We decided to move heaven and earth to learn to fish. My nine-year-old son Raymond wanted it so. He’d watched some YouTube videos and got the notion, I reckon.
This development came as a welcome surprise, for I’d long searched for a way to get him off the iPad, trying hiking, deer and duck hunting, and various lesser-known pursuits, all to no avail.
Our first move was to invade Bass Pro in Huntsville with something of the fervor of George Pickett at Cemetery Ridge – and with similar results.
“We want the best youth fly fishing rig you’ve got,” I told the boy at the counter.
“We don’t have a youth fly fishing rig.”
“Then get me a regular one,” I said.
In no time we were walking out with a contraption so dynamic – hot pink and neon green – it might’ve been designed by a graffiti artist. Nevertheless, we were proud. In my mind I had already succeeded in initiating Raymond into the mysteries of the great outdoors, and in his, well, the rod and reel might as well have been a huge and varicolored river bass brought to hand by time and sweat and skill.
Alas, the thing wouldn’t cast. Upon further examination, we learned that the spool was tangled, and even though we brought in a handyman with the eyes of an eagle and the fingers of a Swiss watch maker, he pronounced the thing dead on arrival.
“The bearings are broke,” he said.
By then, we’d already scheduled our first trip for the following Saturday, but I did my best to remain calm. “Not to worry,” I told him, pretending to know all about bearings. “We’ll find him a rig in my dad’s shop.”
Which we did posthaste. However, it was a spinning rig – much more complicated than the closed-face model we’d purchased earlier, so that, even though Raymond could generate the occasional decent cast, he simply wasn’t ready for prime time.
“I’ll order you one from the internet,” I told him.
I ordered two: one fly fishing youth rig from Orvis, the other the tried-and-true Zebco 33 of the glory days of my own youth.
It was the first time in a long time that the old Greek deities crossed my mind. “Beware of them for they are nothing other than demons from the pre-Christian epoch,” said a favored priest recently. And you couldn’t have proven it otherwise by me, for when the rod broke, I was left to believe that Poseidon himself had emerged from the depths to throw his steely trident directly into the heart of our plans.
Saturday rolled around and, because the Zebco hadn’t arrived, I was forced to tell Raymond that, a-fishing, we wouldn’t go.
“Why don’t we go gather some crawdads?” I asked, knowing that it was the season for them.
I could see the specter of the iPad rising in his eyes like the spirit of Samuel before King Saul in the house of the Witch of Endor, as he motioned his decline.
“Come on,” I said, handing him a bucket and net. “You’re going to love it.”
Love it he did not. Despite the warm and sunny weather, the breeze blowing in from the Tennessee River, as well as the hundreds of crawdads we piled into our buckets like ancient coins from the bottom of an overfilled well, all Raymond could think about was – fish. He’d be playing with a dead one on the bank of the dike or cupping a little one he’d taken from the claws of a crawdad.
“Put that down,” I’d say. “Today is about crawdads.”
But his actions suggested otherwise. For every time I saw him with a fish in his hands, it was undeniable proof that, try as I might, it was not crawdads but fish that we were after at this moment in our lives.
I thought I had it all fixed when the Zebco came a few days later. I’m usually tired after work and therefore only receptive to a couch and a book and occasionally a television program of some kind. But this was make-or-break time, so we hopped in the truck, drove to the nearby boat landing, found a place along the bank where the fish were jumping, and started right in.
In the words of Nick Adams in Ernest Hemingway’s “The End of Something,” they were jumping, but they wouldn’t bite. Raymond cast like a pro, and I tried to focus on this. “You’re doing great buddy,” I told him; and when the sun started sinking, I felt very much like an outdoorsman when I said, “Let’s just work our way along the bank in the direction of the landing, casting along the way, and maybe we’ll find some hungry fish.”
We thought our prayers were answered when, not far from the boat ramp, beside an overturned houseboat that I imagined was shipwrecked by some ancient and unexpected storm, he got a bite. The evening frogs seemed to quiet, the mosquitoes to quit flying; even the ripples in that broad and flowing river flattened as I urged him, “You’ve got him, now, just reel him in.”
Everything was set, the straw of our efforts was turning to slick and scaly multi-colored gold, when – how can I even say this? – he lifted the line out of the water to find that, instead of catching a fish, he had caught – that’s right – a crawdad.
I have a picture of him, standing proudly with it, the smile on his face only partially hiding the disappointment that he felt as, once again, his fishing pursuits were thwarted by that most persistent of aquatic wildlife – the old decapod crustacean, the swamp lobster, the mud bug, call it what you want – the crawdad.
I wished I had something clever and meaningful to say, akin to “When Life Hands You Lemons, Make Lemonade,” or that we went home and made po' boys or étouffée, but this didn’t happen. My only takeaway is that sometimes, when you really want fish from this old world, try as you might, toil as you must, in the end, all it’s going to give you is a crawdad … and you’d better be ready for it.
Along with his father, Allen Keller runs a lumber business in Stevenson, Alabama. He has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MBA from University of Virginia. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
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