Читать книгу Ocean Journeys: Beginnings - Brandon Southall - Страница 4

Steaming coffee, black as the four o’clock morning, waited in the speckled metal mugs Grandmother brought for the boys on fishing trips. Grandfather had been up an hour. Thin smoke hung around a naked bulb lighting the simple cabin. I fumbled into fishing clothes, still smelling of worms and bug spray from cat-fishing on the creaky wooden dock the previous night.

I pretended to like coffee with my pork chops and eggs. I had never eaten bean pie, fried chicken, T-bone steaks, or chili and eggs with jalapenos for breakfast, but we had them all in the tiny cabin, on matching blue-and-white-speckled plates; they planned the menu months ahead. I was seven – finally old enough to go on early morning fishing trips. Little did I know how powerful those early times on fresh water would be in shaping my life around the ocean.

East Texas August mornings were fat and sultry. Warm-bellied, we slid into the heavy darkness holding rods and dim flashlights you had to smack a few times before they worked. The pre-dawn air grew thicker as we clanked down the slats of the old dock. Trying to control my excitement, I tied on a lure in the yellow glow at the end of the dock while Grandfather worked the engine. He tucked me into a too-big life jacket, pulled it tight, and eased the boat back from the halo of light.

Smoke gurgled from the 65-horsepower Evinrude outboard and mingled with mist hovering on the bath-warm water. The smell was magical and earthy, swirling in the boat’s green and red running lights. Once we idled past the boathouse and out of the quiet cove, tiny waves lapped at the hull and a hint of pink flirted with pine trees on the eastern shore. Grandfather looked back at us and opened the engine.

Everything tranquil about the morning ceased as the motor exploded into a deafening whine. The bow pointed momentarily at the tops of the brightening pines and gradually settled as the boat planed. To a seven-year-old, 35 miles-per-hour in an open boat felt like a rocket sled. I beamed at Dad and we exchanged thumbs-up, our baseball hats turned backwards. Streaking across the lake, we arrived watery-eyed and no longer half-asleep.

It was without question worth all of the time, energy, and money it took to get us to that creek mouth at the absolute perfect time. Of course, this is easy for me to say because it involved very little of my time, energy, or money to get us there. The three of us paused as the boat settled and re-acclimated to the eerie silence floating on the water. Sun-bleached, moss-coated tree stumps so closely lined the banks of the old stream that you could read its former transit 15 feet below the surface of the lake. The mist had nearly dissipated despite the fact that we had yet to see the sun.

The moment ended suddenly as a heavy bass rolled through lily pads within casting distance of the boat. The morning held such tantalizing promise that each of us expected to land a giant fish with each cast. Grandfather dropped the trolling motor into the brown water, slid between two ghostly old switch hickory trees guarding the creek mouth, and started fishing.

Casting was an art with which I was largely unfamiliar at that early age. My first effort clanked hollowly off a table-sized stump and the open-faced reel buzzed angrily and belched a nest of tangled monofilament. I stared at the reel, frozen, not wanting to believe what had just happened. Dad and Grandfather were plugging away and it took a few moments for them to realize my situation. My father calmly stripped the line out of the snarled mess, explaining as he went until the reel turned smoothly, and he tousled my hair.

As I recovered from the ignominious opening, Grandfather reared back powerfully and his rod bent. I dove for the net, scattering life jackets and worn water jugs. After a short struggle, he swung the two-pound largemouth over the side of the boat and tossed it into my lap.

“Save that net for his Daddy,” he smiled softly and rigged another plastic worm with an ease that revealed his 60 years on the water. I grinned sheepishly and dropped the frisky bass rattling into the live well.

The sun peeked golden eyes through the pines and melted a little magic off the morning. Fifty casts without a fish while they each boated several nice ones also brought a dose of reality. The water grew shallower as we wound deeper up the old creek, now completely obscured from the main part of the lake by ragged stumps.

I alone stayed with a top-water lure. Bass feed most actively at the surface around sunrise and sunset, hitting bugs and frogs, minnows and sunfish, and occasionally small birds on overhanging limbs. As the sun climbs, they tend to drift back under lily pads, rocks, and ledges, striking only when prey ventures too close. It is then advisable to go under the surface after them. At eight o’clock that morning, fishless, I kept throwing a clunky top-water lure called a buzz-bait.

I am not sure what sort of natural creature this lure is supposed to mimic. Mine was about four inches long with a yellow plastic skirt, a giant white eye, and a gaudy propeller on the front that churned the water ferociously. I have never seen any sort of frantic, mutant, wide-eyed, skirted animal that so bubbles the water. Bass hit lures like that out of aggression rather than predation. That they attack them with such anger is really what makes them so fun to fish.

I plugged away, buzzing tree stumps and lily pads, sometimes cacophonously rattling the lure off the rusted metal roofs of decaying boat houses that once stood by the creek before they dammed the river. I’m surprised more people don’t drop dead when bass hit top-water lures on breathless mornings. My heart erupted as a fish lunged from behind a sideways limb and slapped the buzz bait into the air.

“Keep reeling! He’ll hit it again!” advised Grandfather.

Luckily, I was in such shock from the ambush that I never thought to stop reeling. The fish did hit it again, this time dragging the contraption beneath the water surface.

“Now let him have it!”

I leaned back and felt the hook set solid. The weight of the fish pulling straight away felt in perfect balance and for just a second the fight seemed marvelously even, the outcome uncertain. Quickly though, the graphite rod and 12-pound-test monofilament overwhelmed the foot-long bass and I guided it into the net, despite excitedly stepping into my own open tackle box.

I had caught fish before, but this was the first with a lure on one of the early morning bass trips with the men. When my father framed the black-green and white fish against the blazing Texas sun, it was without question the proudest moment of my young life.

I spent much of the rest of that morning admiring the fish in the live well, keeping track of mine as Dad and Grandfather steadily added more, lifting them myself, between instructions not to, over the open live well until my thumbs were tattered from their rough lower jaws. The water became inches deep and the trolling motor choked thick with Parrot’s feather moss. The pine trees towered above us as we poled the boat around, sinking oars through two feet of muck.

Was this it? Were we simply going to turn weakly around and leave? Grandfather cleaned off the motor and we turned our backs to the trees and headed out with a little less wonder. The fishing slowed as the sun flamed higher into the late morning sky. My rod laid largely silent and the live well open as we coiled back toward the lake.

One of the remarkable things about my father is that he never gives up. The man is relentless, whether deer hunting through a howling sand storm, hiking steadily through icy rain down a Montana trout stream, or casting endlessly into the heat of the day. It paid off that morning as the Hellbender crankbait he was retrieving stopped cold and his rod angled deeply. The thick bass powered away, pulling him to the side of the boat, and got behind a tree. Grandfather smoothly positioned the boat, Dad, me, and the net for the next five minutes until the 6 lb. largemouth bass was improbably hoisted into the noon sunlight.

Though the rocket ride back across the lake was exhilarating, I kept peeking into the live well at the jostled fish banging into one another. I burst onto the dock before the boat had completely stopped and raced up the ramp to the cabin. Breathless, I pulled my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother down to the dock. Scrambling back into the boat, I pulled the fish one by one from the live well, recounting how and where each was caught.

We hung fourteen bass on two stringers that weighed over fifteen pounds each and held them up for their cameras. Dad and I compared tattered thumbs and Grandfather pulled me next to him as we walked proudly through 100 degree soup back to the two-room cabin.

The frigid air hit us like ice water. Lying flat on my cot, fully clothed with beads of crystallized sweat on my brow, I drifted quickly off to sleep. The rhythmic dripping from the duct-taped air conditioner onto sizzling pavement outside the window reminded me of white caps slapping the boat as we raced back across the open water.

After a nap, we ate warm brisket sandwiches on Mrs. Baird’s white bread and fried peach pies with black coffee. The morning’s events immediately took on almost mythical proportions.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Not far from the boat dock, on our side of the lake, was a lush, swampy island rimmed entirely by massive lily pads. It was so close in fact, that Grandfather didn’t even crank up the big motor to get us over to it. The five-minute troll to the shady side of the uninhabited island was like a trip to the ancient Amazon. The company, Grandfather, Grandmother, and my 80-year-old Great-Grandmother, was also well-weathered. Even our tackle was old – cane poles with eight feet of line tied to them, slipshot weights you set with your teeth, bare bronze hooks, and live crickets for bait. Great-Grandmother had never used anything but a cane pole, and she never would, either.

Razor-edged sun beams sliced through the tree tops and dappled three-foot lily pads that we parted like some Antarctic ice-breaker. Hiding from the sun in floppy straw hats, we tied to a partially submerged tree. The analog depth finder blipped 10 feet of water. Fishing with bobbers for bluegills requires a very different level of patience than casting for largemouths. Either everyone in the boat starts hauling in the feisty panfish within a few minutes or it’s time to find some different lily pads. It’s about as easy and fun as any kind of fishing there is and it’s perfect for kids and 80-year-old women who refuse to give in to time. Great-Grandmother needed a walker to get to the boat and two people to help her in, but once the fishing was on she was the quickest cane pole artist in east Texas.

She had three fish in the boat before our wake settled into the lily pads, unhooking them and re-baiting in the same motion while nudging me to open the live well. I swear she had X-ray vision and could see the fish through the stained water. She would pick a tiny spot between the edges of the lime-green disks, arch the long pole above her coolly, and drop the cricket, hook, and weight right through it, easing on the descent just as the line grew taught so the bobber would settle on the surface without scaring the fish. I never saw her loose one. Only rarely would they even momentarily tangle her, once hooked, amidst the intertwined limbs, weeds and lily pad stalks. I was admiring my first catch, dripping slimy and groping for water, when she nudged me for the fifth time.

We moved with the fish around the island all afternoon, exchanging crickets for bluegills. Some were tiny, but others were over a pound, adult males with pouting foreheads and broad, black sides that bent the limber cane poles. Grandfather told us to throw the little ones back because he didn’t feel like cleaning them and there wasn’t enough meat on them to mess with. Great-Grandmother kept them all, winking devilishly as she tossed a four-inch one into the live well.

As a child, fishing those lakes with my family was simply my favorite thing to do. But in those endless, sweltering Texas days, the seductive movement of water infected me in a way I couldn’t possibly have identified. There was something comforting about seeing a coming wave and feeling it roll the boat, about smelling the infectious bliss of life on the water, about witnessing the wonder of a sunrise or sunset on a fluid horizon. It became the most intimate insight into my own place and mortality on this water planet. The magic of water and the joy of fishing would also, in time, become an indelible link to the coming generation as well.

It was time to troll back around to the boat dock and prepare for the sunset bass trip, but Great-Grandmother and I didn’t want the bluegill fishing to end. Together we stalled Grandfather until the crickets ran out and the live well was dark with over a hundred bluegills, sixty of them hers. As they lifted her out of the boat, I dropped them one-by-one into a mesh basket tied to the dock.

My parents smiled as I told all the details of the swampy island and the big ones that got away. Great-Grandmother, hunched and long since gray, squeezed my arm gently. Four generations stood together as the sun dipped in the west and the bass stirred in the old creek bed.