to "Run" very swiftly across the creek. He had snagged something for sure and it seemed to be big because it was causing his rod to bend and it was running away with the bait at an astounding clip.
I secretly hoped that Dad wasn't going to try to beach that thing, whatever it might be, because in my imagination I envisioned that it was big enough to eat both of us.
It turned out that Dad had caught himself a fair sized cat fish. I felt sorry for it. It seemed to plead with me with those little beady eyes.
Wimp!
We fished for another hour or so and then, Dad got tired of fishing and we went swimming in the altogether on that hot Summer day so long ago when people did such things as that.
Trudging homeward once more, catfish in hand, I looked down at my little white Terrier Dog who was following along and said, "Great day of fishing, eh Tag?" (Tag was my dog's name.)
Well Dad got the catfish- bite and I got some chigger bites so I guess we both got something out of it all.
The cat fish was dressed and fried a golden brown by my Dad on the top of the old coal-fired cooking stove.
I couldn't bear to eat it.
I still saw that pleading look from those beady little eyes--in my mind's eye.
I never went fishing again.
Wimp!
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