By SCOTT SAALMAN
Scaramouch
I was a cane pole boy.
Bamboo sticking out the backseat window, cork bobbers bobbing in a country breeze, the crunch and grind of Goodyear on gravel, a day’s dust drying our throats, our Sundays measured by cousins’ smiles and country road miles.
Creek, spillway, river, lake, and pond.
Crappie and catfish and lumbering carp.
Bluegill and bass.
The squirm of live bait in rusty Folgers cans. The worms: slimy, nightmarish creatures unearthed from sewer soil by us wee lads as our grandfather watched from a taskmaster’s higher ground. We harvested the stinky, slippery worm bed that sat like a bruise on a steep hillside.
To this day, I have not seen a worm like those my grandfather bred, skinnier than the hooks they were put on, more vein than worm, pink, putrid, little, wriggling, writhing live-wired things, sun stunned when pulled by the handfuls from the black muck, while we cursed the smelly slop squishing between our toes, a cancerous ground that I swear stunted my growth, left me prematurely bald.
Even the birds wouldn’t eat those worms. I think they were scared of them. The devil’s worms.
The frugal man’s worm, the homegrown, free worm, not the costly worm found in the Main Street bait shop where you were somehow calmed by the doomed crickets’ chirps and fascinated by the juicy, chilled, fat night crawlers caged in waxed cardboard and sold by the dozens like doughnuts.
Crouching behind cattails, sworn to silence so as not to scare the fish, even if a snake shoots between your legs (which they did), staring intently at that cork bobber, as if trying to psychically will it to bob, to begin a dance between an outdoorsman and a denizen swimming just beneath the cumulous-cloud-reflected surface, refusing to blink—the blink being a fisher boy’s biggest sin—so as not to miss the sinking of the bobber and the cue to pull back on the pole, tightly set the hook and lift a deep-water dweller to daylight, all scaly and tail bent, gilled, finned, floppy, and frown faced. I lived for the cane pole bend, the airlift of frightened fish. It was my oxygen.
I caught a mud puppy once, hauled from the murk, all rusty brown, mad, and mucus snorting. (The hellish salamander hiss still gives me chills as I write about it.) Pulling it up the steep creek bank was half the chore, for it then ran wildly across land, eternally hook-mouthed, as if searching for a tree to scale and escape. I cut the line, not wanting to deal with what the devil had dealt. I cut the line, too, for river eel and pond snake – satanic aquatic astonishments that kept this wild-eyed cane pole boy wide-eyed during his water hole days. The snapping turtles did their own line-cutting, which was a good thing, for you didn’t want to risk a finger – I was told he wouldn’t let go until a full moon.
My grandfather kept everything he caught, even the smallest of sunfish. Catch and release was a real eye-roller to him. “It’ll make a fine sandwich,” he’d say with each catch attached to the stringer. We’d hatchet the heads, scale the bodies, slit the bellies, thumb-gut them. We’d coat them with crumb, fry them, and once the meat was in our mouths, use our tongue tips to tease, test and tunnel the meat to find stray bone. I feared the fish bone choke, a slain fish’s final revenge. Karma. Balled bread loosened the bone from the gullet, dropped it safely to the belly. I have reached my fifties, in part, thanks to dough balls of my youth.
Before all that, I was a creek bank baby, left behind on a blanket while my young, lovey-dovey parents fished and cavorted beside a Perry County creek. My father once lifted my squealing mother and pretended to toss her into the drink, except he didn’t pretend well enough . . . my infant ears soon heard the big splash of two bodies. I could’ve become an instant orphan, the perfect bait for the infamous bobcat slinking around that summer, but then I heard my parents laugh and splash and bob together (they were in love like that), and everything was A-OK.
I graduated from cane pole to rod and reel. I lived for Zebco summers: river hooks baited with drippy liver slime, standing sure-footed on riverbank, lost in catfish fever; casted Rapalas and rubber worms from boat decks, hoping to fool a big-mouthed bass; mined crappie beds with the shine of minnow and corpse of cricket.
In my 20s, I experienced a sea change. I started feeling sorry for fish – even worms. Cricket choruses gnawed at my conscience. I lost the thrill of the gill, sold my poles and tackle in a yard sale. I became a repentant fisherman. Somehow, though, when I catch myself reeling in the years, like now, I think fondly of the carefreeness of a cane pole boy whiling away warm-aired days near creeks, spillways, rivers, lakes, and ponds, thinking of nothing else but crappie and catfish and lumbering carp, bluegill, and bass, way back before the adulthood hooks of worry and regret sunk in and, sadly, my jaw became tightly set.
Contact: scottsaalman@gmail.com. You can purchase Scott’s column collections on Amazon.