“Fishin'”
Copyright (c) 2016 by J Kirk Richards
We are big fish eaters. Only “we” has some latitude: the rest of them words (OK, add “are” to the list) all are true. Ever know a fisherman to use any word other than “big?” Here goes the blog that is supposed to sit somewhere just below the intro tagline (or whateverinhole it’s called): Because Bruce Said So. He wants 1,200 words or so twice weekly. Funny, Doctor Jewett never was in charge at Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station’s Public Affairs Shop – and, why anyone in any frame of mind wants their affairs public is beyond me – but he held bushels of integrity and a lossless record at chess and is the former Publisher and Editor of the literary magazine Jo, so This Is For You, Juice!
My father first took me fishing in Maryland and then in Newfoundland, but when we moved to Sanford, Florida, in the middle 1950s and he secured his own 10.5-foot semi-vee aluminum boat that is when I mark Fishin’ as a he-me thing. Both the first time and the last time were traumatic for both of us. He handled the first time better than I. I walloped him the second time, though. More about that much later. But to set the table, as it were, this man, a onetime U.S. Navy aviation ordnance Chief whose CV includes almost every Captain’s Mast aboard CV-8 (USS Hornet) from the time it passed the Panama Canal to its sinking in October of 1942 off the Santa Cruz Islands during the U.S. Marine Corps’ invasion of Guadalcanal to a series of daring and dangerous voyages in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean as a member of the air crew – a flying Aviation Motor Machinest Mate and plane captain – aboard CVE-11 (USS Card) until he was sent to Patuxent River Naval Air Station sometime just before 1945. There he flew in the fledgling Hurricane Hunter aircraft (B-25 Billy Mitchell) aircraft modified to tour the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico as part of his job working the engine test bed program at Pax River. That is where he learned about Central Florida, and in particular Sanford and its many lake-ish charms.
Dad was the oldest boy born after three living sisters on the outskirts of Minneapolis in a place called Osseo. His mom spent time in a double-walled log cabin in the late 1880s on the frontier of North Dakota and was there for the last Lakota (Sioux) attack as the nation welcomed the 20th Century. John Leslie Richards had only a fleeting memory of his own father, who died before my dad was in elementary school. He became a man – working potato fields when school was out – and for him school mostly was out when crops needed hoeing or harvesting from Minnesota to Idaho to put food on his mother’s table and money in his sisters’ dowries. With but a couple – in flush times a trio – of nickels each week for himself, he and his younger brother Keith Kirk shouldered larger burdens than most of us could comprehend. His mom worked at least two jobs. When we finally visited in 1960 I saw the hand-crank Sears Roebuck washing machine on the family manse’s back porch and hear some of the city elders tell of the time “Bud” (or Jack as he was sometimes known) found some black powder and stuffed the town cannon with that propellant and a large round stone and tried to shoot their ordnance over the town’s main church. There were other depredations. As time passed and the newly recognized Great Depression lengthened dad became a hunter and trapper and fishing guide in Lake of The Woods, Minnesota as side jobs for his fire tower profession after he honed some few heavy equipment skills in the Civilian Conservation Corps. It was the hunting and fishing that stuck. Then some Germans and Japanese and their Italian and other friends interrupted his – and millions of others’ – life. And he met this mysteriously delicate solid rock or whimsy in Manhattan and his roamin’ days were over. it took mom many moons to cure his successful poker playin’s (another story entire), but he paid her back by moving the family from Argentia (after Placentia) Newfoundland, Canada, to the booming metropolis of Sanford (pop: 5,600 circa 1954) to the newly reopened Naval Air Station. At the Argentia NAS, dad was off flight status and was the lead enlisted man for half of the station’s Crash Crew…but his real job was taking visiting VIPs (admirals, senators, congress critters and the like) out on hunting and fishing trips. My older brother Glenn and I sometimes got to go along. Our last Winter there we were ages seven and six). Bookend brother Storm had yet to start school and I guess both mom and dad figured enough cannonballs had already been fired by the Family Richards for their lifetimes, so he stayed home. Glenn and I toured each morning the rabbit traps – piano wire strung across the rabbit runs – upon wakeup. Peeing from behind multi-layered snow clothing was educational.
But that changed the Spring of 1955. Just after a big blizzard – and bigger Crash Crew party in our basement that found mom hospitalized with a broken finger and to the surprise of so many orthopedic surgeons and such no other apparent damage from her tumble halfway down the steps from the first floor to the basement of our two-story converted barracks home – I remember yet today the vivid sight of several crashed Navy warplanes at the end of and along the side of our departing runway. And people wonder why flight – hell, high places like couches and beds and short footstools – frightens me so. I have reasons, people. Sanford was then – and remains – a fascinating place. But most fascinating for me when finally I flew over the burg and saw its sparkling lakes and rivers and creeks and woods that must have impressed so the man from the land of ten thousand lakes. There were fish there to be murdered year-round and without the intrusion (but once a double-decade or so) of wind and snow. Wind and rain – hurricanes – he could handle. His youngest son’s middle (but few know the first to this day) name was so derived from his hurricane hunter days: Storm.
Since I was elected arch-enemy to dad – I sat across from him at table and performed role as foil and vex and fellow argumentative – we got along famously. Mom had Glenn pretty much tamed and Storm had yet to be caught, so to give the dear lady some peace her two boys beyond belief went fishin’ from the first.
That first trip was on the Wekiva River in that newly won boat with its seven-and-one-half horsepower kicker that with two could manage a meager seven or ten knots. Later, when I would take it out myself when a storm was a-brewing over Lake Monroe and I had to “tack” like a sailboat to keep the rollers from crashing over the transom, that tired little boat would get on a plane and probably max out near 20 knots, with its throttle locked in and me sitting on a small stool – the bench seats were too high and I am a terrible boat driver when scared – and steering was accomplished by leaning like with a motorcycle. But with dad I never got to steer. Sure, Storm most often but Glenn and I got to steer the 1954 Ford down State Road 46 out to or from Crim’s Fish Camp on a little island of Volusia County that intruded on our Seminole County sudsless Sundays that dad found necessary to haul his terrible trio in their Sunday School best for to climb the mulberry tree just beside the former barge turned tavern. Purple-stained white shirts were dead giveaways, but three hours of peace and quiet and gardening gave his bride an even trade. The Wekiva is a wild and scenic river – so says the Federal Gubbmint. In the 1950s it really was. You could see the sand bottom and drinking by cupped hand was standard…despite personal knowledge that beer-drain was a mainstay flavoring agent. We were fishing for sunfish and catfish with cane poles and dad has his fly rod out as well that midweek morning – it can’t be skipped school if your are studying ichthyology at first hand – and we had a stringer not to sneeze at as we drifted with the slow current. The Wekiva is a major tributary to the Welaka (which is the native name for St. Johns. The St. Johns is not the only northward flowing river in either North America or the Northern Hemisphere, but local wags constantly said such a thing. The St. Johns had a flow rate of less than four miles per hour and dropped so few feet every fifty miles of its near 360-mile length that meant the Wekiva rarely ran out of water. There at the confluence were blue crabs and shellcrackers and the prized Speckled Perch, real people called Black Crappie but we knew as “Specs.” We had no specs but red-ear sunfish, warmouth perch and such on our stringer and when dad finally said, “j, pull up the stringer and let’s get downstream,” I was unwilling to argue even though it was still light out. Our rule usually was hit the water before it played basketball with the sun and come in when the back porch light give you just enough light for scaling and gutting. But this day was different.
There was this godawful big and heavy thing with a mouth wide as Lake Monroe halfway up the stringer of fish. I yelled: “Dad! Snake’s got my perch! Do something!”
He shut down the kicker, forearmed me out of his way and unlatched that special stainless steel link stringer with the brass sleeved swivel for each fish clamp that I have still to this day and stood up, hoisting the stringer and…my God! Damn thing’s a cottonmouth! Fuckin’ Water Moccasin about four feet long out of the water and who knows how long under since its tail was not apparent. He shook the stringer. I handed him an oar from its oarlock and he said: “No! You put the blade of the oar beside the head and gently slide that sucker off my fish!”:
“No, Dad,” I yelled back. “My fish!”
And so, sure enough the snake relaxed its fangs – and my little brother wonders why I am adverse to handling such reptiles as snakes, and we work sometimes locating, removing and relocating gopher tortoises and in those gopher burrows may be found all manner of snakes and such, some even federally protected. The snake slid back into the water. Dad inspected the fish…none but mine showed any marks. We tossed that – damn, why mine? – back into the water but did not wait to see if the Moc returned for its hard-won hors-d-oeuvre. Neither of us said anything about “Not telling Mom.”
Years later when I was working at a newspaper in Titusville, Florida, about 40 miles from home, I’d come home monthly to help dad’s girlfriend with her standard heavy-duty monthly housecleaning. She may have though it was just filial duty, but it was the waffles that used to be just birthday breakfast reward. Mom said to me that particular day in the middle 1970s: “J, do you go fishing anymore?
“Mooooom!” I’d whine. “Didn’t you see me haul off dad’s small boat last week?” By then the old man had acquired a larger – 18 footer or so – tugboat of a river runner but still his bride would not budge off her dirtstance. She had seen me walk into a wave on the Maryland seashore at age two and did not like the fine hue of blue anywhere on one of her boys and thus blamed water, water, everywhere and would not set foot aboard the SS JohnMinnow. “No,” she’d continue as she passed me more bacon. “I mean do you go fishing with anyone other than dad?”
“Yeah,” I pushed words against the flow of butter and maple, “once or twice along the St. Johns or Indian River in Titusville. But mostly I’ll wait for dad.” He’d take a month’s vacation from Disney World where he maintained the park’s water pump system among his many other chores, with a Popeil Pocket Fisherman folding rod and reel and toss out some lure and throw back all bass over three pounds and bring home some to fill the freezer. That month was mid-October, long before most people though the specs would go on the beds – and they were right, but failed to take into account the fish of both sexes used the pre-Spring flush of activity to stock up on fodder for the coming spawn. We murdered fish then. And we needed to. The top two shelves in the industrial size freezer out in the breezeway rotated annually between frozen fish, occasion deer and the citrus squeezed or sectioned that sustained us since childhood. With Glenn and Storm mostly gone, I drank OJ by the gallon (sans the delightful notion of de-toxification with vodka or rum) “But mostly,” I continued, “I’ll just wait for Dad. Why?”
“Well…” she began, a sure sign she was ill at ease and I had no clue about what or which. “I asked Johnny the same question, and he said, “No. I’ll just wait for J to come home.” She added that her best bud Shirley Simas whith whom she shared maternity suites in military hospitals at Bethesda and Pax River in Maryland and later visited while Shirley continued the practice in Argentia, whose husband Ralph also was an aviation Chief at NAS Sanford who liked to fish. “So, I asked Daddy if he’d ever fish with Ralph.”:
I interrupted: “And dad said not only ‘No’ but ‘Hell, No!’ and said Ralph also golfs so he wants to go fishing at 9 in the morning and wants to be on the golf course just after noon. Dad and I murder fish all day. Ralph wants to talk. We say ‘pass me a beer,’ or ‘want a sammich?’ and that’s pretty much it all the day.”
That poor, slight woman never belly laughed before. “Did he mention that question to you,” she interrogated.
“Nope.”
“That’s almost word-for-word. You two are scary.”
“Why, thankee, Ma’am!” And I held out the well-mapled plate for another four-sectioned waffle. I had already wolfed down pair of Duncan grapefruit halves and was working on my second 16-ounces of milk – and there’s another story about milk maybe next but I suspect that’ll be a while yet to ferment.
After swabbing the windowsills and baseboards and moving furniture and such and taking my leave to make sure the local oyster bar was still shucking and sudsing, I came home in time to help dad hitch the small boat-and-trailer combo to his new pickup and off we went to get six dozen ‘minners’s to drown in Lake Monroe.
This time we talked.
“Dad,” I began. “Remember the time in Newfoundland and I had some kind of illness and was lounging lordly on the couch in the living room and you came home drunk and reeking and you wanted to sit down and talk to me?”
His eyes got big and the wrinkles across his brow deepened.
“And I was a prick and you were drunk and I was sick of that shit and wouldn’t say squat to you. Remember, dad?”
I saw him lick his brittle lips. There was the man who on our first Navy Appreciation Day in Sanford stood on the pine picnic bench tabletop and I read this lips saying to the other man – much taller and larger and imposing – “you better shoot me now you sonofabitch, with than little piece or I’ll take it and ram it up your ass!” and he was more frightened about what was to come next than ever I had seen him. So was I.
“Remember dad? You pulled off a shoe and beat me with it three or four times and still I said not a word and just looked hate and defiance at you. Remember, Dad?”
There were tears now. Coming from four eyes. He shook his head North and South and said not a word. The world stopped.
“Well, I do and thought you should know that I remember each and every time that shoe hit. And I want you to know I had to work damn hard to forgive myself for starting that by not talking to you. And that’s all we ever need to say about that.”
And we went back to fishin’.
Years later, after mom died and I had moved back to Sanford, I forced that fucker to tell me he loved me. I only hope my brothers got the same words despite the knowledge that here was this man who had to take on those daunting responsibilities of his time before even junior high school without benefit of a father himself, who did the best he could. He deserved a better son. But at least he got to fish with one who didn’t talk very much.
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