Recalling the fanatics of fishing ~ July 28, 1988

David Heiller

“Boy, Peter is what you’d call fanatical about fishing,” I commented to Cindy as we rode home from a family gathering Sunday evening.

“Kind of like when you were 17, huh?” Cindy asked in more of a statement than a question.

“No, I was never like that,” I said firmly.

Peter and Noah fishing

But Cindy’s question got me thinking to when I was Pete’s age, between my junior and senior year of high school, growing up on the Mississippi River. Almost every summer morning, my cousin Kevin and I would take his flat-bottomed boat and head to the backwaters on the Wisconsin side of the main channel. We would stump-hop, fishing the roots of dead trees. Every tree would yield a rock bass or two. By 10 o’clock, we would have a stringer of fish, which we would split. I would fry mine for lunch.

Most evenings, I would go fishing in the Reno Bottoms, first for bass in the fast spillway water, then for panfish in the slough, and finally, as yellow light dimmed to dusk, for bullheads by the light of a kerosene lantern.

Peter is my nephew. When he was born, I was a college student. I would babysit him. I remember when he first learned to walk, his first words, when he first started watching football games. We would sing songs together. But Peter and his family started moving, first to Detroit, then to Dallas, where they live now. We would see them once a year, at best. Every year, Peter would have grown several feet, or so it seemed. For the first time in my life, I realized how my great-Aunt Clara felt when she would see me every few years and exclaim, “Why, look how David has grown.

You’re getting to be such a big boy.” I would roll my eyes and squirm away, much like Peter did.

Now Peter is tall, almost six feet. His face and limbs are tan. He has strong arms and legs. Cindy calls him handsome, and I would have to agree, much as I hate to admit it because he looks like his father and I would never call Dan handsome, to his face anyway.

And Peter is a fisherman. We saw him a total of about three hours over our weekend visit at my sister’s last Saturday and Sunday. Peter would get up, get in the boat, and go fishing for three hours. He would come back, eat lunch, and go out again for the afternoon, despite the hot sun and blustery wind. The same for the evening. He owns a bass boat and trolling motor. His tackle box is twice the size of mine.

He caught a few fish, a couple smallmouth bass, a one-pound rock bass over the weekend. That was almost immaterial. It was the act of fishing, the search for the lunker, the solitude, the freedom of the lake in his uncle’s speedboat, that drove Peter. He asked me to go with him several times. But it was too windy, or too hot, or I wanted to take a nap, or visit with my sisters, or play with the kids. I knew I couldn’t match Peter’s zeal, and I didn’t try. Maybe 18 years ago, but not now.

Noah tried. He and Adam, Pete’s brother, stood for hours at the end of the dock, fishing in three feet of water. Mostly they caught small sunnies and perch. But

Another day's trip with another day's glory.

Sunday afternoon, Noah came running from the dock to us, half crying and half-yelling. “My fishing pole fell in the water,” he called.

Cindy jumped up and ran back with him. We could see the Mickey Mouse reel bobbing out from the dock. Cindy fished it out, and reeled in a sunfish. Noah grabbed the pole from his mom, and walked back with a proud smile. Adam, who is six, weighed the fish for his five-year-old cousin, using a scale from Pete’s bulging tackle box. “It’s half a pound,” he called out from the dock.

They put the lunker on the stringer. Noah went into the house and grabbed Peter’s hand, led him to the dock. “See the fish I caught?” he asked proudly.

This wasn’t a real fish to Peter, not an eight-ounce sunfish. “Wow, it’s a beauty,” Peter said in a voice that made Noah smile.

Noah talked about the sunfish the rest of the day, and on the way home. I asked him as we fried it Monday morning, “Shouldn’t that be Momma’s fish? She caught it.”

“No, she just caught the pole,” he answered.

That’s fisherman’s logic. It wasn’t a fanatical answer, but bordered on it. That’s what Peter would have answered.