October Crappie

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October Crappie

Late yesterday afternoon, after parking near the lake's rip-rap, I followed the rocky shoreline to a spot that had always produced a steady catch of black crappie. My personal hotbed.

I laid my rod in a crevice on top of a huge granite stone, and set my tackle box and net on the ground. Then I shed my old backpack, which held a couple sandwiches, several bottles of water and a beat up copy of Raymond Carver's collection 'Where I'm Calling From," and set that down, too.

It was windless, chilly, and judging by the sun's low perch, I knew at best I had a couple hours of daylight left. Crouching, I attached a basic jig, chartreuse, to the end of my line. I went right to left, fan-casting, working the jig like a lure, reeling slowly, letting it sink a little, a sharp jerk and repeating the method.

I no longer keep the fish I catch. When I was a boy my father used to bring us to a small lake where we'd catch and keep dozens of crappie. At home, we boys would scale and slit the fish, separating the guts so my mother could bury them in her garden. After we'd cleaned the entire catch, my father would hack off the heads and use his filet knife to slice thick slabs of pink meat off the spine. Then he'd flip the flesh over and over in a gritty mixture of cornmeal and cream before frying. We'd feast without utensils, picking clumped rice and crispy fried fish off our poercelain plates with our fingers while sitting in front of the television.

I could say that I no longer keep fish because being older I'd become conscious of the politically right fact that taking too many breeding fish out of a lake will inevitably deplete the population. But the truth is, I no longer have the patience to scale, gut, filet and fry a fish up.

It's so much easier to drive to the Raley's and buy a couple slabs.

Anyway, about four cigarettes and forty or fifty yards away from where I'd left my backpack, while reeling my jig in, I got my first strike. I jerked the rod and worked the reel, landing a medium-sized crappie. With its rubbery lower lip clamped between my left thumb and forefinger, I carefully removed the hook and set the crappie on the water. A moment later, it slapped the dark water surface and dove, leaving a bubbly trail as it disappeared.

In a nutshell, once you've found the school -- game over.

From that point on, the remainder of the afternoon continued without change. By the time the sky grayed and I was ready to call it quits, I probably had landed no fewer than three dozen crappie.

So here's the point of this. As I'm gathering my things, a small rusted boat crossed in front of me. On board was a man of about thirty and his two young sons. Each time the kids got onto a fish, they screamed out loud and stood up, the flimsy boat rocking beneath them. After they landed their fish one of the boys would yank out of the water a link stringer attached to the side of the boat. The stringer was loaded, heavy with crappie. Perhaps fifty or sixty of the fat black and silver fish still flapping.

"That's a lot of fish," I shouted.

The bigger of the two brothers used both his hands to hoist the stringer up in front of him. He grinned and yelled back, "How 'bout you, Mister. Any luck?"

I shook my head no. The kid let go the laden stringer and it quickly sunk beneath the surface. Slowly, the tin boat moved along the shoreline. The kids continued to scream as during the whole length of the shoreline, they continued to catch crappie.

Slipping my arms back through the straps of my backpack, it got me a little how many fish the kids had. Angered me even that they'd taken so many crappie out of the lake in a single afternoon. But then I started remembering my own father and us boys and the hundreds of crappie whose flesh we picked apart with our fingers in front of the television.

I wasn't mad anymore, but I wasn't happy, either. I really don't know what I felt at that point. All I did know was that I wanted to get home, take a long hot shower, tuck myself up on the sofa and delve into Raymond Carver's 'Where I'm Calling From."

And that's what I did.

***
Possible Edits

Kids were splashing around at the edge of the water, building sand castles and shrieking in delight at each big wave. The sky was cloudless, the sun high overhead, the sand hot. It was after two, but the mother and son still hadn't made their appearance.

Swimming in such clear water, I could see my own shadow on the sandy bottom, as if I were a bird gliding through the sky

dangled his feet in the water, and looked off at the shore.

Reeling my line in, I asked myself . . .
So why was I thinking about her now.
But it was Jocelyn my thoughts drifted to.
I was passing the marker set out by fishermen when my thoughts led back to

A fractured image of his own childhood hit him.

Best of all were the evenings spent after fishing.

I kept hoping they would let the fish go, but instead they continued to load them into their cooler as fast as they landed them.

I used to come here sometimes with my father.

Beer cans shone through the clear water of the lake. To me, they looked like the sunken ruins of an ancient lost city.

But how was that hurting anyone?

With twilight slowly descending he began to see the silhouettes of things he once pictured clearly.

I hadn’t thought about it up to that point.

Water slapped against the rocks.

The waves lifted my bobber a little, and put it back down.

He swings his bent pole toward his father, who deftly removes the flopping fish from the line and adds it to a stringer.

He calculated that they could fry a dozen crappie every night for a week and still have a freezer full. Any way you looked at it, they had kept too many fish.

So what happens, he thought, to the fish in the water? What do they say to one another? Do they swim around, looking for their missing schoolmates, and say, they just rose out of the water and disappeared?

Made him wonder sometimes if there might not be a day in the future when the lake would have no more crappie.

Looking at them laughing as they hauled in fish after fish made me think about when I was a boy.

It looked familiar, like I’d seen it sometime, a long time ago.

I wanted to tell them that, but couldn’t figure out how to go about it. So instead, each time they landed another fish, I smiled and nodded my head.

Instead of doing anything about it, I . . .

Maybe I was angry because . . .

I pulled a soda out of the cooler, opened it, and sipped it on my way back to the water’s edge.

I considered . . . , but understood . . .