Turning the Clock Back

At least once a year and sometimes more frequently, I like to turn the clock back. I am not talking about the adjustments to daylight savings time, or corrections to my wrist watch or the clock on the wall, but rather the process of stepping back in time just for half a day or so and pretending I was a young kid and fishing like I did back then. For me, that means a departure from the glitzy boat that goes faster than the car I used to drive, the graphite fly rods that weigh three ounces, and fly reels milled from aircraft-grade aluminum.

My father was a spin fisherman, and fished with bait. There was nothing wrong with that, in most cases spin fishing and threading a night crawler onto an Eagle Claw hook is how most of us started fishing. For me there was no other way to fish. Several copies of Field & Stream magazine were always laying about the house, usually in the john, and I faintly recall images of an angler using a fly rod and standing in a western stream or floating in a canoe on the Allaghash. These were places that to me were way beyond my world.

My father was a businessman, and as a youth it felt at times like I was a military brat. It seemed at times that as a family we no sooner settled into a new community and I had developed some pals and got to know the local fishing holes, when we were soon packing up and moving off to someplace new because dad was once again changing jobs. I will say this however, as much a disappointment as it was to pick up stakes and relocate, each time we did so it was always to a better place. For me that meant better places to fish. Later while I was in high school we lived on a lake in north-central Massachusetts that provided great ice fishing in the winter and absolutely wonderful largemouth bass fishing in the warmer months. I had become adept at locating and catching largemouth bass with a spinning rod. I would stay out way past dark in my wooden rowboat, many times on the opposite end of the lake from where we lived. I loved the smell of the water and the lily pads and the sounds of croaking frogs. 

I swam a lot in that lake and even today when I go swimming, I keep my head above the water line as if I was still looking out for tree stumps, muskrats and water snakes. I would don a mask, snorkel and fins and dive among the stumps, weeds and brush piles and in so doing I would find where the big largemouth bass lay and return later and catch many of them.

After high school I was off to college getting involved in competitive sports, parties, fraternity life, and some studying mixed in for good measure, but no field sports. Following graduation my passion turned to climbing mountains, but after some time I sensed I was going nowhere fast. I began a career, married and had a family. During all that time fishing was never on my radar, it was as if it had never been a part of me.

It was about the time I turned 45 when my dear friend Jim Mullen called one day and suggested we go fishing. It sounded great but frankly, a bit foreign, it had been so long. Following a quick trip to the local hardware store to gear-up, we launched his canoe and paddled to a small island on the north side of Wordens Pond where we wet-waded a long and shallow sandbar. After several blind casts with my $20 spinning rod/reel combo, I tied into a big Northern Pike. He stayed buttoned but only for a sweet few seconds before his razor sharp teeth severed the line. Within those fleeting moments I experienced once again the thrill of fighting a fish- feeling that familiar pull, the head shaking vibrations that telegraphed through the rod and into my wrist, and the sight of a crescent mirror leaping above the eel grass. It was pure exhilaration.

So it was there on that sandbar, nearly twenty years ago, with my best friend who has since left this world, that my clock was turned back. Now, in the midst of what has become my fishing business, for a day or two every summer I leave behind my modern entrapments- the fancy boat, the spaceage flyrods and reels that cost more than my college tuition, the "Orvis-wear", together with the fishing guide's disposition.  I return to a much simpler time to once again angle as a youth- in a simple row boat, using an inexpensive spinning rod and reel, and carrying a plastic box containing a few Fred Arbogast classics.

Thanks Dad and Jim, you have made my life richer.