Think Like a Fish The Lure and Lore of America's Legendary Bass Fisherman

CHAPTER ONE My first fishing hook was a bent safety pin. I was probably six years old, and my mother, Ethel, wouldn't let me have real hooks like my dad, Cletus, and my older brothers had. She was afraid I'd hurt myself. Each member of my fishing family had occasionally let me hold his pole so I could land a fish he had hooked. Occasionally wasn't enough. I didn't feel that a fish hooked by someone else, then yanked from the water by me, was really my catch. I wanted to hook my own, even if my hook was a coiled safety pin. I'm sure Mama thought I would never catch anything on the homemade snarl whose lack of sharpness reassured her. She doubted that either a fish, or, more important, I, would feel the pierce of the bent and thin wire. She was wrong. I used the makeshift hooks from Mama's sewing kit, worms from the ground, and a "pole" cut from a sapling to entice tiny brim not much larger than minnows along the creek that ran in my parents' 120-acre cotton farm in Chambers County, Alabama. The nearest semblance of a town was Penton, a hamlet so small it isn't shown in the atlas, although it has a blinking stoplight at the crossroads beside the single general store. It had two stores and no light when I was a boy. The place was so small that every resident knew which neighbors' checks were good and whose wife wasn't. My official place of birth is a rural route outside of Penton. There were no zip codes in 1932. I was delivered in our cabin by a blind doctor. I was one of eight children, and my parents had no money to pay for his help, so they gave the old doctor a cow. Later, when my parents became more prosperous, they paid him twenty-five dollars for each child he delivered. He'd stay at my mama's bedside until her baby was born, no matter how long it took. I walked to Penton as a barefoot boy on Saturdays, but not for a while after getting my first bent-pin fishing rig. Penton was Mayberry minus electricity, as many of the town houses were illuminated by coal oil. Food was preserved in smokehouses or inside storm cellars. Old men sat on a bench that ran parallel to the only road through town. The old-timers got there as soon as the sun rose, and left as soon as it went down, never leaving their spot unless one got angry about another's move of a checker. The weathered men sported lined faces from too many hours in the sun, gnarled hands that had worked too hard, and invisible body parts that hadn't worked in years. Their seat was nicknamed the "dead pecker bench." My dad thought that was the funniest thing he ever heard. As a child, I enjoyed watching fish as much as I enjoyed catching them. I still do today. I was consumed with the fish's survival instincts. I noticed how fish swam in schools and were smart enough to realize that a larger fish couldn't chase all of them. They realized there is safety in numbers. I marveled at how they would glisten in the sunlight penetrating the water, then become almost invisible by simply swimming upright, eliminating the reflection on the sides of their silver bodies. They knew their backs were dark and would not return the natural light to a predator in the water or to the one on the bank--me. I observed how fish congregated behind rocks that stood firm against the current, especially after a rain, when the current was stronger and faster. I surmised that the fish grew weary of fighting the current beneath the water, just as a boater becomes tired of fighting it above. A boater might tie on to the rock to halt the fight; the fish just hid behind it. To this day, I notice that many anglers fish the most open and pretty part of a stream. They should throw their bait immediately behind obstructions, which fish use as a shield so they can rest against the constant flow of water. Nature has taught fish to think like the vulnerable creatures they are. The fish themselves would teach me, for yearsMann, Tom is the author of 'Think Like a Fish The Lure and Lore of America's Legendary Bass Fisherman' with ISBN 9780767909952 and ISBN 076790995X.