Fishing with Patrick

[This story was originally published as one of my weekly columns in the Taylor Daily Press, and later reprinted in Texas Fish & Game magazine. I still like it.]

I had just picked up the little Zebco 202 combo to retrieve some slack when the bobber abruptly submerged and began racing east just under the surface of the water.

"Patrick, you have a fish on!" I shouted to my then 3-year-old, playing on the other side of the pier. He ran to me and I placed the rod and reel in his hands, tightening the drag as something clearly stronger than the pin perch I was expecting ripped line from the protesting reel.

With one arm around him and one hovering near the reel, I coached my son as he began to recoup some of the line: "You're doing great," I said, trying to project my excitement. "Wow, that's a big fish you have on ... wonder what it is?"

A black drum, as it turned out. Just brushing the 14-inch legal limit, but the largest fish my boy had yet caught. As Patrick swung the fish onto the dock, I said: "That's a drum. Drum are really good to eat."

To set the stage for what he said next, allow me to digress. Nearly a year earlier, I helped Patrick float grasshoppers in a clear-running Hill Country stream. It was OK if we stuck hooks through grasshoppers because he'd recently seen "A Bug's Life" and had decided that grasshoppers are mean and quite possibly dangerous to boot.

The panfish were spawning and as he jerked one bright red-breasted sunfish after another out of that sweet water, he bent down to look at the rainbow of colors saying: "Hello fishy; you're a pretty fishy." Then, to his great satisfaction, we gently eased the hooks out of their mouths and returned them to the water.

Back on the dock, a year wiser, he grabbed the leader and bent his face close to the drum: "Hello fishy," he said. "We're going to eat you."

Then he began the long march in to the shore. "I want to show Mommy," he declared.

I filleted the fish, worried that as the drum made the transition from entertaining denizen of the deep to deep-fried dinner, my child would be troubled.

"Is it ready yet?" he asked me as he came around the corner to the cleaning table. Later, after reading him his bedtime story, I said: "Patrick, that was a good fish you caught today."

"Yeah," he replied sleepily. "It was a drum." Then, several heavy-lidded beats later: "We're going to have drumsticks."

It seemed a long time coming - my son's patent enjoyment of angling and his dawning understanding of our - both fishermen's and fish's - respective places in the food chain.

Early forays were exercises in exploration and in restraint - trying hard not to become frustrated when he delighted as much in the "kerplunk" and ripples of a well-thrown rock as the tug of a fish at the end of his line; him not understanding that the two were fairly exclusive, at least in the same small patch of water.

I had to check my own enthusiasm - my hope that the next fish would be a really big one to make an impression on him - and make sure we packed up to go home while he was still enjoying the outing.
But it comes -- bit by bit, piece by piece -- and perhaps now I have a budding angler on my hands.

Something similar must have happened with my own father. As I count them today, the greatest of the many gifts my dad has given me are: my life, a love of words and of story, and a keen appreciation for the joys of angling.

I am not certain that any of these gifts were intentional, and the latter two, at least, were mostly the precious gifts of his time.

I do recall that early fishing trips with my father were rarely about catching fish (though I can also remember catching a lot of fish); they were more about the adventure of being outdoors, on the water, doing what he was doing. I remember him spending a great deal of time baiting hooks, dispatching hardhead catfish, naming different seabirds, and - with endless patience - answering my questions.

I imagine it was so with his father, too. My grandfather, Pat, lived to fish. While my father was still in elementary school, they would make the long train ride from Kansas to the Texas coast - eventually moving to Rockport simply because the fishing was good.

My only memory of Grandpa while he was walking (a series of strokes cost him his mobility, though he continued to fish from a wheelchair) is of him beaching a monster (or so it seemed to me then) bull red on the shell banks of Rattlesnake Point.

So, for whatever reason, the men of my family fish - have, as far as I can tell, always fished. It's how we bond. I've never watched a football game on television with my father, my brother, or any of my uncles or cousins, but we continue to fish together.

Not too long ago I traveled to Louisiana and Mississippi to fish at the Beau Rivage Sportsman's Lodge. It was a "work" trip, a writing assignment, so I was traveling alone and fell into conversation with the driver who had been sent to collect me at the airport in New Orleans. In the course of the long drive to Biloxi, he regaled me with tales of the fishing he'd done as a child and as a young man.

Sometime during that long ride, our talk turned to more recent and painful events. He had lost his wife quite suddenly a year before and his grief was still an open wound. He told me that he and some other members of the staff had been thinking of booking their own trip to the lodge. Maybe, he told me, it was time to go fishing.

I considered that for a moment, and considered that - for me - often enough it comes down to a rod in my hand or a bottle in front of me. I believe I am winning when I choose the rod.

I know that as my son grows to manhood, there are only a few things I can do to protect him from the vicissitudes of life. I know that there will be difficult and painful events from which I cannot shield him.

I know, too, that if I can foster a love of fishing, of the outdoors, I have at least helped build for him a life-long refuge where his soul can always find solace.