After the rock-bass fishing down by the Ninth Street bridge there came the first “lazy fishing.” There were times all summer when fishing would get lazy, but the first lazy fishing was a reaction to winter, to the length, the coldness, the depth of it.
When the first warm night came, a good solid warm day, perhaps even hot, followed by an early evening when the dog would barely raise his head when somebody walked by the hardware store—when it became that warm and soft something would pass between everybody and without really talking about things, without knowing how it happened, it was time for bullhead fishing.
Bullheads are northern catfish. Always fairly small—a pound and a half would be large—they were considered by the unintelligent to be rough fish, not worth eating. In fact in some small lakes and swamps they were poisoned out so “good” fish—walleyes—could be planted.
The poor knew better. The boys knew then why they would later come to be called such things as “fresh water lobster” and “fish filet mignon.”
Because the state considered them to be rough fish—as they did perch and dogfish—there was virtually no limit and almost no control on the way they were fished.
The idea was to spend a whole night on a riverbank catching bullheads and dozing and then eat them with watermelon for dessert, but here too there was a form. A way that things must be done.
The place to fish was important, and many things entered into picking the right location. Since it was in the north there would be mosquitoes after dark—hordes of them—and so a small fire would have to be maintained with poplar leaves or grass thrown on the coals now and then to make smoke to drive them away. A place with dry firewood had to be found on the bank of the river where it left town and it had to be next to an eddy in the current so there would be a hole.
The bullheads like holes. Deep, dark, still holes.
They never bit during the day and only started about ten-thirty on a warm summer evening and after they started the biting was steady most of the night.
We did set lines and fished with rods as well. The set lines we made by putting a hook and leader every four or five feet. Each hook was baited with worms or cut-up pieces of dead rotten chicks from the hatchery in town and the line thrown out with a rock to weight the end for distance. The set line would be left on the bottom where it fell for most of the night until most or all of the hooks were filled. (It is perhaps important to note that almost all of these methods are illegal in the north now.)
Along with the set we would work with rods with just one hook on the end. The advantage of a rod and reel was that we could cast past holes where there were only small bullheads and perhaps get larger ones, or a walleye—although walleyes were rare then in that river.
The bullheads bit like Huns. They would come in and swallow everything whole, taking the bait and hook and line well down their throats. They were very hard to get off the hook, requiring pliers, and were dangerous to work with because they had a spine in the top of their back and one on either side that had a mild poison on them and would hurt and swell when they got you. We quickly discovered a way to hold them, from the belly, with the palm against the belly and the thumb up in back of one spine and two fingers up alongside the other-side fin, and they could be worked off the hook and put on the cord stringer.
Biting ran in fits and starts. When they bit, they bit hard and came fast, but when they stopped—sometimes for half an hour or more—it was time to nap or put a little wood on the fire and talk.
Talk. On our backs with the stars up above us, showing through wisps of smoke, the fire warming one side then another when we turned, talked and talked through the dark night.
Talked of girls.
Geraldine this and Sharon that, Shirley and Linda and Dianne—girls and more girls to talk about, dream about, sing about. This one to take to a movie, a scary movie, so scary that in the bad parts of the movie maybe she would throw her arms around … dreams and wishes, stories hoped to come true. We’d be walking along the sidewalk and she would be there and she would smile and her bicycle would be broken or her cat up a tree or, or, or … and she would be helped, saved, and she would be so grateful.… All night stories, dreams, prayers. When I get older and the pimples are gone and I have some money and my hair goes into a perfect flattop and I have the right clothes and I have a car, oh yes, a car like Harlan’s ’34 Dodge with the windshield that cranks up and I am popular, then she’ll wish she’d gone out with me, been nicer to me, seen me.
In the middle of the night, finally, sleep comes and the fire dies and there is nothing until the first gray line comes up across on the east side of the river and the morning birds sing.
The set lines are pulled in and almost always there is a fish on each hook. They are added to the stringer, and if somebody thought ahead they remembered to bring the washtub and a wagon for hauling it. River water is put in the tub and all the bullheads are dumped in—upwards of a hundred of them—and taken home to clean. Depending on where they are to be cooked sometimes the fish are cleaned at the river, the guts let to slide with the current and feed other bullheads and snapping turtles that come up from the muddy bottom to strike at and grab the fish heads like something from a monster movie. That’s if the cooking is at Wayne’s house because his mother doesn’t understand about things and doesn’t want fish guts around even though we promised to turn them into the garden, which makes for good potatoes. But at other places there are cats and dogs to eat the guts and heads and the fish are taken home because some swear that the longer the heads are left on the better bullheads taste, although it is hard to see how they could taste better.
Hard to see how anything could taste better.
The fish are cleaned, the heads cut off and the meat washed in cool water and wiped with a towel to get the slime off the skin—they have no scales. The meat is a rich reddish color and when they are clean and wiped they are dipped in batter made from eggs and stale beer and then rolled in cracker crumbs mixed with pepper and fried in butter. They are done when the skin separates from the meat and the flakes of meat open like a book when they are pulled with a fork. There are some who fillet the bullheads but they are generally considered foolish because that takes away the skin, and the skin—crackling and tasting of butter—lends flavor to the meat and is itself good to eat.
You cannot catch enough of them. Maybe there aren’t enough of them in the whole world. Jimmy Breshkov said once that it’s impossible to keep up; that you could fish and catch bullheads and clean bullheads and fry bullheads and eat bullheads and by the time you buried the bones in the garden and went back to the river you would be hungry again and you could just keep going that way forever, catching and cleaning and eating them, but Jimmy is the same one who says ants never die because it’s never been proven. He says nobody has ever seen an ant die of old age and Jimmy says that they’re like the weeds in the Sargasso Sea that never die—one end shrivels off while the other end grows and they live forever, and he says there are plants that were alive when Columbus came through and so it must be true of ants as well.
But the bullheads do taste good, even if Jimmy is wrong, and it is tempting always in the summer to try his theory and see if it works; see if it’s possible to eat your way through a summer on bullheads and raw-fried potatoes and watermelon for dessert.