The Old Man followed a highway through country unfamiliar to me, up steep hillsides and around mountain curves. We were headed for smaller water, he said, where the fish weren’t as big but neither were the crowds.
Of crowds, we’d already had aplenty. The past week had witnessed my spring furlough from fourth grade, and we’d spent it on the newly-opened Tenn-Tom Waterway. The first day, gray skies kept potential competitors away but, as the days went on and the skies cleared, other anglers gathered about.
On that first day, clouds washed over the world at ground level, teasing in wisps through bare trees, filtering through any pear trying to bloom, through tangles of honeysuckle daring to green. Drops upon boat rails, on gear, on us settled, condensing from clouds all around. They needn’t have fallen far. We listened to the rain patter on water and metal and wood. The fish didn’t mind, so neither did we.
We had set out to see what the local crappie were up to, and we’d quickly hit the mother lode. In the Fulton lock we’d checked the first flooded honeysuckle tangle we’d come to for crappie, and never found the need to leave.
We caught fish as quickly as baited hooks could be lowered into the snarl, as quickly as the occasionally broken off rig could be replaced. We caught crappie as quickly as minnows could be dipped and baited, as quickly as big, heavy slabs of silver-scaled succulence could be unhooked and placed into coolers, as quickly as jig poles could be maneuvered, lowered, bent and retrieved.
We caught fish while the bright sun shone and a cold wind blew. We caught fish while a wave-whipping squall passed over and around us, and we caught fish now, as a March drizzle tried and failed to wash the smiles from the faces of two Old Men and a Boy.
In the course of life’s events, no small amount of discomfort is required, but only rarely is it ever rewarded as handsomely as it paid us back that week. We fished from sunrise to sunset, dressed fish until midnight, slept a few fitful hours and arose in the still-dark chill to do it again.
The decades that have passed between have taken the Old Men with them. They’ve taken many of my illusions away, erased much I once believed to be so. Still, each year come March, when the days begin to lengthen and the crappie head shallow to spawn, they bring me back to a place in time that will live in my mind as long as water runs free. They take me to a week in a boat with two happy Old Men, who’d found, in life, a happy place to be, and who’d then taken time to show it to me.
Later, as we drove in search of another, more secluded spot, the hillsides grew steeper and the valleys more narrow. I’d always considered us to be lake fishermen. If there was going to be a lake somewhere soon, I thought, it’d be a mighty odd one.
“I’ve rarely seen a lake on the side of a hill,” I offered.
“Just wait ‘til you see the fish that live in it,” he shot back, and I let it rest.
Now and then we crossed valleys that lay half in shadow, half in sun, sidehilling past farms that were appealing from a distance, but grew bleak and cheerless up close. Eventually, though, we crossed a dam that bridged a long valley, launched our boat and headed upstream to a deep water shoal, where we drifted jigs to a school of crappie that must have outnumbered the stars in the sky. A cool breeze pushed upstream throughout the day, then fell from the hills with the setting sun. We had the river all to ourselves.
“Life has no shortage of disappointments and sharp corners,” the Old Man said in the quiet. “So many of the things that bring us comfort seem simplistic, but maybe that’s just because they’re clear, and that’s where we’re meant to be.
“Someday you’ll grow up and trade simplicity for shiny things. Before you give up too much, though, take a few minutes and remember the value of the simple days.”
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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