(Originally appeared 5/01/97)

A Quieter Time

by Gene Hill

It seems that right now most people think the largemouth bass was invented so it could be chased in high-powered bass boats, spied on in its bedroom with sonar, and scared into defending itself against plugs that resemble a World War II fighter plane.

While I have nothing against technology or spending a ridiculous amount of money on fishing tackle, proper hats, polarized glasses, beer coolers, et al., I have the uneasy feeling that things have gotten a bit out of hand. No way do I think that we ought to stop the clock of progress or pretend that this is a softer and more gentle time, but there's no harm in taking a moment or two to reconsider a few things about fishing.

It's no doubt symptomatic of the time that everybody wants to catch fish; all well and good. But it also seems that we want to catch the most fish in the least amount of time while covering the greatest distances. I doubt that the Creator had that in mind when he so kindly designed the largemouth.

Time was when the bass was the end piece in a long chain of events. No small part of the fun of fishing was getting bait. I remember a tiny spring-fed brook that tumbled through a cathedral of spruce. Everything was cool and green and somehow magical. Small leopard frogs were sprinkled here and there, and we splashed around together getting equally wet until a dozen or so were collected in an old milk pail filled with moss and ferns. It was always a delightful adventure, spiced with the pleasure of the farm dog barking instructions and the stalking of water snakes with the Red Ryder carbine BB gun to deal with the ones that considered the frogs their private property.

Another evening, after the chores were done, would find us in scratchy wool bathing suits seining the tiny coves of a nearby lake for minnows and the occasional perch or bluegill. Whatever we caught ended up in a washtub that we invariably filled with too much water, and this added to the already swampy smell in the back seat of our Model A Ford.

Nights after a summer rain were spent barefoot on the lawn catching nightwalkers with flashlight and swift but gentle hands. We spent other afternoons in one brook or another for hellgrammites and crayfish, which pinched our fingers and had the habit of disappearing from the boxes and buckets we kept in the coolest part of the cellar. Braver souls than this one also added a small mouse or so to the arsenal, which they would swim over the holes where only the biggest bass were thought to lurk.

I know I can never recapture that incredible excitement I used to feel as we pulled away from the dock in our boat (watched by a pair of tiny barn owls that were almost always there), and tried to row as silently as we could so as not to break the spell. I like the dead calm mornings best. Behind the boat was a silver path dotted with the little whirlpools of the oars; it was a matter of pride to have that soft wake as straight as a plumb line. If you were good at rowing, it was no small source of satisfaction, and perhaps one day you might overhear a grownup, none of whom were noted for lavishing praise on small boys, mention that "Hilly's boy knows how to handle a boat."

While we rowed, keeping a certain distance from the giant lily pads, as silent as dawn, my father would be casting his favorite topwater plug: a homemade contraption shaped like a wedge that sort of popped when you jerked it. He called it a "vacuum bait." Like all his favorite plugs, it was red-headed with a white body, and had three huge single hooks that, only in theory, made it weedless. My rod trolled one of my precious frogs or a four-inch shiner or a bluegill about the size of a silver dollar.

Needless to say I felt that I was a far more sophisticated fisherman than my father. A devoted reader of all the outdoor magazines we could afford, at 10 or 15 cents a copy, and a constant student of all the catalogs, I absolutely ached for stuff I couldn't afford. My dream fishing tackle box was one with two or three trays filled with Creek Chub Darters, Pikie Minnows, Heddon's Go-Deeper River Runts, Pflueger Chums, Johnson's Silver Minnows, and Hawaiian Wigglers. In the bottom compartment would be pork rind, pickled killies, and a bottle of luminous paint used for topwater plugs, which were made to glow by shining a flashlight on them for a little while!

My tackle box in reality was something else. A cedar cigar box with some odds and ends of hooks, bobbers, a one-bladed pocketknife, and a few spoons I had salvaged from a shallow rock ledge that snagged the unknowing trollers. In time, however, I did manage to garner a couple of the plugs I most coveted, but the one thing I never owned that I think I wanted most of all was a casting rod made by True Temper and, if memory serves, called the American Boy model. It was four-sided and looked like a fencing foil five or five-and-a-half feet long. One of the summer guests at the lakeside hotel had one, and as I rowed him around the lake for 50 cents a day I could hardly take my eyes off of it or the Pflueger Supreme reel he used with it.

The rods we used were bamboo, five feet long, and stiff enough to throw a bait pail. I had some nameless free-spool casting reel, while my father pleasured himself with a South Bend that sported "ruby" end bearings and a level wind. They say that adversity always has some compensations, and one of mine was that I became a past master of picking out backlashes in the dark. We used a button hook, by the way; shoe stores still gave them away out of habit as an advertisement although an eccentric old maid great-aunt of mine was the only person I remember who wore shoes that buttoned.

Back to the fishing. In contrast to the modern outboard and the wave-slapping, stepped-V hull, one of the absolute musts of our outings was quiet. Country folks weren't much on talking in the first place; it was "showy." So we didn't chatter and above all we didn't bang around in the boat. You didn't scratch an itchy bare foot on the anchor cleat, you didn't slide the bait pail over where you could reach it, you didn't squeak an oar in its lock, you didn't thrash around the boat trying to recatch a loose frog. You were as quiet here, or more so, than you were in church--since my father didn't have the same constraints on him as did our Methodist minister. We fished a lot on cloudy days that either threatened rain or really did, since most of those days gave us time off from working out of doors. When the boat needed a little drying out we used a sponge--and when you wrung it out you did that quietly and gently too!

Between the worms and the frogs and the shiners and the plugs and spoons and a little luck we almost always seemed to catch fish--sometimes bass, pickerel more often, and catfish and perch almost always. Now and then there was an eel, which we loved to eat as we did everything else. I don't remember ever throwing anything back unless it was illegal, out of season, or too small. My father took as much pride, almost, in his ability to clean a fish as he did in catching one. I was only allowed to scale them for a lot of reasons, chiefly my careless attitude about sharp knives and the remoteness of medical help. I was always cutting myself with something, not out of any incredible clumsiness but more because of a very short attention span for any given task.

I said before that I couldn't recapture the excitement of those early mornings I so looked forward to--and I'm sorry, because I still believe that this is the reason, the essential why, that we go fishing. But I think you know just what I mean.

I still have a few of those old plugs and spoons--even Pop's "vacuum bait." And once or twice every summer along the shores of a local bass pond you could see a middle-aged man chunking a plug about half the size of a shingle along the edge of the lotus lilies. When the light is just right and he can see his reflection in the water, a certain magic that only fishermen know about takes place. He sees the shadow of an old wooden rowboat and the silhouette of two fishermen. One is a young man of about 30 who seems to be smoking a cigar; the other, rowing, is a tow-headed boy about 10 or so. The quiet is accented by the rhythmic plop of a huge wooden plug and the distant murmur of barn owls. He wonders for a moment why the man and boy never speak, and then he realizes that they don't have to--they are fishing together, and that is all that matters.


This story originally appeared in A Listening Walk...and other stories by Gene Hill. Copyright (c) 1985 Gene Hill. All rights reserved.