When Ryan was 15, I was in the habit of picking him up on Saturday afternoons to go fishing. Actually, it was entirely possible that he would have friends over and instead of fishing we got lunch and talked about whatever issues were current with the group. Sometimes he just wanted to rent a couple of movies and we would hang out at the house and watch the movies. It was always about whatever he was wanting to do that day and it was usually go buy some bait and put the fishing poles in the car, because he loved to fish.
With Ryan, I always wondered who was mentoring who, because while I was showing up every week and spending time with him and his friends, I was also learning quite a bit from him. One of those things was fishing. I have hated fishing most of my life and if I never ran into somebody that wanted me to pick up a fishing pole, I would have been okay with that. But here we were, and I was learning a little bit about fishing. I was so “not a fisherman” that when Josh or Joe came with us, there was always plenty of things to rag on Mr. Mike about. I was generally the butt of more than a few fishing jokes each trip.
For example, fishing in the local canal is where I learned to sit down and not rock the boat. Ryan had a dinghy that he had salvaged after someone on his street had thrown it out. It was sitting on a homemade rickshaw contraption (also from someone’s trash). One day he and Joe walked it down to the end of his street where there is access to a canal. They had rigged up a lawn chair in the middle of the thing so I would feel comfortable sitting down on it and away we went. Every time I tried to shift my weight one of them would yell, “Hey, sit still! You’re rocking the boat!” Yet they were on each end of the boat standing up fishing. When they were casting, or leaning over, or otherwise moving around, the boat never budged. I never figured out how they managed that, and in a nine or ten foot dinghy I was the potential disaster just sitting in a lawn chair minding my own business.
Another example was setting the hook. When we fished from the bank, it was always very quiet. The fish don’t need to hear your conversation and serious fishermen don’t want to, either. One of the first things I had learned about fishing with these boys is that it is all catch and release. Catch a fish, take a picture with it, remove the hook and let it go. One day Ryan came over and informed me that while the idea was catch and release, it wasn’t supposed to be done all in one motion. You are supposed to reel the fish in before you release it, and in order to do that, you need to set the hook. He said, “What you’re doing is called donating bait or feeding the fish. The fish takes the bait, removes it from the hook, and spits the hook out. So when you feel the fish messing with your bait, a gentle tug sets the hook and then you can reel him in.”
Got it. Maybe. These fish in the canal were about the size of my hand or smaller, and I’m not sure that I had ever “felt” anything. Ever. I was getting pretty good at dropping the worm off of a leaf or the opposite bank into the water after casting and then waiting a bit and slowly reeling it in. Sometimes I had a hook, sometimes a hook with a worm on it, and sometimes a fish. I never made any distinction between the three, I thought that was just fishing. So I started paying as close attention as I could to what happened after the worm “fell” in the water. Once, I was pretty sure I felt something, but then I wasn’t so sure. Nope. Nothing. Then I thought, well, it couldn’t hurt to try the tug thing anyway. I didn’t realize how tightly I was holding the pole or how uptight I was in general. I yanked more than tugged, and out from the far side of the canal (which was only about 10 or 12 feet wide) came the smallest fish ever, about the size of the palm of my hand, and sailed over my head, landing several feet behind me on the bank. While Ryan and Joe were rolling on the ground laughing at this point, I was secretly relieved that there was actually a fish on the line and I hadn’t yanked in an empty hook!
One of the places that Ryan liked to go he called Burnt Bridge. It was a stretch of road with water on each side connected at one point where the road was a bridge. Apparently it was originally a wooden bridge that at some point had burned down, but all the times we went there it was concrete roadway that went over the water. It was not fresh water, but was like a tide pool off of the intracoastal waterway. There was an island about a quarter of a mile away from the bridge that you could walk out to and the water would never come up over your knee. We would park off to the side of the road just past the bridge and walk out to the island. Sometimes we would borrow the pastor’s canoe and we would bring that with us. Of course we would fish. I have several memories of that place, three of them not so fond memories. The worst one was on the far side of the island. The closer to the island, the deeper the water is and I was about chest deep in close to the island when something brushed past my waist. Yup, I never saw it, had no idea what it was and I screamed like a little girl and hollered, “Ryan!” Don’t ask why. I could only tell you fears are not rational. He never said anything about me screaming, he only wanted to know why I called his name. I never ventured that close to the island again and certainly not on that side of it.
The water was much clearer on the side you could see from the bridge. When you got close to the island it was probably waist deep, but I settled for stopping around mid-thigh. It was at that depth one day that a ray lifted up off the bottom where I never saw him (and almost stepped on him) and moved off to the right and circled around behind me and disappeared. In retrospect it was really a beautiful thing and I hope I didn’t scream that time, but in the moment I wasn’t too fond of the fact that he was six inches under my foot when he lifted off.
The last straw, for me, was the day we were fishing quite a ways from each other and I was reeling in my latest catch to be released and realized I have a really nasty looking barracuda on the line, and I am standing (in cut-off shorts) in the same water that he’s swimming in! Yup, I hollered for Ryan and reeled Mr. Nasty Teeth in as close as I could to the end of my pole which I then held as far away from me as possible. Ryan made his way over and didn’t ask me this time why I called his name. He reached for the barracuda, took the hook out of his mouth and released him. Fortunately, the barracuda swam away toward open water and I started making my way the quarter mile back toward shore. If I remember correctly, I was pretty much done with fishing at Burnt Bridge at that point!
