Fishing Stories I Ain't Got

I really wasn't ever much of a fisherman. I went with a couple out of New Orleans and the wife fished with an old kids bow from a bow and arrow set and she caught all the fish that day. My wife and I went when I took her to visit my mother for the first time, didn't really get bites, went out with my brother-in-law in a little boat and drifted around while he tried to get the motor started again. Managed to catch my daughter's lip the first time we tried when she and her brother were about five. Went with boy scouts over and over, and didn't really try and drew pictures while the boys fished. My son needed one more kind of fish caught to get his Fishing Merit Badge and we spent every Sunday morning at a little nearby stocked pond to get him a catfish, but we never did. And he never got that Merit Badge. He still fishes every summer when we go backpacking and usually catches something. We had a regular fish fry last year with all the catch (none of which was mine).

What I do recall is the swimming where you weren't supposed to in Indiana, in the reservoir that was halfway to town, and the limestone quarries that were filled with ice water. The thunderstorms in the Midwest that would drown you. Riding rubber inner tubes down storm drains and creeks that were gorged with gushing water. Swinging out on ropes from trees to sail down into lakes. The Kern River, later out here in California, in rafting and in just laying out in it and letting it take you down around the bend. There was a lake in southern Indiana (that I once tried to walk around) that you could wade out and the fish would come and nibble at you.  Maybe I should have tried fishing there.

This is a song that a group here called Marley's Ghost covers really well. I had, of course, heard it before somewhere, but hadn't really listened to it until they performed it here in LA one night. And I thought it was a Bob Dylan song and was having a wonderful time imagining Bobby having a real childhood back in Minnesota  until I realized it was a Van Morrison song about the best of childhoods in Ireland.