A FISH STORY

Fishing never held any great excitement for me. I’ve probably gone fishing less than ten times in my life, but there is one trip I shall never forget that colored all my plans of ever looking forward to such outings. My father and grandfather went fishing as often as they could and they did their best to instill some sort of fondness of the sport into me. It was supposed to be a chance to relax and have “quality time” with my Dad, away from the stress of homework and jobs. On one such occasion, while living in San Antonio, Texas, my Dad took me on a fishing trip with some of his friends to catch carp. As far as I can remember, there were no other kids there.

They called it a “fishing trip” and I was supposed to learn how to fish, but as far as I could see it had little to do with fish and whole lot to do with beer and mosquitoes. There were no females on the trip and yet plenty of references to them were mentioned. They would tell stories and drink beer and the more they drank, the rougher were the stories. They’d slap each other on the back and get louder and louder. After a while, some of them were having problems trying to find the pond. The only reason they would get up off the logs in front of the fire was to stagger out to “water the flowers” as they put it. My main job was to swat mosquitoes and “get some more firewood,” especially when the stories got to be a little more than a ten year old should hear.

The “stream” where we were “fishing” was more like a swamp. It smelled bad, the water was very muddy and the bugs were large and plentiful. It looked like something out of a horror movie to me, especially since we arrived at about the time it was getting dark. About twenty squadrons of mosquitoes were assigned to my body but seemed to leave everybody else alone. Maybe they didn’t like the smell of beer. I never saw anybody fishing and when I asked, “why not?” I was told that a fishing line with baited hooks had been laid across the pond and that left them free to talk. (And drink beer).

It also seemed strange to me that there were no tents or sleeping bags. I later learned that this was an “all night” fishing trip. After a while, their words began to slur and we all fell asleep where ever we happened to be laying, sweating and dirty. This was supposed to be fun? Sometime, in the middle of the night, someone screamed, “The fish are taking our bait!” I thought to myself, “Oh really?” I’m no fisherman, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that our baited fishhooks have been in the water for a long time. There shouldn’t be any bait left, as of hours ago.

Nevertheless, we all got up with our flashlights and examined the fish line and every hook was bare except a middle hook. Someone screamed again, “Careful, that’s a huge Texas snapping turtle!” On closer examination it instead proved to be a huge Texas rock. By then we were all awake enough to see the dawn breaking and we had not even one fish among us, although some of us had very large hangovers. We gathered up our things, which were much lighter, without the beer and headed home. I was bone tired, covered with mosquito bites, itching and filthy. When I got home, I cleaned up and went to bed, glad that it was Saturday. Hours later, Mom came in my bedroom and said, “How was your special fishing trip with your Dad, Billy?” I didn’t have the guts to tell her how I really felt so I said, “Great Mom, just great.”