Teaching Worms To Swim
PHOTO: The One That Got Away!
Five-year old Grace caught her first fish, a smallmouth bass on Squam Lake, but her prize was short-lived as the slippery critter soon headed back to open water.
Photos courtesy Josh Nicolaisen
By Ed Allard
Ed Allard’s popular “Around The Cracker Barrel” appeared in The Weirs Times from 1992 until his passing in 1999. This column was originally published in the Weirs Times on May 2, 1996.
Zaak Walton never made a believer out of me. I can see going out in a boat on a nice day, tossing the anchor overboard, popping the cold contents of a sixpack and thumbing through the latest Weirs Times as I lean back against the cushions, but I don’t want to be bothered by some dumb fish nibbling on an expired mudworm.
Oh, sure, when I was a kid I waded barefoot in the Tioga brook many a spring day spearing suckers, but I never considered that fishing and there was no skill involved. The finny creatures hung around almost motionless on the brook bed, pursing their lips stupidly, blowing an occasional bubble past their bulging eyes and seemingly unaware of the spear lunging at them.
No matter how hard up we were, Mother would never have fried a sucker and Father would never have eaten it if she had. He encouraged my piscatorial pastime, however, because he buried a sucker in each hill of corn that he planted, an old Indian trick that he had picked up somewhere; said that it made the corn grow faster. Having experienced a whiff of the defunct fish just before he hoed the dirt over it I could understand the corn sprout’s eagerness to get up out of that smelly dirt into the fresh air.
Steve Klum talked me into going fishing with him one day when I was old enough to know better. There were two mistakes made that day; Steve’s suggestion that I come along and my agreeing to do so, but I had the mistaken idea that it might be interesting to find out what makes a man want to sit on a hard seat in a leaky boat, dangling a worm in the water. Steve showed me how to thread a worm on a hook and the worm didn’t seem too happy about that part of it either. I expected it to shriek when I impaled it. I had hardly begun to dangle it in the water, looking over the side to see if it was swimming, when Steve got a bite and started rocking the boat and whooping loud enough to scare off any fish that happened to be in the vicinity. The whooping I could stand but I, who gets seasick watering the lawn, found the rocking boat a little too much.
As I was busy leaning over the side of the boat attending to the consequences of my seasickness Steve hauled in a large eel and flipped it into the boat where it writhed and wriggled in a frenzy of activity. Now, I don’t like snakes, nor anything remotely resembling them. Forgetting my regurgitation rhythm, I grabbed an oar and flailed wildly at the eel, causing the boat to rock, the eel to escape, the oar to slip out of my grasp and Steve to surprise me with the power of his vocabulary. Man, he came up with words thatI had never heard of, and him an elder of the church.
It must have looked funny to see him trying to use an oar to paddle a cranky rowboat back to shore. The boat wasn’t half as cranky as he was though. For some reason, he never asked me to go fishing with him again, in fact, our relationship seemed to cool quite a bit. Anyhow, if he had asked me, I wouldn’t have gone.
My old friend Pickerel Pete was not one to be too concerned over laws that applied to fishing and one afternoon, before the fishing season was officially open, was sitting on the bank of the brook waiting for a nibble. Sensing someone behind him, he looked up and saw someone in uniform and asked, “Be yew the new game warden?”
“Yup, I be.”
Without a sign of concern, Pickerel Pete began to move his fishpole slowly back and forth. After a moment, he lifted the line out of the water and pointed to a minnow wriggling on the end. With all the innocence of the guiltless, he explained, “Just teachin’ him how to swim.”
And, speaking of worms, have you ever wondered how much fishing Noah could have done with only two worms aboard? Things like that keep me from sleeping well now and then.
Jerusha Perkins, who owned a nice little farm out on Wishbone Road, also owned a little shack down in Florida where he and his wife spent the coldest winter months. Looking for a farm loan one year, he was turned down by Hiram Smerd, the bank’s coldeyed loan officer. Jerusha took the refusal calmly and departed for Webb Smith’s grocery store where he bought a fair sized haddock and toted it back to the bank in a paper bag. Given access to his safe deposit box, he glanced around to see that the coast was clear, took the fish from the bag and locked it in the box. The next morning he and his wife took the local to Boston, heading for their Florida vacation.
Jerusha and his Mrs. returned three months later, and discovered that they could smell the bank the moment they descended from the train. Defunct fish is not difficult to recognize. At the bank the doors were open to the cold March winds and the staff shivered in their overcoats and earflaps. Hiram Smerd leaped up and down with joy when he saw the Perkins, asked if Jerusha still wanted that loan and could hardly wait to escort him to the safe deposit boxes where both held their noses as they removed the reeking haddock to bury it deeply behind the bank. Hiram sent in his fifty cents for the Sons of Izaac Walton Annual Fish Dinner but never showed up. Someone remarked that Hiram didn’t care too much for fish any more.
This may be the month of May but I’m thinking of doing a little ice fishing if I can find the Jim Beam, a tall glass and the requisite ice cubes.
Now that is fishing that I can sit back and enjoy!
