Alan Liere: The fishin’ thing

We’d been picnicking – my family and I – at Granite Point on Loon Lake, one of those dog-day August afternoons in Eastern Washington when the sun seems to find a spot directly overhead and refuses to leave, tossing down ultraviolet until you can pick out the office workers by the rosy-pink blush on their shoulders and the great gobs of Coppertone slathered on their noses.

Tired of the immature chatter of my cousin, Albert, who at 5 was two years younger, I had left the lawn, walked down to the beach, and bounced up the plank connecting the boat dock to shore. Below me in the clear water, a school of pumpkinseed sunfish suspended lethargically, drifting aside without perceptible movement of fins or tails when I chunked a pebble at them. There, as the ripples subsided, I saw the bass plug, hanging by rusty treble hooks to a length of equally rusty anchor chain nailed to the dock. Responding, more to the red enamel so out of place in the opaque green world it hid in than to any conscious awareness of what I had found, I lay on my belly, extended my arm to the shoulder into the lake, and claimed the prize.

Until that moment, I had been quite satisfied with my collection of baseball cards and comic books, but when that chipped, homemade, red and white bass plug was pulled dripping to the surface, it stirred something within me. Years later, my mother would say it marked the beginning of a passion for fishing that would eventually exceed the bounds of sensibility.

Now here was something good. Here was something that combined beauty and mystery with promise.

“Whatcha got, honey?” Concerned with my absence, Mom had come looking for me.

“A fishin’ thing I guess,” I answered. “I found it in the water.”

“Well, put the slimy thing back where you got it,” she said casually. “You get one of those hooks in you, you’ll get lockjaw for sure.”

Certain I’d obey, she turned and started back down the beach.

A half-hour later, I still had not “put the slimy thing back,” and had, in fact, tied it to a coil of discarded, linen line I’d found farther up the beach. Following some vague instinct that suggested the plug must enter the water to attract a fish, I twirled it above my head like a lasso and flung it into the lake.

Many times since that day, I have seen largemouth take a buzz bait or plastic worm seconds after it touched the water, but never since have I seen one leave the water to intercept an offering on the way down. When that bucketmouth exploded from beneath the green carpet of dollar pads surrounding the dock and fielded my plug as easily as Willie Mays did a long, fly ball, I was too shocked to do anything but hang on.

With one set of rusty hooks implanted in the side of her mouth, the bass splashed down, then cartwheeled across the surface. Probably, she was no more than 4 pounds, but to me, her size was fearsome, and at first I held the line tightly, afraid I would offend her more by moving, hoping she wouldn’t notice me there and identify me as the origin of her irritation.

Finally, I could stand it no longer, and still years away from the concept of “playing” a fish, I turned my back to the water and began running up the beach with the line strung taut over my left shoulder. After five steps, I had taken the stretch from the old linen line, and the bass, now sulking at the base of an acre of lily pads, was not about to be unceremoniously horsed to the surface and skittered across the water like some 5-ounce sunfish.

When the line parted, I was pitched into a headlong, off-balance stumble, my feet frantically but futilely trying to catch up to my head, my glasses hanging precariously under my nose.

I arose, spitting sand, and turned to gaze out to where my red and white bass plug had disappeared. It had been mine for only a short time, but I believed, as only a 7-year-old can believe, that the next summer it would again be hanging there on that rusty piece of anchor chain waiting to be reclaimed.

In the meantime, I would investigate much further this “fishin’ thing.”