Chapter 14
Summer days, live oak shade, fishing at the pond
Starry nights and old flashlights illuminate the world outside
“Brothers Forever”
The little misspelled note, Scotch-taped to the sliding backdoor early on Saturday mornings, demonstrated more about me than my inability to spell. Like an oversimplified constitution, this document communicated great independence. To the untrained eye, its intention was merely to inform my parents of my whereabouts on any given day. This two-word communiqué, however, also conveyed my burgeoning and unabashed sense of autonomy for everyone to see. It was a proclamation of my intention to wander, to explore, and to conquer everything, all of course, by dinnertime.
Running out my backdoor at a good clip, I could reach the pond in a matter of minutes, but it might as well have been a continent away from my parents’ calm suburban home. Between the various reptiles, the giant live oaks, and the endless sea of grass, the pond was a wondrous world unto itself. The Sons of Starmount dodged danger there; we problem-solved, hid out, laughed, and soaked up everything the Florida sun could give us, all while reeling in more bream and bass than one year and one small body of water ought to be able to provide.
No matter how fast I ran through the backyards, swinging open the gate behind Clay’s house and leaping across patches of stinging nettles, I always felt as if I was arriving late. Catching my breath at the water’s edge, with my friends all waving from the dock, I could hardly contain my sense of panic at what I may have missed. I still, to this day, hate missing out on what my friends might be doing.
Rain or shine, the pull of the pond and the allure of catching fish was a yet-unmatched calling in my young life. In retrospect, it’s strange to realize that the outside world, which was so beyond my control, was more comforting than the world in which loving buffers existed. Alligator Pond teemed with dangerously unpredictable snakes and alligators. It also contained all the standard water hazards, not the least of which was drowning. We had to navigate these risks with our underdeveloped sense of reason, as well as our overdeveloped sense of immortality. Starmount Drive, with its grassy yards and neighborly spaces, offered the comforts of home and the protection of parents. The choice between the two was never a difficult one, because there is no greater exercise of freedom than fishing in the wild with your friends.
Tadpoles, minnows, frogs, snakes, and the small swamp known only to us as Catfish Pond tempted us on a regular basis, but the star we set our fishing sights upon was Alligator Pond. It was there that a rickety old dock offered instant access to the deep-blue hole rich in bream, those pan-sized treasures. The dock jetted out some fifteen feet into the water and was just wide enough to hold all of us boys and our fishing tackle. We were constantly trying to position ourselves for that perfect angler’s spot, adjusting with the ever-changing angle of the sun. The water at the end of the dock was bluish-green, but crystal clear for the first few feet down. There, silver flashes of bream bodies twisting and turning through the water looked like tiny lightning bolts. Catching a glimpse of that underwater storm was an unmistakable sign that it would be a fun and rewarding day.
The end of the dock covered more than just our hunting grounds. Hidden beneath the final planks, at one of the deepest points of the pond, stood the mysterious drainpipe. The drainpipe shot straight up ten to twelve feet from the pond’s muddy bottom to just above the water’s surface. The occasional gurgling sounds emanating from deep within its metallic bowels agitated our already restless imaginations. We debated how that pipe twisted and turned its way back into the dark woods and what kind of creatures inhabited its innards.
It’s difficult to overstate the amount of naive courage the Sons of Starmount exercised. Our collective bravado was so profound that we often had to invent things so we could feel scared. But sometimes, that same bravado served to mask our fears.
In what seemed like a role reversal, the youngest among us often initiated the conversations about imaginary danger, likely to goad the older boys into showing some measure of fear. It was an effort by the youngest to strike a balance in the group. Those mind games constantly played in the background of our day to day life.
One day while fishing, John got the ball rolling. “Guys, I don’t like that sound. It’s never been that loud before.”
“John, it always sounds like that,” his older brother shot back.
Timmy came to John’s rescue. “No, guys, John is right. I think...I think it’s about to blow!”
Timmy and John accomplished what they had set out to do: we were now all talking about the possibility of the drainpipe exploding, with mounting levels of dramatic bluster and concern. The dramatics of it all sent us scurrying off the dock and slinking back onto it at semi-regular intervals that entire day. And for the next several days, we constantly talked about the possibility of the pipe erupting without warning, and sucking the entire contents of the pond, including us, down the drink.
Tommy, always the strategist, weighed in: “Okay, I’m not saying it’s gonna happen, but if it does, get ready to hold your breath. He continued his warning, gesturing wildly over his shoulder. “If we do get sucked down that thing, we’re gonna need to hold our breath all the way to the waterfall back there in the woods.”
Matthew reminded us of the other possibility we had been kicking around: “What if it really does go all the way to China?”
Matt Bourgeois, quiet but resilient, quickly dispensed his matter-of-fact two-cents on that: “Then we’re gonna have to hold our breath for a hell of a lot longer.”
I simply tried to keep our optimism intact. “Don’t worry, guys. If that drainpipe really does go to China, it’s at least a straight shot through the middle of the earth, so it’s not as far as actually having to drive there.” It’s a wonder that we ever figured anything out with any degree of factual accuracy. We were more than comfortable with fantasy and reality alternating as the truth. That’s alright when you’re young but doing so as an adult can have fairly serious consequences.
Fortunately, the drainpipe-to-China scenario never happened, or any scenario of being sucked down the drainpipe, but the adventure was in believing that it could.
When did it become a bad idea for a bunch of ten-year-olds to go fishing without parental supervision? I mean, I hear myself saying it in my head, and I think, Well, that does sound like a bad idea. Kids drown all the time and there were snakes and gators and all manner of innocent mistakes a kid could make way out there. But it hasn’t always been a bad idea. Back then, telling us that we didn’t know anything about the dangers of the pond, of alligators and snakes, and that we had no idea how to watch each other’s backs, wouldn’t have made things any safer for us, even if an adult was right there beside us the whole time. In fact, I think it would have made us less safe, by making us more afraid and less confident. We would not have had to think for ourselves or problem-solve anything. Broad independence and learning for yourself was a philosophy that worked well in 1977. When did that change?
At one time or another, we all fished alone. But it was most often a group effort. We had many intense but polite discussions at the end of the dock, just above the drainpipe, waiting for the fish to bite. We argued about the deadly effects of eating Pop Rocks and drinking Coke at the same time, about whether Big Wheels were faster than Green Machines, and about the merits of using both a bobber and a sinker on the same line. Even at ten, fishing meant more than fishing.
We made for the fishing grounds armed with every possible implement of destruction in our collective arsenal. We had cane poles, with their single-length line, simple bobber, and a hook. We also had Zebco rods and reels, with their push-button thumb caster and drag wheel. These were perfect for learning to cast, as they were forgiving and rarely got tangled inside the cone-shaped reel. We also brought along frog gigs, broomstick nets, minnow cast nets, five-gallon buckets, and nylon fish stringers. Some of us were even lucky enough to have an adult-sized, custom-made fishing rod reserved for the big bass. We each wielded tackle boxes; some had their father’s heavy metallic ones, with rust spots and chipping paint, while others toted newer lightweight plastic boxes, complete with multiple trays and sliding shelves. They all held an assortment of simple hooks, fancy lures, bobbers, metal weights, and extra line, while the largest tackle boxes also contained Twinkies, Moon Pies, and bubblegum, mixed in with earthworms, crickets, and dried-out tadpoles.
We used various forms of bait, including the occasional Oreo and Nutter Butter cookie, but there was only one sure-thing bait for catching bream: Sunbeam white bread. We were convinced that it possessed magical properties for attracting the big sunfish. The Steges’s dad drove a truck for the company, so having an endless supply of Sunbeam bread helped make it even more magical.
We had a particular way of loading that bait. First, you’d pinch off a moist piece of bread, usually from the center of the slice, and then ball it up between your thumb and index finger until it was the size of an extra-large BB, and then, finally impale it on the end of a medium Eagle Claw hook. The trick was shoving that bread ball hard enough and far enough onto the hook for it to stick, without accidentally adding the end of your thumb to the bait ball.
The smaller bream, which hung out at the surface like a pack of wild dogs around a dumpster, threw themselves face-first into the bread ball. Sometimes you’d catch a small one within seconds of the bread hitting the water. That was fun because even small bream fought hard enough to make it feel like you had hooked a fish ten times its size. But the little darting fish were not our intended prey. We wanted the granddaddy panfish, the ones double or even triple the size of our hands, which mostly lurked toward the bottom of the deep-blue hole at the end of the dock.
The trick to getting your bread down to the giant bream was to drop it quickly past the overeager young fish who were hell-bent on relieving you of it. You wanted that bait to reach the darker, colder waters, where the more cautious big boys ruled. They’d circle your bread slowly and methodically at first, unlike their younger and more impulsive offspring. But when they finally decided to hit the line, they did so with confidence, swallowing the bait whole and completely snaring themselves on the hook, and then fighting to stay below the surface like deep-water Atlantic marlin.
Even the bobber would behave differently with small and large bream. With the small bream, the bobber splashed wildly about the surface. It was exciting, but the bobber rarely disappeared from view. When the larger ones hit the line though, the white-and-red round bobber would dive precipitously, mixing with the blue-green water and then disappearing like a painted rock into the darker depths, a clear confirmation of a large fish on the line. The arc of the cane pole or rod would also change dramatically, assuaging any remaining doubt of the line’s bounty. It was at this point that the exciting fight for the surface and ultimately, the bottom of our five-gallon catch-buckets, was unmistakably on.
Alligator Pond was an ecosystem of extreme generosity. I’m not sure I have ever fished a more vibrant stretch of water. It was generous in rewarding bounty and experience, so much so that I don’t remember ever struggling with jealousy over a friend’s luck. In fact, the amount of bream I brought home far exceeded my family’s ability to eat them, especially because I liked catching fish far more than I liked eating them.
Joe Hodge, one of my father’s best friends and a fellow doctoral student at Florida State University, first taught me how to clean a fish. He showed me how to lay the fish out on a ribbed wooden board with a metal clamp at one end. With the end of the tail secured under the clamp, I cut the head clean off with an ultra-sharp scaling knife as quickly and humanely as I knew how. Then I sliced a straight line along the fish’s belly. Pulling the guts out was perfectly disgusting and satisfyingly messy, like the icing on the cake to a young angler already steeped in all things gross. Once I gutted the innards, I would take that sharper-than-I-should-own knife and work from the tail forward, de-scaling the fish and finalizing the cleaning process. The very last step was to drop each clean and sleek fish filet into its own sealable baggy of water and stand it on-end in our small freezer. That freezer burst at the seams with mini half-bodied aquariums, like a weird aquatic version of the Chinese Terracotta Army lined up in neat rows, frozen in time. I always thought it made our freezer look so cool.
Big bream provided plentiful fun and were the core of much of our shared fishing experience. Even so, a big bream was not the ultimate prize. A giant largemouth bass was the fish that dominated our dreams, monopolized our stories, and fed our bravado. As far as fishing lore and a young boy’s hysteria goes, a record-breaking bass may as well have been an albino whale. Those fish lay deep in what we called “honey holes,” far from the dock and only accessible through the taller, moccasin-laden weeds that surrounded Alligator Pond. Fishing alone was a rarity, but most of my memories of fishing for largemouth bass are memories of me fishing alone. I think each of us secretly put in extra time on that mission, angling to be the one to pull in a record fish.
For bass fishing, I abandoned my static cane pole and my limiting Zebco rod and reel for the more powerful, open-faced rig my Uncle Richard custom-made for me. Bass traps, poppers, floating minnows, ball-head jigs, and spoons patronized the working end of my line, though the most effective bait proved to be a dark-purple plastic worm with an anti-weed guard on it.
Much of my success reeling in the prized fish was about halfway around the pond on the Starmount side, just down the hill from a huge live oak tree. The bank on that side was accessible and wide open to the sun. I often shared that warm spot with softshell turtles, snowy egrets, and a great blue heron. On occasion, I would also share it with an enormous water moccasin. That snake, a regular visitor, was a big boy. He was mainly black with subtle bands of greenish-brown. His body was as fat as my upper thigh at the time, and his broad, triangular viper head looked angry and ominous.
Two important safety mechanisms provided a sheltering distance between that snake and me. One, my friends were not with me, which meant there was no dare or strong temptation to handle the snake. And two, my primary focus was on catching a bass I could brag about to everyone back on Starmount. That snake and I always knew where the other was and what each other was doing, but I had bigger fish to fry, and I suppose he had his sights set on bullfrogs, field mice, and quite possibly the fish I was angling for.
I knew the perfect spot to put that bass lure. There was a deep, dark, tannic hole just off a fallen cypress tree, and on most mornings or early evenings, it was chock-full of largemouth bass. Water lettuce and pondweed surrounded the hole, and I often lost my lures in it. The trick was to drop that plastic worm into the open water and slowly drag it past the plant cover. The initial bass strike on the line was exciting. The rod would bend, and sometimes the reel would make a sizzling sound, like bacon in a hot pan, as the line streamed out toward the water at lightning speed. One good snap backward seemed to do the job, cinching the fish on the hook. With bass, the first few seconds of the catch were exciting, but even the big ones seemed to put up less of a fight over the long haul than most of the bream we caught.
It was rare for me to come home empty handed on the days I fished alone, but just as rare to come back with more than one big bass. It was hard to continue fishing after reeling in the first big one. I think the focus and excitement of seizing what I saw as a monster fish was hard to muster again, plus my need to rush back to Starmount to show off my catch to the boys and my parents was just too much for my underdeveloped attention span to manage.
Catching the big bass was just half of the excitement of the expedition, though. My favorite bass spot was closer to Alligator Island than to the dock, and so it tended to attract the gators. From time to time, one of them would catch the scent of my freshly caught, floundering lunch spread and make a beeline for my spot on the bank. On several occasions, one of the gators grabbed my fish, still on the hook, just a few feet from the bank. A tug of war ensued, with the gator’s large teeth eventually snapping my line and stealing my prized bass.
On one frightening occasion though, my hook became lodged in the gator’s pink jowls as it gobbled up the bass. For some reason I kept the bail open on the reel, releasing several feet of line while the gator thrashed. No matter what it did, it couldn’t break the line, which infuriated it. It splashed and rolled just a few feet away from me, then suddenly, before I even had the chance to shit my pants, that living dinosaur rushed up the bank toward me.
The boys and I had often advised each other to run in a zigzag pattern if an alligator ever chased us. It’s anyone’s guess as to where that bit of advice originated. It may have come from the old black man who fished that same side of the pond. He seemed a brilliant fisherman to us and we listened intently to his advice. It may have even come out of one of our Ranger Rick magazines. More than likely though, we pulled that bit of beautiful bullshit right out of our asses. The concept was sound enough, and ultimately, for me, may have saved my life. Alligators have short legs but are incredibly fast over short distances. But they are also not particularly agile in changing directions quickly. I took off up the bank like a sports car missing a front wheel, dragging my fishing pole, which was still attached to the gator, behind me. I dashed to my left, hopping over two-foot-high fire ant hills, and then darted right, trying not to trip over the live-oak limbs that had come down in the storm the week before. I continued to weave left and right, trying not to look back at the gator in hot pursuit.
Medium-sized gators, like the ones living in their namesake pond, can reach ten-to-fifteen miles per hour. That’s fast, but a ten-year-old running for his life can easily reach Mach 2. In the end, the line snapped, and although the gator never got any closer to me than he did at the water’s edge, I didn’t stop running until I hit the asphalt on Starmount.
I suppose the gator eventually realized that a bass already in its mouth was worth more than the prospect of a boy’s leg on the run. That was probably the only time I was ever not disappointed at losing a fish. The moment provided the adrenaline rush I craved, and even more importantly, it gave me bragging rights that lasted for weeks. And arguably, now, decades.
The magic of fishing during my time on Starmount was that it took no effort or time to go from dreaming about fishing to actually fishing. Water was all around me, I had built-in fishing buddies, and the luck and skill needed to be successful came naturally, imbued by time and place, I suppose. The same has not been as true in my adult years.
I have fished for pike and walleye in the Ojibwe waters of northern Ontario and for rainbow trout in Tennessee mountain streams. I now own gear that is far more expensive than I did when I was ten and have an extensive knowledge of how to use it. What I don’t have any longer is a young boy’s luck. Beginner’s luck cannot be overstated.
But that said, maybe it was never really about luck at all. On Starmount, there existed a temporary union between dreams and reality, just as there was an instinctive relationship between boy and nature. Like best friends, nature and I spent a lot of time together. I gave it all I had, and it gave back to me tenfold. Those of us who have experienced that powerful childhood connection to wild places try desperately to hold on to it in our adulthood. But having to work so hard to hang on to it means that our connection with it has already been partly severed.
I cannot find a word or phrase that better describes the sense of self-actualization I felt each time I left that poorly spelled note on the backdoor. It was forty years ago, but Gone fishen’ seems to say it all, even now.