Lines from the Long Rod: A Fishing Journey

By Allan Larson

A collection of fishing stories and memoirs from around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543982282

Book preview

ago.

1

Fish Heads and Nut Grass

Fishing consists of a series of misadventures interspersed by occasional moments of glory.

Howard Marshall, Reflections on a River (1967)

By the time I was nine or ten, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that I wanted to do more than fish. At that time, we were living on a small farm a few miles outside of Salisbury, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Unfortunately, fishing was not readily available. So every fishing trip was a pretty major venture in our old ’38 Chevy. Pa would occasionally lug us down to Princess Anne, over on the Virginia side of the Chesapeake Bay rent a rowboat, and buy clams and mussels for bait, then we’d spend the day on the muggy, sweltering bay. We’d also take crab traps, baited with fish heads. And I think that we nearly always did better on the crabs. But that was because the eastern side of Chesapeake Bay was pretty shallow, and Pa didn’t feel like rowing out to deeper, fishier water. And we had to buy the fish heads, which appalled the Depression-era mentality of my long-suffering mother. Years later, when I found out that crabs like chicken necks and wings and heads at least as well, I never told Ma, because Lord knows we’d had chickens and could have saved the money spent on fish heads. At that time, the forties, Salisbury was the self-proclaimed chicken capital of the world. I think Sonny Perdue started there.

Sometimes, on the sorties out of Princess Anne, the bay was so crammed with jellyfish that we couldn’t fish or crab. They’d come up by the dozens in the crab traps, or hang on your line, sinker, and bait, and Pa said they were hard to row through. Occasionally, though, we caught some fish: black sea bass, porgies, little bluefish and small brown flounder the size of a dinner plate or a little bigger. The flounders were the real prize. Ma and Pa would fish with the rods we had, and I’d use a handline. It was all pretty bucolic. But then one day, as Pa was trying to cast a bit away from the boat, he stood up, tipped the boat, and cast—all this simultaneously—and sunk what I suspect was about a size 2 stainless-steel bait hook solidly, very solidly, into the base of Ma’s thumb. Although I’ve seen lots of hooks in lots of people since then, this one was by far the worst. It swelled and bled a lot immediately. Pa knew that you were supposed to push the hook through, cut off the barb with pliers, and back the rest of the hook out. The first and only time he touched that hook, Ma screamed like nothing I’d ever heard. So that approach wasn’t going to happen. Turned out he didn’t have any cutting pliers anyway. The saddest part was that Pa had to row her into the doctor in Princess Anne, and it was still only morning. And that finished fishing for the rest of the day. Why couldn’t it have happened in the afternoon?

So, one stifling Eastern Shore morning, Pa and I are out in the garden hoeing out a unique Eastern Shore weed called nut grass. He’d been trying to bribe me with a fishing rod if I’d hoe the nut grass out of just the corn. Much as I wanted a fishing rod, I was a little suspicious, because he wasn’t really too much into anything but work. And I doubted his tastes in anything as artistic and delicate as fishing tackle. Turned out my doubts were well founded. Later in the day, he must have felt sorry for me, for the nut grass was an unstoppable force, and he presented me with a rod that I think he made. It was a straight hexagonal cylinder of wood, probably oak, about five feet long and an inch in diameter, with strategically placed screw eyes as guides. And onto this thing he had strap-clamped a strange little tarnished brass reel, perhaps two inches in diameter, that I doubt would have held much more line than what could clear the rod. I thanked him profusely, because I knew that my labors on the nut grass really hadn’t earned it. But in truth, I wanted to cry.

The next time we went down to the bay, we didn’t go to Princess Anne, but instead to a bridge over the Choptank River, where we fished from the bank. The Choptank was by far the biggest river I’d ever seen, so you had to be able to cast to have any chance at all of catching a fish. Ma and Pa could cast, but my outfit, even with a heavy sinker, would not. The strange little reel was the main culprit. But not to worry: my father laid the outfit on the ground, stripped all the line off the reel and up through the top screw eye, put his foot on the rod, grabbed the line above the hook and sinker, swung it around his head a couple of times, and launched my terminal gear into what looked to me to be a pretty fishy spot. And, wonder of wonders, it was. My tackle was quite up to the job of cranking out a couple of one- or two-pound flounders. If euphoria is an emotion you can attribute to a kid, I was euphoric. I kept my fish separate from theirs, and when Ma cooked them, I ate only mine.

But things were only to get better. Sometime later, I believe in April or May, Pa and I were again in the garden. We were doing battle in the low row crops with what my buddies and I now called the goddamn nut grass, and out of the blue he says, How would you like to move to Spring Mount? To me, Spring Mount, three hours north of Salisbury, in Pennsylvania, which had an honest-to-God big, clear-water stream running through it, was so far beyond my wildest fantasy dreams that I don’t remember my answer, but he sure knew I approved. Approved—hell, I’d have let them sell my sister if they needed the money for a down payment. He said, We’re going to try to buy Aunt Laila’s store. It includes the post office and lots of other stuff, and we’ll all have to work pretty hard. Aunt Laila was Granny’s sister, and she had what I’d been led to believe was a profoundly underachieving husband, named Frank. Laila pretty well ran the whole operation, comprising a general store (this is 1948—food, hardware, gas pump, etc., the total provisioning for a small town) and post office. And she was just tired.

Well, he and Ma bought it. We got there to take over about noon on a hot June day, and within two hours I was down on the Perkiomen Creek with the same identical outfit from the Maryland garden and the Choptank River. Clearly, not exactly the best choice of outfit. The Perkiomen was the size of the Roaring Fork River in Colorado, the Little Lehigh in Pennsylvania, or the Cattaraugus in New York. Wide and placid, interrupted by low, colonial-era dams and brief fast water every couple of miles, the Perkiomen rambled through a pretty nice-looking countryside. For a ten-year-old fishing freak, life could not have gotten better. Work in the store, however, soon became comparable to the nut grass in the corn. It is a high price we pay to fish. Most people, wives especially, don’t realize that.

40s era post card

2

Kenny

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

Will Rogers

This little interlude has nothing at all to do with fishing, but every time I think of Maryland and the goddamn nut grass, the memory of Kenny Catlin makes me smile. Kenny’s family—Floyd, Bessie, and his fairly normal younger brother, J.D.—had a place across the road from us. Since Kenny was the only kid within walking distance who was my age, we were constant buddies. Kenny’s most distinguishing feature was a large, flat, spongy area between his nose and upper teeth, the result of a poorly done cleft palate surgery when he was pretty young, circa 1940. I suspect it didn’t look too bad when he was little, but as he grew bigger, so did the spongy area. I don’t think the lip was the real cause of the stuff Kenny got himself into, but he sure got himself into some stuff.

Behind their house and down the hill was a fairly thick woods with plenty of underbrush. All the Catlins’ wastewater—and I mean all of it—ran downhill through a buried pipe and reappeared as a bog, about the texture of yogurt, five feet across and of unknown depth. It was easy to avoid in the summer, because it had the character of a toxic dump site and nothing grew near it. But in the winter, leaves and anything else that blew or fell from above completely camouflaged it. Any kid with an ounce of sense knew it was out there and gave the general area a wide birth. But when it was covered by leaves, Kenny seemed to think that it had been mystically removed. It hadn’t.

So, one fall Saturday morning, Kenny and me and J.D. are down behind the house shooting our homemade bows and arrows at anything that moved and a lot of stuff that didn’t move. Our fathers helped us make the bows, and although we almost never hit anything that moved, they could throw an arrow a pretty good way. Kenny had already lost a couple of arrows, so when his last one flew past a sitting squirrel, he was after it at top nine-year-old speed. Almost immediately, kersplat, he is in the middle of the sewage bog and shrieking his head off. I don’t remember the lip affecting his voice at all. Me and J.D. got down there pretty quick. Luckily, a fair-sized branch had fallen into the pit earlier, and Kenny was hanging on to it, but it was very obvious that he’d gone in over his head; the thing was bottomless. We pushed sticks out at him to pull him in, but he was sort of afraid to leave his branch. So, in typical kid fashion, we went to get Floyd, his father. Floyd got him out somehow and marched him up to the house and hosed him down for what seemed like hours, on a downright cold November day. Kenny still had his heavy winter coat and hat on. Floyd was merciless and stripped him naked and marched him into the house. I didn’t see him again that day and never saw the coat again.

The finest moment, though, was one sweltering summer afternoon. Kenny and I had two ongoing projects. The first was our foxhole. It was toward the end of World War II, and we had dug a hole on the edge of our alfalfa field that most GIs would have been proud of. We worked on it endlessly, and our fathers even admired it, or so we thought. The other never-ending project was chopping down a huge dead buttonwood tree over on Kenny’s place. We chopped at it with hatchets and axes, we sawed it, probably for a couple of years, but when I last saw it, we weren’t a fifth of the way through it. I suspect it may still stand.

This particular afternoon, after a fruitless hour or so of whacking at the tree, we wandered over to the Catlins’ chicken pen. Any right-thinking kid likes to harass chickens; they just seem so damn dumb. There are no rocks on the Eastern Shore, so the only thing to throw at them was the oyster shell gravel from the driveway, and that was a fair walk away. After a bit, we got a couple of long sticks to poke at them. But because you had to push the stick through the holes in the six-foot-high chicken wire, you really couldn’t move it well enough to poke them efficiently, even though they were right at the fence.

So Kenny says, Watch this and he unbuttons his pants, gets out his little unit, sticks it through the fence, and pees on a slow-moving Rhode Island Red hen. It didn’t move too slow after that. Now that was funny, and we laughed until we couldn’t laugh anymore. But Kenny, as I’d noticed before, had a pretty good-sized bladder. The next target was a little banty rooster. When Kenny again stuck his thing through the fence, this guy didn’t walk off at all. He just stood there and looked up at it. And when Kenny started to pee on him, the little bugger jumped straight up in the air and pecked Kenny—hard—right on the end. It bled like crazy. He was scared to death. We had no idea what to do in this thoroughly embarrassing situation. So he did what little boys do in times of distress and ran crying to his mother. I haven’t the remotest idea what Bessie did with it, but she did take the time to chase me home. I know she called my mother, because she wouldn’t let me go over for days. But, you know, I really don’t think peeing on chickens is a perversion, and, best of all, girls can’t do it.

3

From the Ground Up

And, first, for worms: of these there be very many sorts: some breed only in the earth, as the earth-worm; others of or amongst plants, as the dug-worm; and others breed either out of excrements, or in the bodies of living creatures, as in the horns of sheep or deer; or some of dead flesh, as the maggot or gentle, and others.

—Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653)¹

Old Izaak was more than a casual student of worms; the above section of The Compleat Angler goes on for pages as Walton describes a myriad of worms and wormy creatures, offering almost endless information on raising them, keeping them vigorous in the bait box—worms to fish when, where, and for what, and on and on. It is somewhat amazing to me that he ever even began fly-fishing at all. But I really do kind of know how it must have happened.

And it wasn’t very long until I was pretty heavily involved in the eleven-year-old’s equivalent of worm science myself. You know, you don’t just hop out of bed one morning and start