Pot-Hole Fishing

Something from the tackle box: 

       This is what the Lord says:  “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.   But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’”    (Jeremiah 6:16 NIV)

       Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it.  (Proverbs 22:6 NIV)

one of Grandpa's cane poles hanging in the boat house

       My very earliest recollections of fishing go back to the days when I might still have been a pre-schooler, three or four years old or so, right around the year 1960 if I figure right.  I’m not entirely sure because it was a long time ago, but is seems like I might have been that young.

       My Grandpa and Grandma Carr owned a farm near the small town of Dansville, just a half-hour’s drive southeast of the state capital of Lansing.  Grandpa was a good farmer, a very good local politician, and an even better businessman, which meant that he and Grandma prospered in life to a degree that a whole lot of small family farm operators didn’t.  

       I heard stories about some rough years back when my mom was a little girl in the midst of the Great Depression, but in all the years that I knew Grandpa and Grandma there were always two good John Deere tractors in the barnyard, a good pickup truck in the driveway, and a very clean late model Oldsmobile parked in the garage.  The farmhouse was big and clean, with most of the modern amenities of that day, and filled with really nice furniture.  The yards, gardens and outbuildings were always well maintained.  And all of it was usually pretty well paid for.  You had no trouble imagining total strangers driving by and saying to anyone else in the car, “now that is a nice looking prosperous farm,” because it was. 

       I guess I’ve told you all of this so that you’d know that my grandparents, on my mother’s side, were not the kind of country folk who needed to hunt and fish for food, at least not in the years when I knew them.  The fidge, freezer and pantry were always full in Grandma’s house, and they would go out to eat dinner with friends at a really nice restaurant in Lansing at least once a month, if not more often than that. 

       But, that being said, I will tell you that my Grandpa Carr did love to hunt and fish, and both he and my Grandmother loved to eat what was bagged, especially ring-necked pheasant in the fall, and in the summertime, fresh lake caught pan-fish, be it bluegills, sunfish or perch.  They just loved it!

       Now the problem with owning a one-man/one woman farm operation with livestock is that you can’t take a lot of “time off” to go somewhere else to hunt and fish.  The hogs will need to be fed today and tomorrow just as surly as they did yesterday and the day before, so you have to squeeze leisure activities, like hunting and fishing, into those hours when the chores are done for the day, which means you’re also going to stay pretty close to home to do that kind of stuff. 

       For hunting it’s less problematic.  A farmer who likes to hunt, and who is wise enough to leave wide fence rows and good sized wood lots standing on his property to shelter and hold the game, will be able to hunt to his heart’s content without ever leaving his own estate.  But fishing is another matter.  Not everyone has quick and easy access to good fishing waters.  Most of us, farmers included, have to get in a vehicle and go somewhere to fish, which takes the extra time you might not have to give to it every day, even in Michigan, which is among the best places you can live in the United States if you want easy access to fishable waters. 

       There are good-sized fishable lakes with easy public access within a twenty mile drive of almost any place you can be in Michigan, - except for a few places.  Southeastern Ingham county, where my Grandparent’s farm was located, being one of those places.

       Apart from the overdeveloped and overused Lake Lansing, located right next to the city it shares a name with at the very northern edge of Ingham county, there is not a body of water in that whole area that’s even worthy of the title of “lake” in my humble opinion.  There are quite a few pot-holes that claim the title of “lake” which can be found on a map of Ingham County, a good number of them in fact.  But I figure that unless your banks are extensive enough that they can’t be completely enclosed and owned by someone with a one-mule forty acre farm, you ought to rightly be calling yourself a “pond” rather than a “lake.”  And there isn’t too much open water in all of Ingham County that exceeds those dimensions. 

       So, the geographic situation being what it was, if Grandpa and Grandma Carr liked to catch fish, clean ‘em, cook ‘em, and eat ‘em all in the same day on a regular basis, which they did, and if they needed to do that within the time restraints of their daily life on the farm, which they also did, then pot-hole fishing it would be!  There was no way around it.  And that’s where I come into the story as a small child.

       Now, if you drove about two miles south from my Grandparent’s farm on the road that would eventually take you into Stockbridge, you would come to a place called Millville, which wasn’t a “ville” at all.  There was, and I believe still is, a Methodist church there sitting in the middle of a cornfield like so many little Methodist churches in rural Michigan do.  And, at that time, there was also an old country store there.  The really old fashioned kind of country store, like the one that Sam Drucker ran on the “Green-Acres” TV show.  And that was it!  There was nothing else to Millville, - at all.

       But if you drove south to Millville, parked your car at the country store, and then walked east down a dirt lane about a quarter of a mile or so, you came to one of those little pot-hole lakes that had a dock jutting out into it, along with a couple of beat-up old rowboats tied up there if my memory serves me right. 

       I’m not sure if anyone and everyone in the community had access to that fishing hole, or if my Grandpa Carr had special permission that other folks didn’t have.  All I know is, that when I was very young, that pot-hole pond behind the Millville store was where most of the pan-fish dinners that got eaten at my Grandma’s table came from.  

       And I can remember being taken down there when I was very young and being allowed to hoist those little fish out of the water with a cane pole from the end of that dock knowing that, if in Grandpa’s judgment the fish was big enough to keep, we’d be eating that same fish before we went to bed that night, - and – that I would be part and parcel to the whole process. 

       Grandpa was a pretty good teacher if you were interested in learning.  He would let you watch whatever he did, explaining to you what he was doing as you were watching, long before you were ready to do it yourself, even if you were willing. 

       I knew how to put a worm on a hook long before I was ready to actually put a worm on a hook, or even be allowed to really handle fishing hooks at all.  I knew how to take a bluegill off a hook without getting my hands stung by his spines long before my hands were big enough to fit around a fish.  I knew how to scale a fish long before you would have wanted me to be scaling any fish that you were going to eat.  I knew how to cut up and clean a fish long before you would allow me to handle anything so sharp as a fishing knife.  So when the time was right, I could just start doing all of that on my own.

       Now, this does not mean that I knew everything about fishing from before the time I could actually go out and do it on my own.  Far from it!  My Grandpa Carr loved to fish, and he shared that with me, but his ideas of good fishing were very one-dimensional.

       I never saw my Grandpa Carr, in his whole life, fish with any other tackle than a cane pole, hook and worm, and he fished until he was almost ninety years old.  He never used anything other than earthworms for bait that I ever saw.  I never heard of my Grandpa fishing for anything other than pan-fish with that cane pole and baited hook.  There might be big bass, or pike, or walleye, or trout, or catfish in a lake, and he might occasionally hook and land one of them, but it would be an accident when it happened because he never went after them.  He was after bluegills, red-eared Sunfish and perch, - period. 

       And most emphatically, my Grandpa would never dream of filleting a fish.  That was a huge waste of meat in his opinion.  The mere mention of filleting a fish would make him mutter under his breath.  Every fish he ever caught that didn’t get thrown back was first scaled, then gutted, then the head and fins were cut off, and then it got thoroughly scrubbed with cold water from a garden hose before it was ready for Grandma to coat with some cornmeal and toss in the frying pan.  That is the way it always happened with no exception.  When you ate those pan-fried pan-fish you picked the bones out as you went along.  That’s just how it was done, - every - single – time that you ate some of Grandpa’s fish. 

       So, at about the age of nine, when my father started taking me to Canada to do the kind of fishing that he liked to do, trolling for walleye and northern pike with all kinds of artificial lures attached to the line feeding out of a bait-casting rod and reel set up, catching fish that would be filleted and the big boneless slabs of white meat carried home in coolers packed with ice to be stored in a freezer and then eaten any time of the year you felt like fish, I pretty much figured that cane poles, bobbers, and angle worms, were for old men and little babies.  After that, I did not do much fishing with my Grandpa Carr, in fact, practically none, which is pretty sad when you think about it.

       It’s not as horribly bad as it sounds, though.  My Grandpa and I weren’t “estranged,” or anything like that, there would be a couple of decades of good times pheasant hunting together ahead of us, but his idea and my idea of what constituted a good time fishing had gone in completely different directions, and I was too immature, and he was too stubborn, to compromise our opinions for the sake of fishing companionship.  It was a mistake. 

The place my Grandpa bought up near Cheboygan when I was a teenager

       As I mentioned earlier, my Grandpa Carr lived into his nineties and was fishing well into his eighties.  When he was in his sixties he shut down his hog operation and just planted corn, which gave him a lot more free time to hunt and fish.  In his seventies he started leasing his fields to another farmer and could do whatever he wanted to do, whenever he wanted to do it.  He and Grandma bought a summer home on a very nice inland lake in Cheboygan County, where there are really big fishing lakes all over the place, including a Great Lake just a ten minutes drive from the cottage.  Grandpa could now fish for most any kind of fish that Michigan waters had to offer right out of his back door.  But he didn’t. 

       When my Grandparents were up at the cottage in those later years, my Grandpa would fish almost every day that the weather permitted it.  And what he would do would be to get in his own boat, at his own dock, putter out to different spots on his own four-hundred acre pot-hole, put down his anchor, and fish for bluegills, sunfish, and perch with his cane-pole and a can of night-crawlers.  If his fishing had been good that day, he’d prepare them for Grandma to cook that day, just like he always had.  That’s what he did until he couldn’t do it any more, and I’ll be telling you more about that in my next story. 

       I would watch him, but I didn’t go out with him.  If I went out myself I would be casting for bass with crank-baits, or trolling for pike and walleye with artificial minnows and spoon lures.  If my fishing had been good that day I’d be filleting those fish so you didn’t have to pick out the bones as you ate them.  Grandpa and I would eat each other’s fish, but we wouldn’t fish for, or clean each other’s fish, the way the other wanted. 

My Grandpa's beautiful 400 acre pot-hole viewed from the porch of our cottage

       My Grandpa Carr passed away about twelve years ago now, just a couple of years after he couldn’t go fishing any longer because of his failing health.  Grandma left us just a year later.  The cottage they bought up in the inland lakes country of Cheboygan County now belongs to my parents and I.  And, as you know, I go up there a lot, - and fish. 

       My ideas of what constitutes a good day of fishing have changed a lot in recent years.  I now love to fish for pan-fish just as much as my Grandpa did.  Ninety percent of the fishing I do now is for those small and tasty little fish. 

Here's who I like to fish for 'gills!

      I still prefer more sophisticated tackle than my Grandpa used, my favorite way to catch bluegills being on a nice lightweight graphite fly-fishing rig, a thing my Grandpa would have shunned as a rich man’s toy.  But to putter out in his old boat, anchor in one of his old spots on our four hundred acre fishing pond, and then spend all day catching a mess of bluegills, sunfish and perch to pan-fry, is a pleasure I now hold as dear as he did.  I’ll even take one of his old cane-poles out every now and then and use that, just because I think it would have pleased him, – though I still insist on filleting any fish that I keep.  -  Sorry about that, Grandpa. 

Something to take home in your creel:

       I have pre-school grandchildren of my own now.  The oldest will be starting kindergarten this fall.  Last summer, when he was four, we started fishing together. He seems to like it really well.  He is my best fishing buddy now and he knows it. 

       The time will come when I take him to places where we just might catch some big fish if we’re savvy fishermen, but for now I take him to places like where my Grandpa first took me, places where I know we’ll most likely catch a lot of little fish to throw back into the water with very little effort. 

       We started out with cane-poles last year, a six-footer for him and a nine-footer for me.  I would bait his hook, but he would hand me the worm and watch me each time I put a new one on.  I would take the fish off the hook for him, but I would show and explain how I was doing it without getting poked by dorsal spines each time.

       This year, at age five, he’s using a little spin-casting rod, and often gets his bobber, hook and bait somewhere in the general area that he intends to.  Although practicing common courtesy to the other fisherpersons in the near vicinity when he makes his casts still needs to be stressed pretty regularly. 

       He is still too small to hold even a small bluegill in one hand while removing the hook with his other hand.  But once I’ve gotten the fish off the hook for him he will sometimes take it in both hands and toss it back into the water for himself.  

       He has seen and understands what I have to do to get those few fish that we do keep ready to cook and eat the way I do it.  Some day I may even show him how to scale and clean one the way my Grandpa did it, just so he knows there’s more than one way to clean a fish. 

       And I hope against hope, when the day comes that he can teach me something new about fishing, I will be as enthusiastic about fishing with him, the way he likes to fish, as he is right now about fishing with me the way I like to fish.