How does one eliminate layers of travel, exotic settings, news catches, complex strategies, high-tech equipment – and once again find that core at the heart of fishing, the joy of taking a colorful still person out of the water. The world we can only visit?
Fortunately on Saturday she enlisted the services of a guide. A child named Ibrahim is 5 years old.
While I was on a fishing trip in Canada, he was tending to a baitfish rig in a small pond in southwest Michigan with his fellow preschoolers.
He was ready to share his thoughts.
We met in a small park with a floating fishing dock, near a playground, a bathroom block, and a dog park. At the end of the berth was a T-section with a seat and guard rail. An ideal fishing platform.
I knew he wasn’t big on blending into crowds, so I arrived twenty minutes early to make a claim. Abby and his father showed up around the appointed time, at which point Abe announced, “The plan has changed. We’ll start at the playground.”
This was his day. So we grabbed our gear and set out to play. When we got back to fishing, half an hour later, the end of the pier was still available.
“You brought the bait?” Abby asked. I nodded. A round, flat, blue bowl containing red worms. And a transparent plastic container with wax worms.
“Mealworms are good,” he said, never explaining how waxworms compare and differ. “Are those earthworms?” He asked with a nod towards the blue basin. “They don’t work well.”
They had used mealworms in his kindergarten the previous week, and fish had been caught – though the number of people who moved on to tell the story retold, and I didn’t put pressure on who did.
He got this dodgy thing early in his hunting career. It will serve him well.
So, anyway, I baited his hook with a waxworm, me with an earthworm. He did quite well with the two-foot-tall, pastel-colored Snoopy Zebco spincast. It’s now, but it was his mother – my daughter – when she was five and she was fishing from Kiwasey Lake Pier in Stratford Woods Park in East Ashman.
I missed a few bites of earthworms when, after about 20 minutes of fishing, the grilled bobber tilted the Abbe line at a 45-degree angle and disappeared under the water.
Abe tuned the Zebco 202, grabbed the hook, and, quickly enough, figured out what everyone considered his first grab, put the hook on, and rolled it unassisted.
He would have liked to keep it, but it didn’t feel like a day to fry fish.
Last year we pooled our efforts for a few panfish, and with each release, he chanted, “Back to the sea!”
I tried that phrase on Saturday and he looked at me as if I was speaking Latin.
I settled at a height of five.
After a few minutes, the line got tangled up in a hopeless ball inside the reel, and as I started to unravel it, Dad yelled, “Back on the court.”
That was the hardest moment of the day. I wanted to redouble our efforts – catch more fish, bigger fish, take them home and fry them, and come back to them again every day, forever.
Abby had a ball. Now he is ready for something else. Five years, right?
I disassembled the Zebco, cut the line and reloaded the spool from the spool I carry in my fishing rope case.
Snoopy and I picked up another pair of bluegills and a baby bass and launched them into the sea. Abby and his father were on the slide. I gathered our things and headed to join them.
Abby wants to fish for salmon from the panfish pier and he’s sure he’ll fish one day, I don’t doubt it.
It’s in that blessed stage where anything can happen, but nothing needs to.
He might turn out to be one of those kids who hunts from dawn to dusk and goes to sleep dreaming the next day.
He may fish a little from time to time.
He may be attracted by different feelings.
It’s up to him. I hope he’ll secure me when he can.
I don’t think I taught Abby anything about hunting on Saturdays, but here’s something he taught me: Enjoy that very moment of hunting, and whenever I move, I release it.
Email freelance Midland writer Steve Griffin at [email protected]