Fish Tales

If you’re new to the First Light Substack, don’t be alarmed. Saturdays are a little different. They’re a chance to catch up on your Bible reading—or take a break if you’re already ahead. I like to use Saturdays to share stories from life. They’re all true, at least as best as I can remember. Time has a way of sanding off the details and sometimes layering in a little fiction, but the heart of it is always honest. I hope these stories spark a few memories of your own.

When I was a young man, a man with young children, we lived for several years in a church parsonage that sat atop the crest of a short hill where the narrow asphalt road ascended from the east between two stands of briers, oaks, and dogwoods – land that had once been cleared for farming but was now overgrown through neglect. As the road crested at our home, things changed. On the left stood our small framed home clad in lap siding and a little further south from the road was the white country church with a cemetery out back.

On the right was Web Rix’s pasture, bordered by taut barbed wire and carpeted by green grasses. If we walked across the road and through the ditch, and squeezed ourselves between the strands of barbed wire, it was only a short walk to Web’s pond. This was something we did on occasion because Web didn’t mind us doing so, and we liked to fish.

I can’t recall ever catching any trophy fish from Web’s pond. The bass tended to be wormy so they were of the catch-and-release variety. We caught a few decent catfish, though they were mostly mud cats – not the best eating among the catfish species. The most prolific fish in Web’s pond were perch.

There was an old willow tree that grew out of the pond bank at an angle. The fish, particularly the perch, found the shade of the arched willow limbs hanging out over the water a pleasant feeding ground. A man could always count of catching a few perch there if nothing else was biting.

One afternoon, I took my son, Daniel, over to Web’s pond so he could catch some fish. We took a small rod and reel, rigged with a bobber and gold hook on the end of the filament line, and a can of corn for bait. Those perch would eat about anything, and bits of corn served the purpose as well as worms and, as an added bonus, we didn’t have to dig for them.

The way it worked was like this: I baited the hook, cast the line into the water, hooked the fish, handed the rod to Daniel, helped him reel in the fish, removed the fish from the hook and tossed it back into the pond. Then, I repeated the process over and over again.

After having caught numerous small perch, and after having just removed another one from the line, and while putting more corn on the gold fish hook, Daniel looked up and me and with a mischievous grin said, “You know what?”

I replied, “No. What?”

He smiled and said, “I’m catchin all the fish and you ain’t catchin nothin!”

“Well,” I laughed, “I suppose that’s true.”

a boy and his dad at a fishing pond