Wonder bread and bacon

A reflection on progress and a southern boyhood

Photo by Sean Musil on Unsplash

I don’t cry about much these days. I’ve gotten considerably more stoic in my old age, unless we are talking about births or deaths…of nice people and dogs…especially dogs…Clemson athletics, missing a big buck and maybe really good barbecue. And, oh yeah - smashing a fingernail. I’m convinced smashing a fingernail hurts on the order of childbirth. My wife says that’s bullshit.

Regardless, I teared up a little last week when I shut my favorite bait caster in the tailgate of my truck. My adult children were unsympathetic. They said my rod was obsolete. They seem to think that fishing rods weren’t meant to last ten years. They said I should’ve replaced it a long time ago with a new, high tech model. They said I should buy one constructed of space age material promising more successful hook sets and deadly accurate casts. I disagree. I liked my rod. I knew my rod. My rod felt like an extension of my arm. With a 10” plastic worm Texas rigged on a 4/0 worm hook and an ⅛ oz bullet weight, I knew exactly how it would behave under most any circumstance. l could work that bait over any lake bottom, any structure and tell immediately when a curious largemouth gave it a little taste test.

Nonetheless, it was finished. I made the trek to our local big box outdoor supply store. I hadn’t shopped for a rod in over a decade, but I’d seen the forest of fishing rods from a distance when I’d been there shopping for other things. From far away it looked excessive. Up close it was totally ridiculous. I felt lost. It was overwhelming. Who needs that many choices in fishing rods and fishing reels and fishing rod and reel combos? There were more lengths and weights and colors than I could ever imagine, made out of materials that sounded made up by a science fiction writer on those funny mushrooms I keep hearing about.

I meandered around the fishing section picking up one rod after another, feeling the flex in the tip, feeling the contour of the handle, inspecting the eyelets. Visions of a similar experience as a child, shopping for fishing gear with my Grandad, began to materialize. I was maybe six years old, standing next to him in the fishing section of an outdoor store, looking up at his weathered hands. I studied him studying the lures and line we needed for our trip the next morning. I don’t remember him saying anything or doing anything out of the ordinary. He carefully selected what we needed and proceeded to the check out. I followed along silently, a duckling propelled by his invisible wake.

Grandad introduced me to fishing when I was barely old enough to remember being dragged out of bed while the morning light was still dim. Half awake and likely ill-tempered, I stumbled to the station wagon idling in the driveway and lazily stretched out across the back seat to sleep for the drive. It took a little less than an hour to reach the ponds on our quarter-section just outside Oklahoma City. It was a scene that repeated every other year when I was visiting until I was old enough to get myself up early and help prepare our gear.

Back home in South Carolina, there were three ponds just a short distance up the dirt road from our house, all within walking distance. In 1978, I don’t remember there being any specially branded fishing clothing or polarized sun glasses, at least not at our house. My tackle box was a beat up metal hand-me-down affair with a once iridescent blue coating. Irregular geographic patterns of exposed metal were visible where rust had gradually undermined the finish. It held a collection consisting entirely of hooks, split-shot and bobbers, maybe a Mepps rooster tail, a crank bait with beat up eye paint, a green and black beetle spin, pliers, a stringer, and a squat, rusty-lidded glass jar with an Uncle Josh Pork Frog inside.

Before I was coordinated enough to cast, I was allowed my pick from the bundle of cane poles in the corner of the garage. They stood there, collecting spider webs throughout the off-season, all pre-rigged with a length of 8 lb monofilament, a hook, a weight and a bobber. Then the year came when I graduated from the cane pole to my first Zebco 33 with the push button reel. From the shore, with the flick of my wrist, I could cast to the deep water, to the mysterious places out near the middle where I always suspected the fish were hanging out when the bite was slow along the shoreline. It felt like the whole world was suddenly within my reach.

On those summer days when I would tire from riding bikes or shooting BB guns, I would gather my rod and reel and tacklebox and kick rocks ahead of me as I walked to one of those ponds. There were no bait and tackle shops close by, and our sandy South Carolina soil was too dry and loose to reliably provide a source of worms or grubs to dig. I depended almost exclusively on what we had in the kitchen, what any southern fisher-boy in the 1970’s would reach for - Wonder bread and bacon.

I could pinch a little piece of that soft, white bread and mold it around the barb on a tiny little Eagle Claw hook like clay, pinching and mashing, mashing and pinching, until it was a firm little bead. Sunfish and Bluegill would congregate around the baited hook like buzzards, circling and darting, until one mustered the courage to snatch it up. If the bread was stale, or if the fish just weren’t interested in a bland diet, a small piece of bacon fat carefully folded and threaded on the hook would often produce results. Our neighbor kept an aluminum jon boat on the bank of one of the ponds. I helped myself to it regularly. He didn’t seem to mind, or if he did, he never said anything to me. After a few hours, I might have a stringer full of bream or I might only have a sunburn. In either case, it was magical.

Before I cared anything about my best friend’s dad’s collection of porno mags, before my interests were hijacked by cars and dating, before weekend activities included figuring out how to beg, borrow or steal a couple of beers for us to share at our impromptu field parties, before all the typical distractions of adolescence consumed my free time, a tight line and the anticipation of what might be on the other end, made my pulse quicken. There were times when I could almost feel the water and creatures within calling to me. I was powerless to resist.

Standing there in the forest of fishing rods among aisle after aisle of lures and gear promising to fill your live well with all manner of fish, I wondered why anyone would ever believe you could catch fish without braided line, without 3 rods, 6 colors of soft plastics, 4 colors of spinner baits and 5 different crankbaits, without polarized sunglasses, without branded spf 50 fishing shirts and without expensive boats and trucks and trailers.

I’d felt at least a dozen different rods the same length and weight of my recently deceased model. None quite felt the same. Maybe it was the setting; sensory overload. Maybe once I had my reel on it, and I wasn’t surrounded by dozens of strange people and billions of unnecessary fishing related SKU’s, it would feel right. Maybe I needed to pick one and give it a chance; take some time to get used to it. I don’t know. It didn’t feel right. A disembodied sense of homesickness welled up within me. Only, this feeling was heavier, a strange emotional cocktail of loss and longing for something, someplace that you treasure, and despair in knowing what you long for is no more. It is gone, merely a memory, a ghost of something that once was and will never be again.

I carefully placed the rod I had been inspecting back on the display rack, turned and began to walk toward the exit.

There’s a gas station not far from the boat ramp where we fish these days. The aisles are cramped. The floor is worn. It’s dusty. The fluorescent lights have fly specks all over them. They sell crickets and night crawlers, hot dogs, boiled peanuts, tobacco and ice cream. I’ve seen some rods in there; just a few. Maybe one of those will feel right. If it does, I’ll pick one up. And, maybe a little Wonder bread and a pack of bacon too…