Baker's Branch

I found my common ground with my future father-in-law, Moe Filson, on a bass fishing trip outside Wewoka, Oklahoma. It was in the evening of a hot August day in the early 1960’s, Dragonflies humming, snakes slithering over mats of pond grass, bull frogs croaking, and not a ripple on the water. Hot, hot summertime. Heat indexes had not yet been invented. People knew it was hot by the old- fashioned method: You stuck your arm elbow-deep into the icy water of the pop box down at the local gas station and fished around in there until you found the coldest Nehi grape imaginable. You knew then, by comparison, what “real hot” was. Moe owned what were then novel fishing “boats”, a couple of canvas covered float tubes. The devices were perfect for fishing the tight little farm ponds of Seminole County. Throw ‘em in the back of the truck, and let’s go. You got wet fishing in them, way over your waist, but it was hot, remember, and nobody minded playing the Nehi grape in much bigger, weedy,

  “Where?”  “Right over there.”  “Where, ‘over there’?”  “Right ... there!” he pointed, hard. “Look under the birds!”  David Campbell was getting impatient with me, that he could see what I so obviously couldn’t. The wheeling, bone white gulls finally keyed me in on the ferocious, chopping-water action going on beneath them. The sand bass were up, bustin’ the surface, and then some.  “Oh, yeah,” I said stupidly, transfixed by an eruption of fish, water, and gulls about the size of an average gymnasium floor.  It happens every year about this time. Call “this” early fall if you want to. This time of the year, the weather turns off cool at odd times (what, August is not an odd time for cool weather?), and remains thus for several days running.  In spite of what the weathermen want you to believe, it is not unusual for this early cool spell to sneak in, and just as quietly sneak out leaving 100 degree weather yet to come. I am 91 years old, and have seen it happen dozens of times. Big dea

There is that place in Luke, Chapter 5, when Christ in his travels pauses at the shoreline of Lake Gennesaret followed by a swarm of people wishing to hear him speak. So huge was the crowd, my Sunday school teacher told me when I was six, their collective mass threatened to push Him over into the water before he could get a word out.  Apparently He didn’t want to get wet, and spying a fisherman pulled up on the bank a few feet away and cleaning his nets from a night of work, Jesus asked him if he might stand in the bow of his boat, push off a few feet so as to gain some room from the pressing crowd, and begin his lesson to the multitude. The fisherman, named Simon, said no problem.   When finished speaking, as way of thanks, Jesus told the man to cast his net on the other side of the boat in a little deeper water. Simon said, more or less, “Man I’ve been doing that already all night and haven’t caught a blamed thing! But, if you say so...”, and the rest, as they say, is history.  

  I think I have been gathering bait most of my life. Really.   I'm not just talking about worms, either, but a whole plethora of soft and/or crunchy variety of fish snacks and main courses that would give me the tight line connections that fueled my imagination, and still do now that I think of it.   I was put to thinking about this the other day in Wal-Mart in the sporting goods section when a lady stranger asked my opinion about a bait cage there used to contain grasshoppers. She wanted it to hold some crickets she was going to buy for her pet geckos. That bothered me a little, grandchildren being a lot more fun to play with, and humanizing, but more expensive she countered, and I granted her that point, but reminded her that geckos couldn't play baseball, or go to proms, regardless the clever one we all see on TV selling insurance.   I asked her why she wanted to buy crickets in a Tulsa pet shop when she could raise all she wanted in her own garage with a small cardbo