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Stuart Revercomb

Stuart Revercomb is a marketing consultant and joyously married father of four children. He seems to remember someone once telling him he ought to be a writer. "The Unseen Here and Now" -- Thursdays.

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April 05, 2001

Fishing For Eternity

Having recently completed a series of 3 columns entitled "Fish Of Grace", I had committed myself to a lack of coverage on the subject until at least June. Alas, the best laid plans...

I took my 2 daughters Gussie (6) and Jane (almost 4) out to my friend Al Hammond's farm last Friday for a little fishing expedition.We arrived at the pond to the realization that the water was still quite muddy from the previous day's rains, but having never truly "fished only for the fish", we shifted our old "Willys" pickup truck into 4 Wheel Drive and headed down the grassy hill to the waters edge.

After rigging up and sending Gussie over to the dock with a bobber and a worm, I backed the truck close to the waterline and outfitted Jane with the same. She sat on the tailgate to avoid the mud as I flipped the light little rig out over the water.

"Ker-plop", it rippled the perfectly still surface and then bobbed to a stop.

"We're fishing", said Jane.

"Yes we are", I replied as I joined her on the back of the truck.

The day was remarkably beautiful - the temperature was hovering perfectly in the mid 70's, the sky was crystal clear and the grasses and shrubs had just begun to reveal the first lime green hints of their coming Spring glory. It wasn't long before Jane began to fidget, so we broke into the Cokes and Doritoes we had on board. I leaned back against the warm metal panels of the truck bed and sipped the sugary concoction."What a great day to not catch fish", I mused. I began to drift with the high puffy clouds above the tree line. Moments later Gussie proved the thought entirely wrong.

"DAD I GOT ONE!", she yelled. Her shriek seemed to have both elements of excitement and fear.

"Hang on, I'm coming!", I replied, grabbing our little net off the back of the truck.

By the time we arrived at the dock Gussie had already landed a beautiful rainbow trout - over 16 inches long and perfect for grilling. Al had advised us to keep a couple to help deplete the stock in the pond before summer, so we wrapped it up in the Doritoes bag and put it on the bottom of the cooler. Gussie declared that it was her "lucky bobber' that had done the trick.

It was then that Jane started to cry, " I wis I had a bucky bobber", she pouted.

It hadn't taken long for Jane to reach the point where her own lack of a fish was just more than she could bare. She began to cry harder. Gussie and I needed another fish and we needed it fast, but between Jane's crying and all that muddy water, I figured it was a long shot at best. We re-baited the hooks while Jane continued to sob.

"Come on Gus we'll cast off the dock and see if we can catch another one."

But there was no such luck. Another 20 minutes passed without so much as a nibble. Jane had fortunately quieted down and had even mustered up the moxie to come over to the dock with the can of worms and dirt.

"Maybe I can help", she said quietly.

"YES Jane", I replied enthusiastically, "I bet you can." I handed the rod to Jane and then looked out at the bobbers. The two lines had become entangled. "Reel yours in Gus and we'll see if we can untangle these lines." As Gussie's bobber approached the dock dragging Janes in tow, it suddenly submerged.

"Whoa ! I've got something Dad !"

"What? Are you sure? I think thats just the...", I was wrong. Suddenly the water right next to us exploded as a huge Rainbow Trout rolled and whipped its tail out of the water. Jane's eyes grew wide with excitement.

"THAT'S MY FISH ! THAT'S MY FISH !", she began to yell, all the while stepping backwards lest she become to close to the beast. The fish really was big and a fighter to boot - it was all Gussie could do to hold the little rod in her hand.

"DO SOMETHING DAD !", she yelled. And I did. Grabbing the little crawdad net that would hardly hold a bluegill, I swept beneath the fish and swung it over the dock. No sooner had I done so, the huge trout wiggled itself out of the tiny net and onto the old wooden planks.

If we were in a slight state of pandemonium before, we were now ready to redefine the word. It may have been Jane's fish out there in the water, but now that it was on board, she was having none of it. Jane was half scrambling, half falling, half crawling to separate herself from the "leviathan" that was frothing there on the dock. Gussie was overwhelmingly enamored with the size of the fish and was screaming at the top of her lungs to "GET THE FISH DAD! - GET THE FISH!!"

The fish itself had all kinds of fight in it and began flopping and twisting and rolling all over the dock - increasingly wrapping itself in both lines and tugging back and forth with its every movement the free pole that Jane had long since abandoned . This had the effect of swinging the second hook wildly about, and I was now using half of the faculties I had left just to keep it from catching me or the children.

To make matters worse the dock we were on was only about 3 feet wide and between dodging the hook and attempting to grab the fish I had to make sure that none of us wound up in the drink. I was displaying some pretty good moves but I wasn't coming up with the fish.

Just when things couldn't get any worse, Jane grabbed the can of dirt and worms and began to back off the dock at a high rate of speed, but she tripped and the black mess went down the front of her shirt and onto the dock. This wouldn't have been so bad, but some of the dirt went into her shoes and Jane was convinced that the worms had traveled with it. She began to shriek, at a decibel approaching that of an aircraft engine," WURMS IN MY SHOES!! - WURMS IN MY SHOES!!!"

Having heard this, the fish was no longer the thing for Gus, who promptly dropped her rod and went over to "help" her fallen comrade. By this point the Trout had become a thread bobbin, so wrapped in fishing line as to be mummified, but it was still capable of pulling the conflagration about the dock as it flipped and flopped with abandon. For a moment I thought the whole teeming mess might go over the side and to the bottom. Forgetting the wayward hook I pounced upon the 18 inch trout and the whole sordid thing came to an end.

It was not a pretty landing.

"Nope - no worms in there", Gus said matter of factly as she peered inside one of Jane's shoes. She glanced over at the exhausted Trout. "Say Dad - do you think we can keep that one too?" All I could do was laugh. It didn't take long before the girls caught on to the hilarity of the moment and we all sat laughing there together, snorting like a bunch of little pigs as we recounted our favorite parts of the "scene". Every time we got back to the "Wurms" in Jane's shoes we started howling all over again.

There is a wonderful description in one of Frederick Buechner's books where he recalls a simple morning where he is picking his children up from a bus stop in the country on a clear fall day in Vermont. It occurs to him at some point during this moment that no matter what else happens in his life, this world or the universe for all time- - that that moment is "inviolate" - that regardless of how unsafe or uncertain the future may be, that the "having-beeness of this time", is with us forever.

"In all the vast and empty reaches of the universe", Beuchner writes, " it can never be otherwise".

For the sake of memories such as these, I hope he's right.