The Bait Man

 

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 cardboard box, some damp newspaper loosely stacked in its bottom, some scattered cornmeal and bread crumbs for cricket food, and some captive crickets, just a few, she could find any night she wanted right under her back porch light. 

Nobody had ever told her that she said. When I die, I said, nobody will know but you. You must tell as many people as you can so that the knowledge of it will not be lost to the world. She laughed, but I was at least a little bit serious. Hardly anyone does these things anymore. 

I began gathering bait, all types, with my father and my uncles when I was about four years old, I'm pretty sure. By the time I was six, I was gathering my own nightcrawlers at night with a flashlight after a rain in the yard of our home on the banks of Chesapeake Bay in Maryland where Dad was teaching math to Naval Academy preppers. 

We had a neighbor who had figured out how to electrocute nightcrawlers out of the ground with a couple of old-fashioned soldering irons jabbed into the ground and plugged into his house's 110 with an extension cord. Wonderful. The worms didn't quite rocket out of the ground, but they did nearly so. The neighbor knew I liked to fish, and would call mom and tell her to have me bring a coffee can over after dark if I wanted any. A week's supply, in five minutes? Well, yeah. 

Back here in Oklahoma, my grandfather, Austin Howell, taught me how to pluck catalpa worms, big fat, green, ugly suckers off of catalpa trees in July and August to fish for the channel cats that loved them in the deep blue holes of the Clear Boggy down in Atoka County, and the green jade, holes in the braided sandbars of the South Canadian River in Hughes County. 

We caught crawdads and put them in metal minnow buckets by seining them from small farm ponds, wading shirtless in bluejeans, or nothing at all. It was always hot, and if it was illegal to gather bait while naked, nobody ever brought it to our attention. 

I am here to tell you that not a catfish swims, no matter the species, that will not eat a fresh crawdad. We caught black bass as well off our crawdad-baited trotlines. So much for finesse fishing for bass. 

It was always hot. The fish were always hungry for bait, usually late in the afternoon when we would eat from a broken watermelon with one hand, and bait hooks with another, not worried about confusing the two. 

It rains in Oklahoma about as often as bankers raise interest rates on savings accounts. Once I understood that, I took to placing flat boards and sections of old plywood around the back edges of my property and watering them with buckets from the hydrant about twice a week. The worms gather around that damp darkness like Bedouins coming to an oasis, and lifting the boards and picking worms right off the top of the ground is so easy it is almost work. Were it not for the possibility of finding a snake under the boards on occasion, it would almost be no fun at all. 

In New England, at low tide I gathered with a shovel blood worms, dreadful creatures upwards of a foot long with actual fangs and bodies covered with short, bristly hairs such as you find on pigs, but the stripers, flounder, and tautogs (blackfish) loved them. It was a bait that would actually fight you, try to turn back on itself and nail you with those fangs, while you tried to run a hook through its body. I don't know why they took it so personally. 

Periwinkles, a small snail about the size of your little fingernail, I plucked from rocks, smashed with other rocks, and threaded onto snelled Eagle Claw hooks for blackfish, and small, inshore cod. 

In Key West, I caught pinfish, a striped fish about the same size and shape as a bluegill, on small hooks baited with doughballs made from slices of stale bread, or good bread when Mom wasn't looking. I caught mullet the same way. Both were excellent baitfish, and had the added advantage of being excellent eating in their own right when the grouper, amberjack, and snapper couldn't be found. 

Now, I am an old bait gatherer, and although I still follow the old, solitary ways learned so long ago, I now like to take along a grandkid in case I fall in over my head, get snakebit, have a heart attack, or get mauled by the mountain lion rumored to live in the neighborhood out here on Baker's Branch. What's a kid for, if not to use? 

Alyssa Webster, my 12-year-old granddaughter, likes to go along and run the perch traps with me in front of the house. We bait the the throwlines and trotlines with perch for daily catfish runs. I let her empty the traps, handle the bait, put it into buckets, and then re-set the traps. 

Perch, sure, but they are also called "sunfish." Perch all over the color of the sun: Green, chartreuse, even; lavender, coral, silver, ivory, and purple. It is not possible to tell you all of the colors of a sunfish. She stares at them a long time before dropping them into buckets. I know what she is seeing, but not what she is thinking. 

There is a day coming when she will handle diamonds and emeralds. I hope that she remembers the sunfish when she does that, but I cannot guarantee it. 

A silly thing, to look at a diamond or emerald, and think of bait, don't you think?

© 2012 Conrad M. Vollertsen