2. My Mama

With our tin cans alive with bait, Uncle Worth and I would cross the potato patch and slither down the grassy slope to the river. Then we climbed into the big, flat-bottomed boat that was tied to a stake under a clump of graceful “weeping” willows (the kind they used to carve on gravestones) and drifted slowly past the lily pads until we reached what Uncle Worth thought might be a favorable place to lower the old anvil. He did this gently, so as not to scare away the perch and blue-gills and rock bass. Hooks would be dropped into the water and presently the red bobbers would be hopping up and down and under.

I am quite aware that this is not a sportsmanly way to catch fish, but it was effective. Our tackle was crude and our methods were primitive, but what we were out there for was fish and plenty of them to fry in a pan, and this was a good way to do it.

In more recent and more prosperous years I have been occasionally inveigled into fishing with much better (certainly much more expensive) instruments, but I never caught so many fish as I did with Uncle Worth’s homemade equipment. But I never was much of a success as a sportsman. Perhaps I entered the field of sports too late in life to have any real enjoyment of it.

If there were any fish-and-game laws in operation at that time, we didn’t know about them. We caught all we thought We could eat for supper and breakfast.

A few years later, there was a limit on the number you might catch, which was a sensible rule that saved the fish from total extinction. There was also a season, prescribed by law, though my beloved Uncle Paul Beezley, a man of great rectitude, said it wasn’t quite fair. The only open season for fishing, said Uncle Paul, was at the period when the resident farmers had to be in their fields cultivating their corn. Once a country cousin of mine, a farmer boy, spent a couple of nights in jail for helping himself to a mess of blue-gills caught in a near-by pond a day or two before the season opened. Would that all our laws were so rigidly enforced. Mama, when hearing of her nephew’s incarceration, remembered an old quatrain:

The law condemns the man or woman
Who steals a goose from off the common,
But lets the greater thief go loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

When the fish had stopped biting and a huge dragonfly was perched impudently on my motionless red bobber and the late afternoon shadows were slanting toward the east, Uncle Worth would row us back home, the oars clattering in their locks. The experienced navigator rarely glanced over his shoulder to plot his course for he knew this friendly river by heart.