Rick Bass
Fish Story
Eventually, even time spent out on the lake with a cane pole in your hand—the most timeless time of all—runs out.
STEVE WILSON says: RICK, FINE STORY ON YOUR TRIP WITH YOUR DAD AND MR. JIM. I ENVY YOU. I’VE KNOWN MR. JIM FOR 25+YRS AND APPRECIATE THE GRIN ON HIS FACE. "A MAN OF FEW WORDS" BUT ALWAYS QUICK TO MENTOR OR "ASSIST" MANY YOUNG PEOPLE (INCLUDING ME) IN HIS LIFE. HE HAS PASSED HIS LOVE OF FISHING ON TO HIS SON RUSS, WHOM I FISH WITH IN MEXICO. THANKS FOR SHARING YOUR HEARTFELT STORY WITH THE REST OF US. (September 24th, 2010 at 2:14pm)
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Stephen steers our boat into an empty cove—dark, pretty water—and tosses a buoy over, taking only the quickest of glances at his depth finder. I’ll soon come to understand that he knows every branch of every submerged tree in this lake, knows the underground terrain of the old mysterious forested valley that lies beneath us, the way my father and uncle know the buried landscapes of the oil fields.
Stephen hands us our rods, complete with sliding corks and baited minnows—he’s brought fourteen dozen!—and we drop the weighted lines over, the bobbers measured to descend to the day’s magical crappie depth of twelve feet. As he’s handing us our poles, Stephen’s explaining the basics to us: how to wait for the bobber to go all the way under and how, if the hook gets stuck on an underwater branch, to not jerk and yank, because that will spook all the other fish hiding in that brush.
I particularly like this image—a flock of crappie roosting in all the branches, exploding into flight at the tug of one impatient fisherman, crappie flashing in all directions, like quail. Stephen tells us it may take some getting used to, learning to fish with a bobber again.
The wait isn’t long. Suddenly Uncle Jimmy has a fish aloft and swings it into the boat. It’s a huge crappie, and at that moment it’s more precious than jewels or any other riches of the earth, gleaming in the morning light, every scale illuminated with fantastic clarity. Uncle Jimmy is grinning like he rarely grins, the ear-to-ear kind, and even Stephen, who has seen so much, seems a little surprised by the immediacy of our success. He unhooks Uncle Jimmy’s fish and holds it up for me to photograph, the two of them still grinning, Uncle Jimmy giving a thumbs-up.
Stephen rebaits the hook with a splendid shining minnow. And almost instantly Uncle Jimmy’s got another crappie, almost as big as the first. Now Stephen has an explanation. He says that’s often how it goes, that the other fish in a school get excited when they see one of their own rush out and take the silver minnow and then disappear—ascending!—and so they rush out too and attack the next minnow. And sure enough, now Dad has one on his line.
My own bobber begins to twitch, sailing a short distance under unseen power, then pausing, and after a while, when it has moved no more, I reel in to see the archetypal image of woe and futility: the shiny, bare hook.
Dad and I are both losing bait now, while Uncle Jimmy is still hauling in one crappie after another, though finally, he too hits a cold spell—I imagine a vast school of bream moving in, with some underwater communication going on—and after we’ve gone through maybe three dozen minnows, Stephen announces quietly that he thinks we’ll move on to another spot.
He’s got plenty of other spots. He has gathered and bound great twisted bundles of tree limbs, trunks, and branches, as if creating some public art installation, then towed them out into the lake and tossed them overboard to create microsites of extreme habitat: secret places known only to him, which he guards and protects carefully—his livelihood. Like a farmer, Stephen practices rotation on his underwater fields of fish, never harvesting more than ten from any one pile and giving each brush pile a good rest between such harvests. The practice is not illegal—it creates structure and habitat that would otherwise be lost as the lake ages, slouching toward senescence—but still I picture him towing out his little thickets on moonless nights, like a pirate or a rumrunner.
There are fish at every brush pile. I’m surprised we don’t catch any largemouth, but Stephen says the crappie are more aggressive and drive the largemouth out of the prime habitat. At one pile, we begin catching little yellow bass, each of them about a pound, and they too go into the ice chest so we can find out what they taste like. They look like circus fish, yellow-bellied and blazing with the distinct markings of striped or white bass, bold as zebras. Particularly fascinating to me is the way the lines stop above the anal fin and then begin again, slightly offset, rather than continuing uninterrupted, as if a printer had run out of ink and then repositioned the fish for the remainder of the stripes, but with that slight offset.
Who made the world? goes the first line of a poem by Mary Oliver. Who made the swan, and the black bear? I puzzle over what selective advantage there could be for those offset stripes but can’t figure out a satisfactorily intelligent explanation. The day is growing hotter, and it just doesn’t feel much like a day for hard thinking. Marveling, yes, but straining my brain, not so much. Maybe the stripes are just an ongoing, random experiment. Maybe the verdict on such offsets—compared with the unbroken lines on striped bass—is still a work in progress. Who made the world?
Stephen shows us on the depth finder the deeper, cooler channels, the meandering path where the old Sabine River once was or, I suppose, still is. The limit for crappie on Toledo Bend is 50, but Stephen says he asks his anglers to fish to only 25 each. As if 75 fish in the ice chest is modest. But the crappie are so large that our ice chest is filled with only 50. A hundred filets. We head on back into the shady cove at Fox’s Lodge, sun-blasted, sated, and maybe even a little chastened by the volume of our catch—not just the bounty but the ease of it, just waiting for that bobber to go down, time and again. You wouldn’t want every day to be like this one, probably, or the thrill would wear off, but once in a while—every 34 years maybe—it’s okay.
The bumper stickers are true. Time did not move while we were out on the lake. All day long it sat still and deep, while we pulled one fish after another from out of those brush piles. Even after we got out of the boat, and my father helped Stephen clean the fish, and we took them up to the cabin to cook over mesquite coals in the red dusk with no one else around—even then, time didn’t move. It would soon enough resume its fluid rush, eddies and crosscurrents, standing waves, riffles, everything working its way downstream. But not yet. And as I sit listening to the East Texas summer evening insect-roar, it’s the end of Mary Oliver’s poem that comes to mind: Tell me, what is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?
We sit around the grill, visiting. The fish is delicious. As night comes on, a few fireflies begin blinking, flashing their lights, patrolling the forest as if in search of a lost route—the channel where a river, now buried, still runs, well below the surface.
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