Fishing with Dad

Let me say, that I love to fish now that I am old enough to have the patience for it. I don’t care how or with whom. I don’t care what I fish with, what I fish for, or even if I don’t catch anything at all. Fishing is a state of mind. The Act of Fishing is its own reward. The serenity of the water gently lapping against the shore, the fragrance of Cedar trees in the breeze, the warmth of the sun, the clear blue sky. The strategy of choosing the lure, the technique of making the lure behave realistically, and if you’re lucky you’ll experience the surprise, the thrill and the sense of accomplishment when you land the elusive bass, perch, pike, trout, or bluegill you were stalking. Like I say, I love to fish…but this love of mine wasn’t handed down to me by my father. Oh no. In fact, the experiences I describe above are the antithesis of my experience as a child.

There’s an old adage that goes something like “Be careful of what you ask for, you just may get it.” This especially held true when we wanted to spend time with Dad. Now its not that Dad didn’t love us – he just had his own limitations. Patience and tolerance might be virtues, but they were lost on a man with 3 jobs and 8 kids. He worked those two, sometimes three jobs to send all 8 of his kids to parochial school. Going to work at 4 am, coming home by 6 pm, eating dinner and going to sleep at 9 pm just to do it all again 6 days a week. At the end of his workday, more often than not he was greeted by my exasperated Mother at the front porch with words like, “do you know what your boys did today?” And more often than not, my memories of Dad returning home from work are unpleasant for these reasons.

Anyway, it was a rare pleasure for Dad to enjoy a few moments of peace doing something he enjoyed. Fishing was one of these little releases he tried to sneak in. For some reason, it seemed Mom would take advantage of Dad’s spare moments to get a little peace as well. When Dad would yell across the house to say, “I’m going fishing”, Mom would reply with an equally vociferous response of “Ask the kids if they want to go too!” I’m sure this would set Dad off, but he did what Mom wanted (as we all did) and would ask us if we wanted to go with him.

Now as I said, I didn’t really like to fish, but the prospect of having Dad’s attention all to ourselves was a pretty enticing notion for the following reason. With a Dairy Queen store along the way, it was quite possible that the two of us could stop for a treat on the way home. Once committed, I immediately realized that I wasn’t going to be alone. One couldn’t go with Dad without the others thinking that you were going to get something that they weren’t. Before long, what was going to be Dad going on a relaxing fishing trip alone, morphed into babysitting 3 restless kids with the collective attention span of a herd of cats. This is how every fishing trip with Dad went. In retrospect, I now feel a bit sorry for that poor man.

The Act of Fishing was a collection of activities that - even as individual acts - stand on their own as something that energetic young boys love to do, but little girls would find most disgusting indeed. These necessary activities include such fun things as digging for worms, descending down lakeshore bluffs to reach your favorite spot, baiting the hooks, taking fish off the hook, and climbing said bluffs to make it back to the car.


Digging for worms
The technique you use greatly depends upon the bait you choose for your outing. Hunting for nightcrawlers is a unique process that requires watering the harvest area with a garden hose, the use of flashlights, etc. Nightcrawler hunting is an outing all by itself. However, ad-hoc fishing trips like the ones my Dad tried to take always meant leafworms. Leafworms were easiest to find and the least bothersome to gather. It was also something my Dad could turn us loose on with some degree of success.

We had our favorite places to look for them. The rhubarb patch alongside of the garage had rich dark soil that was easy to turn over with a spade. The dirt around the fire-barrel in the back corner of our backyard was another good place to look because my Dad said the ashes “sweetened” the soil – whatever that meant. It was simple. Place the tip of the shovel where you wanted to dig, give a big jump and land on top of the spade. If you struck it right the spade would deeply cut into the clay-based dirt. From there, even if you were small, you could turn over a big clod of clay by pulling hard on the end of the shovel’s handle. The next step was to break up the big clod with your hands in to smaller pieces until you spotted that squirmy worm and placed it into a Chase and Sanborn coffee can with a little dirt.

Walking down to the lakeshore
Our house on “the east side” of Ypsilanti was close to Ford Lake – and Ford Lake was where my first fishing experiences were. It was actually a carrot farm, flooded when the Huron River was dammed up by Henry Ford to create a large water reservoir for his factory. Very deep and long, with high bluffs on all sides, Ford Lake was quite picturesque from a distance. But get close…not even real close… and one could pick up the stench that years of factory pollution had caused. Because the factory abused this resource, everyone else did too. Abandoned cars, washing machines, and old Christmas trees were common sites on the shores and in the waters of poor Ford Lake. Yep, it was polluted – so much so that we heard rumors of people swimming in the lake and coming out of it with welts and yellow patches on their skins from too much exposure. I don’t know if these rumors were true, but as a kid you believed it.

We didn’t have a boat, so we had to fish from the shore. The only way to get to the shore was to first drive to Lakeview Swim Club (it was located on the closest bluff to our home, overlooking the lake), trek across the field behind the pool, climb the 6 foot tall cyclone fence (and you already know how I feel about fences by this time) and descend down the steep bluff in knee-high weeds, poison ivy and trash, to get to the lakeshore. There were a whole bunch of sites and smells along the lakeshore that you just don’t encounter in a subdivision. Rotting fish, algae, water birds, and the like each have their own characteristics to explore, but enough of that, we were going to fish!

Baiting the Hook
So far, so good. We finally arrived at the lake. As far we could tell Dad was still in a good mood. Tom, Mark, and I weren’t arguing yet (“you touched me,” “well you touched me first!”), there was the possibility of catching a lot of fish or simply one big one worth bragging about, and Dad still thought he might find this to be a relaxing outing. Ah, hope sprung eternal back then, but chaos was about to rear its ugly head.

When it came to dividing up the equipment, our problems began to surface. You see, when you carry four fishing poles in a bunch, fishing lines and hooks tangle quickly – especially with the hillside we had to traverse to arrive at our destination. When Dad saw the tangled mess, his fuse was lit. We could see it glow, and he tried to conceal it, but we knew we couldn’t stop it.

He divvied up the rods, gave us each one and told us to bait our hooks. Tom knew how and enjoyed doing it (Dad always loved him the most!), but I didn’t know how and Mark was afraid of worms. When we whined about it, he baited our hooks and his fuse began to burn. Finally settled in with four bobbers floating in the water, Dad finally began to relax a bit. My bobber started to come alive. “Set the hook!” Dad yelled. I lifted the rod tip quickly, but to no avail. Reeling it in, I quickly learned that the worm was cleaned off the hook, and I still didn’t know how to re-apply the bait.

“Dad…” I said with reticence, “I need another worm!” “Get one out and if you want to wait, I’ll put it on, otherwise, try it yourself.” He was playing with a fish on the end of his line and wasn’t in an immediate position to stop what he was doing for me. No sooner did I grab another worm, when Mark said “I got one! I got one!” He reeled his in and yelled “Dad, get it off for me!” Tom said, “ I got one too!” And I said, “Dad, I need help baiting my hook.” By now, Dad had lost his fish, and saw two of his sons with better luck than he.

Still, the novelty of the first fish of the day kept Dad’s fuse from burning too fast. He quickly removed the hook from the smallish bluegill that Mark caught, put it on a stringer and re-baited Mark’s hook. “You know a boy your age should be able to bait his own hook.” Dad would say. Tom was able to manage the bluegill that he caught, and put it on the stringer too, but I was still baitless, but it was now my turn for Dad to bait my hook. Tom was immediately fishing again, and Mark had just cast his bobber back into the water while Dad was finishing with me. “Dad, the worm flew off my hook when I cast.”

The fuse was burning quickly now. Dad left me and attended to Mark, and told him to bait his own. Mark looked scared and told him he couldn’t. I cast my line in the water, only to have the hook catch the bobber in mid-air and fall to the water 10 feet in front of me in a bird’s nest. Mark tried to thread the thin ribbon of an earthworm onto his gold hook by placing the worm on a rock and pushing the hookpoint toward it. Dad went back to his rod only to find that whatever fish that was attracted to his offering made off with his bait while he was tending to us.

The glow of his fuse was now moving closer and closer, following its path of destruction. Unaware of how close Dad was to the edge, I told him my line was tangled. “Gosh damn fool kid” I heard him say under his breath. He always said “gosh damn” because, of course, saying the Lord’s name in vain was wrong. Even though he said “gosh damn”, he coupled it with ”fool kid”. I knew it was going to happen any minute now and my stomach began to turn and my palms began to sweat.

Dad untangled my line without a word and I promised myself I wouldn’t interrupt him again. Convinced I could sit quietly, I watched my other two brothers as my Dad returned to his fishing rod. “Go ahead and fish!” My Dad commanded. “ I will in a minute.” I replied. Now I could feel the dreaded pressure that only comes when you have to go to the bathroom. “Dad, I have to go to the john.” “Dammit” Dad said. “Number 1 or Number 2?” “Number 1” I said, afraid to tell him the truth. “Then go behind the bush!” he replied. My stomach rumbled loudly, warning my Dad that I didn’t fully disclose my disposition, but then the rumbling stopped, my stomach settled down. I was safe for now.

Now Mark was completely engrossed in his attempt to bait his hook without touching the worm. Not seeing that Dad’s frustration level was already at Defcon 3, Mark said, “Dad, I can’t get the worm on the hook!” That was it. The fuse had made it to the powder.

“GODDAM IT! I may as well be back at work. So much for a fun, relaxing trip. I try to do a little fishing and your Mom made me take you anyway. You damn fool kids spoil everything. To hell with it. We’re going.”

I started crying, Mark started crying, and Tom yelled, “I’ve got another one!”

Tom’s luck didn’t matter. Dad knew what his fate was if we stayed. At that point I didn’t really care anyway. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be there anymore. If I didn’t get to a bathroom and fast, Dad and I would have even bigger problems on our hands, legs, and feet.

We gathered our gear, climbed the bluff, walked the field, piled into the car, and drove the 15 minutes home. Mom yelled, are you back already? You were only gone an hour! Dad said nothing, Mark said nothing, Tom went out to play, and I stood outside the sole bathroom door in the house, dancing a jig, waiting for whoever had beaten me to the toilet to finish his paperwork.

I didn’t go fishing again until I was in my twenties. Mark enjoys both hunting and fishing, and Tom is a diehard outdoorsman. Once we were men, we each took turns taking Dad out for fishing, trapshooting, or hunting trips. As adults though, the tables turned with us being frustrated as Dad provided the comic activity you will read about in subsequent stories.