The Last Fish – Part 3:

(A 4-part series)

A sharecropper taught me what a fish is…A bat ray flew by me – smiling?

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Fear drove me to start fishing – at age 4 when I fled into the woods to escape my mother’s angry outbursts. She raged at being stuck as a housewife in a Kentucky farm house while her husband spent his days in the outside world she so cherished.

I ran until her anguish dissipated among the trees.

Deep in those woods I discovered a pond, and at that pond met my first black man, a sharecropper who showed me how to fish using a stick, string and a safety pin-hook.

“Jest sit there and wait,” he said, describing what a fish looks like.

“It got a head that’s all mouth and a neck wit doors that open and close, and a long slimy body wit a big, waving hand at the end, and…”

I sat frozen, staring into that murky water in hopes of seeing such a thing, as he went searching for my mother.

“Terry!”

Mom’s frightened, relieved voice pulled me out of the depths, but something had taken hold and I kept returning to sit on the mud bank with my stick rod – waiting, yearning. A year later we moved to Florida.

Early on a Sunday, along the edge of Tampa Bay, I caught my first fish – a little perch – and shrieked with such delight that all those malingerers sleeping in to avoid going to church roused themselves and raised their windows and cheered.

Fishing took over my life as we moved around the South and I started catching more fish – taking note of what they did when I hauled them in.

They always fought like hell.

“Wouldn’t you?” said an old red-neck fisherman I got to know.

They always looked down at the water.

“They wanna go home.”

The hook always tore their flesh.

“Fish ain’t got no feelings, ain’t got no nerves to hurt with,” my mentor explained as he ripped out a hook buried gut-deep.

Relieved at having my doubts answered, I took to fishing with a vengeance, and it took me into the wilds.

I discovered creeks and rivers and ponds and lakes and estuaries and oceans. Places I never would have seen if I hadn’t been chasing fish. Places I barely saw because of my single-minded devotion. I almost never looked beneath their surface, but probed it with my rod, my magic wand. Fishing stayed mysterious that way – except for the misgivings, which never really went away. They re-emerged the day I met a Japanese World War II ace.

I met the ace at a fly-in – a gathering of pilots and planes that flew into a small airport for a weekend. The ace was selling his book about how he shot down more than two-dozen American pilots. Later, when I was researching his boasts, I stumbled onto the story of an even-greater Japanese ace named Saburo Sakai who was so heart-sick at the end of WWII that he became a Buddhist acolyte and swore never to kill another creature, “not even a mosquito.”

I tucked the story away with all my other qualms.

A couple of years ago my wife and I had a great adventure – kayak-camping along the coast of Catalina Island. I caught a lot of fish as we skimmed the surface of the ocean; then we donned masks and fins, and looked beneath.

Worlds of wonder opened up.

There, the calico bass hid in the shadow of long kelp strands, looking up toward the surface.

There, a school of giant barred perch swept past me in a column just behind the last wave – where the wand had taught me to find them.

There, ghosting along underwater as a bird would in the air above, a bat ray flew by with its eyes looking at me and its mouth – smiling? I surfaced with a memory.

I once lived on a boat and often stood on the dock, gazing into the water. One morning a bat ray swam toward me just under the surface. Thrilling – until I saw the large, rusted barbed hook in its mouth and the white, festering wound. It passed beneath the dock, trailing a fisherman’s broken line.

How many of those creatures had I hooked? Many. And most broke off because they are big and wily – they know how to circle a dock piling and snap the line. Free, except for the ugly hook. Good thing they don’t have…feelings.

That qualm joined all the others and, unknowingly, I took them with me in 2016 to my favorite fishing spot on the planet – a handful of lakes in the high country of the Sierra. Here I had come 30 years before, alone, and made the mountain peaks ring with cries of joy as I caught one wild trout after another. Here, I taught Boy Scouts how to fish. Here, I put down the magic wand 65 years after first picking it up.

(Tomorrow: Part 4 of The Last Fish. Read Part 1, Part 2, Subscribe)