Reeling In Time with Fish Tales. Brian E. Smith

clippings, leaves, and a light peppering of trash blown into the water from here and there along the meandering stream. Tiny minnows flickered in wads around the rocks, looking for food.

      I wondered if they would eat bread, so I walked back to Aunt Quida’s house to get a couple slices of bread for the minnows. They gave me the remains of a loaf of bread in the sack. The ladies were so involved in conversion that they didn’t even ask what I needed it for. With a “Sure, honey,” they just handed it off. In less than a half hour, I was back looking at the minnows in the canal. I rubbed a slice of bread between my hands as Dad had shown me at the lake. Crumbs rained down upon the water. Three or four clumps of bread dropped down with the crumbs. In a minute, the minnows had gobbled up the crumbs. The miniscule pieces of bread would disappear in the minnows when they swam up. The big clumps were slowly floating away in the flow, rung with feeding minnows, like cows around a slow moving hay bail. I bent over to get another slice of bread and something caught the corner of my eye. I popped my head over the rail to see a ring of water where a clump of bread used to be. Half a slice of bread I rubbed between my hands, before hastily breaking the rest of it into four pieces and letting it fall in the water.

      The crumbs disappeared right away. A wad of minnows were working over the biggest piece of bread when they all scattered away, only to come back in a few seconds. I watched closely and they scattered again and didn’t come back. A big fish came up in front of the bread and slurped it off the surface! Wow! What was that? Breaking up two more slices of bread into random sized chunks, I tossed them on the water without making crumbs. I watched all the pieces at once. My head and eyes darted back and forth from one white ball of bread to the next, as if I was watching three tennis matches at the same time.

      A fish came up behind one piece and slurped it down. I broke up the last three slices and put them in the water. In minutes, several large fish began feeding on the bread. Sometimes I could see almost the entire fish in the water. It was huge. Every one of them was ten pounds or better. I had found a mother lode of big fish. I couldn’t believe so many big fish were available so close to my house, and nobody knew about them. Apparently, many people went over the bridge in a day’s time, but nobody had the opportunity or inclination to look over the railing.

      Ideas started flying around in my head. First thought; I needed to get back here immediately with a fishing pole and a loaf of bread. Big fish, so close to home, and I didn’t need a boat I didn’t have in the first place. I was Christmas morning excited.

      How would I land the fish? The fish were too big to lift from the water up on the bridge, using just the fishing line. The line would break before the fish was out of the water. I ran around to where the bridge abutted land. It wasn’t a mountain goat trail, but tricky. For a twelve-year-old boy, it wasn’t bad. I quickly figured out a path to take and what rock to stand on to get the fish on land if things should happen as I planned. My mind was still a rush, figuring out the details, while riding back home with Mom, but I didn’t mention what I was thinking about.

      “Are we going over to Aunt Quida’s today?” I asked Mom the next morning. She gave me a strange look to a question she thought I would never ask.

      “No, we’re going shopping together tomorrow,” Mom said, and asked, “Why?”

      “No reason, just wanted to know,” I nonchalantly replied. That bit of information meant no free ride to the bridge, so I had to apply plan B, my bicycle. I’ll ride over this evening after supper. Passing the math through my head, I figured I could hump it there in fifteen minutes or so.

      ***

      “Did you taste it?” Dad asked, referring to supper.

      “I guess I was real hungry. I’m going for a bike ride,” I said as I headed out the garage door. Secretly, I had rigged a medium weight, spinning rod that afternoon for fishing from the bridge. Rigging consisted of tying a number four bait holder hook to the end of ten-pound test main line. I decided to use bait holder hooks, thinking the barbs on the back of the hook shank would better hold wet bread on the hook.

      Mom’s garage freezer was missing one loaf of wheat bread. I snitched it, stuffed it in my fishing creel, and set the creel in the sun to thaw the loaf all afternoon.

      I thought holding a fishing pole in one hand while peddling, would be awkward travel, slowing me down. Something I didn’t have time for, even though the summer days were long. So that afternoon I had tied the fishing pole along the horizontal bar between the seat and the handle bars; the reel hung just forward of the seat, and the rod tip rode above the front tire. I looked like Sir Lancelot on joust with the fishing pole jutting out the front of the bike. I didn’t care what it looked like, because it worked great for me at the time. I believe we’re all given a small invisible booklet of crazy idea tickets at the beginning of life, and one ticket may be pure genius, but we can’t be too humble or ashamed to use the tickets in public in order to find the one that pays off. Think about it; somebody pulled a ticket that said “Pet Rock” and went for it.

      The sound of the garage door closing was what I heard, after quickly grabbing the creel with the bread, hooks, bobbers, and other stuff already in it and hopping on the bike. Ten hard peddle pumps had the bike up to optimum cruise speed. I wove through the neighborhood streets, trying to guess the best crows-flight to the bridge. Twice, I found dead ends, but within fifteen minutes, I skidded to a stop at the foot of the bridge. I leaned the bike against the guardrail, hurriedly opened up the creel, took out the bag of bread, fingered two slices of bread from the bag, tore them to chunks, and tossed them in the water as chum. I next untied my fishing pole from the bike.

      With hook in hand, I ripped the middle out of a slice of bread. I gently inserted the hook in the middle and lowered it over the railing. A gust of wind came from under the bridge, blowing the soft piece of bread off the hook into the canal. I ripped the middle out of another slice of bread, but this time, I kneaded a small piece of the center into dough and stuck the hook in the doughy part. I lowered it to the water, but in a matter of seconds, the bread became mushy. The hook sank through the middle, carrying with it a booger of dough. A fish skinned that piece of bread off the surface as I was bringing up my hook. That made a frustrating situation more frustrating to me. Now, I laugh thinking back; that bread not staying on a hook was a memorable frustration in my life. I didn’t know how carefree I was. That was then.

      I looked on the ground at the two rings of crust. It came to me. The crust is tougher than the middle. I took the corner of crust off one of the rings and inserted the hook flat in the corner so it ran through the crust twice. It held fast. I lowered it over the rail into the water, watching as minnows began to nip the edges. The hook hung from the bread corner. I pulled line from the reel, so the bread would free float naturally in the light current. A lazy V wake came from down current toward the bread. The minnows scattered as a pair of lips protruded above the surface. I yanked. The fish slurped the bread down. I untangled the hook from a patch of weeds around the guardrail. Frustration, coupled with anticipation, spiked with a touch of fear, lead to a premature hook set. I got the hook untangled, checked the line for nicks, and tore off another corner of crust. My hands were shaking, trying to pin the bread on the hook like Barney Fife looking for his bullet in his front shirt pocket. I managed to get bread on the hook with just a prick to my finger. The bait was back in the water with a taint of my blood.

      “Brian, relax!” I said to myself aloud, while sucking the blood from my fingertip. I slung my head back and forth to see if anyone was around to cash in my crazy ticket. It was cool; there was nobody within earshot.

      I watched my bread intensely. Minnows came around it. The current was slowly moving the bread downstream. Where the bank cut back from the rock riprap, a small eddy formed. My bait was doing slow laps around the faint vortex. I gingerly pulled on the line in an effort to move the bait out of the sluggish whirlpool. The bait was just out of the influence of the eddy when the hook pulled free. The bread floated five feet past the eddy when a set of lips sucked it down.

      I walked out on the bridge an extra pace or two to set my next bait out a little further from the bank. That simple adjustment, might allow my bait to flow downstream, without the eddy drawing it in. Minnows gathered as it floated gently down the stream. The popping noise you get when your straw sucks the