The Fishing Pole

When I was a little girl more than 40 years ago, I thought fish were slimy, yucky, disgusting things. An opinion that I held for a long time, punctuated only with a tolerance for poached salmon and the occasional batter fried cod with tartar sauce. The summer months of my youth were spent camping at the Sierra lakes stuffed with planted trout. The canister trucks would roll to the edge of the shore, and the driver would open the hatches. The plump, stunned, sedated fish would flop from their torrent of water and fall limply in the lake trying to avoid being caught by the swarm of gleeful kids that paid no mind to the ranger’s call to, “Move away”. Each week of summer camping, my mother scraped together the much too dear coins from her food budget to buy a box of worms for my brother to keep him happily occupied during the day; hopefully, successfully harassing with his fishing pole, the now fully acclimated fish of the watershed--a past-time which had absolutely no appeal for me. Fishing was a big part of our family life, although I was obstinate in not participating in the sport, a divide that had repercussions in my relationship with my dad. Never to have the closeness he shared with my other siblings, because I didn’t partake in the all-consuming fishing passion. An emptiness that would never be filled…I thought…

I was born in a simpler time in the 60s, the fourth of four kids. My folks didn’t have much money, but they loved to have fun, and we always had summer camping vacations at Pinecrest with my aunt and uncle and their three kids. That meant two moms, seven kids, two campsites, a gallon of Hexol, one bottle of Vodka, and two dads that reappeared each weekend. Now remember, this was child-rearing before Pampers. Usually, one or the other family had a kid in diapers. Mom and my Aunt would sit around the campfire, stirring a pot of poopy diapers with a pine bough happily drinking martinis. My mom said she never took much equipment, unless she had a toddler that was still eating cigarette butts out of the sand, and then she’d pack the play pen. We went swimming for hours each day, me sporting my Styrofoam floatation bubble on the outside of a zebra striped swim suit with the older siblings and cousins making sure I occasionally came right side up for air; we log rolled on the anchored pine log 20 feet off of the shore of Beach 4, we hiked around the lake, and we heard the endless echoes of “Elmer” shouted through the campsites at dusk. 

The days were spent in the water, with quick runs up to the snack bar for soft serve and to check for coins left in the slots at the bank of pay phones on the side of the general store building. Hallelujah--a complete feeling of top of the world euphoria would overtake you if you found a nickel or dime, or the mother lode of gold, a quarter, in one of the pay phone coin return slots. A thrill which now eludes the smartphone obsessed culture that peers incessantly at two-inch screens as if they were hoping to find the meaning of life, when it is in fact, passing them by…

Fishing in our household was year round. Dad would fish any moment he got. He would take my brother out early in the morning to fish, and then he’d go to work and my brother would go to school. They’d get home from work and school and go out to fish again. The big bass or lake trout they would catch would immediately be whacked on the head and then threaded through a pole. From an early age, all us children were schooled that if you had your photo taken with the fish, you always held the fish WAY out in front of you to make it look bigger. This was a photo-taking skill so engrained in my brain, when I had my son, the first pictures after the birth I held him at arms’ length to enhance his girth. Pictures of bass and trout filled our family room. Fishing poles were hung from the garage rafters, and my Dad would always take any child in the neighborhood fishing that was willing to go for a minimum of four hours because that meant you could catch another limit of fish.

The memories of summer weeks at Pinecrest would endure for a lifetime. So many years passed, and my lack of interest in fishing did not change. But one warm summer day in the mountains of the Sierra, my son said he wanted to fish and the purchase of a $15 fuchsia and turquoise Scooby Doo pole would lead to a gift that was like no other. That dang pole was a pain in the butt. The reel kept getting jammed, it was impossible to cast most of the time, and my boy had to master this strange part of “getting play” in the line before he could cast it into the water. But master it he did, and master I did the smelly disgusting Power Bait that I would gamely thread onto the hook. I was dying to cast his little pole, but I didn’t have a fishing license and I was afraid to get caught. Dad would say, “Those rangers are going to check. That’s a big ticket.” He once got my mother cited by Fish and Game for having her fish his second pole without a license, and they had to drive all the way to Sonora to pay a gigantic fine on a ticket that they could ill afford. And while Mom was mortified that she had been cited, Dad wasn’t too upset because after all, it was related to fishing. 

That summer in the mountains, my boy and I fished. We fished in the early morning at Lake Alpine. We fished in the evening at the river and the private lakes that dotted the mountain towns. Now mind you, this cast and wait stuff was really was really hard. Dad skeptically watched our endeavors with the Scooby-Doo pole and finally agreed to go fishing with us. The bond of fisherman was forged when my boy got a hook caught in his finger. He didn’t fuss, the hook was removed, the blood cleaned up, and Dad knew he had a new fishing partner with definite potential. Ben’s fishing button was definitely ON. 

Soon after, Dad gave Ben his first “Big Man Fishing Pole” with a real reel. One fishing lesson later and Ben had it down. One week later, late in the evening at a little man-made, fish-stocked lake near Arnold, Ben caught his first trout. 

Now my rule is, if you kill it, you eat it, or as I once read in a detective novel uttered by the bayou-borne hit man who had a partiality for deep fried alligator, “If it dies, it fries.” Ben looked at this silvery, slimy black dotted thing and didn’t appear too interested in eating it. So, after several of my frenzied attempts, the hook was removed from the caught trout and it was released back into the pond only to float dejectedly belly up. I gamely grabbed the fish, and righted it into the water with a maniacal flushing back and forth of the gills. I don’t think the possibility of CPR and mouth to mouth was too far off as far as Ben was concerned. The stunned fish, not believing his good luck, finally twitched his tail and quickly swam away to be caught again another day.

The summer weeks passed, and further fishing attempts were fun but unsuccessful. On our last day of fishing on a cold October day, Ben, my Dad and Mom, and I went to the little lake for one last fish. I baited the line with the neon yellow silver glitter Power Bait, and Ben did a beautiful cast into the middle of the pond. He waited for a few minutes and then turned the fishing pole over to his Grandpa so he could go play on the swing set. Ben and I were in the middle of this serious swinging contest, pumping furiously away, when Grandpa Bob started hollering “You got a fish! You got a fish!” We ran back to the dock and Ben and Grandpa reeled the fish in. And a big fish it was too! As a result of that “so big” fish, much admiration and feeling pleased with themselves ensued, and it was a perfect ending to the first summer of fishing. To some it would just be a fish, but to me, it was a bigger catch. On that day, on that dock, I saw my son developing the relationship I had always wanted with my father. Unable to do it myself, he had done it for me.

But it was to be, not the end of a summer, but the beginning of something new that I had wanted since I was a little girl. For three months after that last big fish of summer, on an early Christmas morning, I got a gift I would have never expected. A gift that meant more to me than what it appeared to be. For under my tree, tied with a green ribbon just for me, was a beautiful new fishing pole and fishing license. A gift from an old man to his grown up daughter that said, “I want you to fish with me.”

(Louise Simson is Anderson Valley’s Superintendent of Schools and loves to fish and eat cinnamon rolls.)