Graham and Evan are having a day on the UofL campus: It’s a teacher inservice day for local public schools. They walk over to my building just before noon and immediately fall in love with Jessica, who works the front desk in our lab.
“Hey, you guys. Come look over here,” she smiles at them and walks to our fish tank.
They follow, like ducks or puppies.
“Check him out,” she says pointing at the crawdad, one pincher poking out of his rock hideout.
“Cool. Is he a crab?” Evan asks.
“Kind of like a miniature freshwater lobster,” she tells them.
They are even more excited when they discover the bluegill. “Wow!” Graham shrieks and hops up and down.
I love watching these two skinny little boys, easily fascinated by a simple panfish caught in a nearby pond. They remind me of one of my favorite summers.
The summer three years after the US celebrated its bicentennial and youngsters across the States spent hours scouring spare change for the special quarter, I turned 12 and spent most of my mornings fishing Lake Wingra for bluegill and sunnies with my friend Jim and sometimes our neighbor Mike. It was the Summer of Bluegills.
We would meet outside at 7:30 sharp. In one hand, I carried a rod with a trigger handle and green reel; in the other, I held a small tan tackle box with sinkers, fake worms, a hook remover, and a yellow nylon stringer.
We’d rest our tackle on the hill in my parents’ front yard, which has eroded to a small bump now, and skip behind the garage to raid our night crawler farm. I kept a large tub of bedding (peat moss and strips of newspaper) beneath the underhang behind our garage, and we filled it with crawlers after nearly every rain. We’d pop some bedding and a handful of fat wigglers in an old Land O’Lakes margarine tub, and we were ready to go.
Jim and I could have been mistaken for brothers that summer. We don’t look much alike in the face, but we were both skinny, about the same height (though he grew much taller), had shaggy waves of blonde 70s hair, and boasted the same Alfred E. Neuman grin. We wore three-quarter length baseball jerseys and mesh ballcaps with Zebco, Shakespeare, or Mepps logos.
Our favorite fishing spot was about a mile’s walk from home. We’d head down the hill past the substation with the ominous high voltage signs, over the railroad tracks where we’d grab rocks to chuck at trees, down through the mossy glen, and past Mallat’s pharmacy where we’d pick up a Watchamacallit candy bar. Then, we’d escape down the street and onto the dirt path, which became thick with mosquitoes and gnats in late July.
We would fish the tiny lagoon, green and white with lillypads, on a little peninsula where we could see what we called Turtle Island.
One morning in early June perhaps a week before my birthday and long before the heat came, we caught 27 bluegills, sunfish, and crappie, many no larger than our palms. We kept them all, and we made it home by 11:30, on time for a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and macaroni and cheese.
We were hooked, and afterward, we missed scarcely a morning the entire summer, except for Sundays of course.
We scaled and cleaned our catch in my backyard, rinsing out the guts with a green garden hose and threatening my sister with the nasty bits.
My dad agreed that we could keep the potential feast in our basement freezer, and we began planning a backyard fish fry for all the neighbor kids in August before the start of school.
By mid-July my father’s freezer was half-full of tiny panfish not worth keeping, unless you were a twelve-year-old on a mission. On a morning Jim, Mike, and I were meeting at my house, Jim hadn’t arrived yet, and we realized we didn’t have a knife.
“I’ll get one,” I said and went inside while Mike flicked ants in the driveway.
I snuck past my mother in the living room, with what I imagined to be the stealth of a jaguar, and pulled the filet knife from her cuttlery block.
“Did you get the knife?” Mike asked as I came down the porch steps.
“Duh,” I intoned sarcastically, and I drew back as if I were about to stab him in the belly in a psychotic rage, though he was well out of range. I thrust forward menacingly.
I lodged the knife in my right posterior.
Mike and I stared at each other a moment, jaws dropping. “Shit,” I said, forgetting Catholic school instruction for a moment.
It went in about an inch-and-a-half, and it hung there when I let go my grip.
“Damn it,” I said and pulled it out. I dashed inside to check the damage, still a little stunned.
“What?” my mom asked as I slammed the bathroom door.
“Nothing. I just want to use the bathroom before we go.” It was easier to lie to her if she couldn’t see my face.
But Mike was right behind me. “He stabbed himself in the butt,” I heard him say.
I still have the scar I am told, though I’m less flexible today and it would be impossible to confirm without a mirror.
The weeks progressed and the sizes of our catch shrank. We never did surpass the day we netted 27. Mike joined us more and more often as the summer dragged. Sometimes, we wouldn’t fish so much as climb trees or hold competitions to see who could make the loudest thunk in the lake with a rock thrown from shore.
On a day we’d caught only two or three within at least two hours of trying, Mike and I stood at the narrow end of our favorite fallen tree, about fifteen feet into the lake. He caught a snag and inched past me, leaning over to free his line.
I looked over my shoulder at about the same time I heard the splash.
His head was under.
I felt the tree bob, and I was in the water up to my neck on the other side.
“Pah!” I heard him exhale as he surfaced.
Jim laughed from the shore, and we made our way to him, laughing and soaked.
We released our catch and walked home wet, empty-handed, with the stink of late-summer lake all over us, and smiles all around.
The week before school started, we delivered on our promise: A fish fry bash in my backyard. About a dozen of us kids from the neighborhood were there. Jim, Mike, and I breaded and fried our summer investment to share. We served up corn on the cob from the grill. We drank pop from cans with the pulltabs dropped in.
Graham, Evan, and I head over to the student union for lunch (it’s called the Student Activities Center or SAC here). It’s an incredibly sunny day and warm.
I really miss those guys and that summer, but I have a telephone, and I still have two really great fishin buddies.
March 10th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Nice memories.
May 31st, 2007 at 4:39 pm
..and it does bring back memories. I don’t remember the details like you do but I remember the stabbing, the day we had that great catch, and the end of year cookout in the backyard. Man we had a great neighborhood.