Answering the casting call

Each year, my buddy Don, who is the kind of outdoorsman who meets with other outdoorsmen to hold raffles and cook pancake breakfasts, takes me and my wife Kara for a little fishing trip down the creek near his house. Before Don started taking us on these trips, the last time I’d held a fishing rod was at Penn State, where I’d taken a fly fishing class to complete my gym credits.

Did you know that you still have to take gym classes in college? I suppose it helps prepare college students for the real world, where it’s been my experience that at any moment, a PowerPoint presentation can turn into a pick-up kickball game. At any rate, learning to fly fish is a relaxing way to spend a gym period, not like in middle school, where the majority of my time was spent scurrying into the corner behind the bleachers to keep the pubertorily advanced kids, who showed off their new armpit hair in the same way an adult would show off a new Lexus, from concussively pelting me in the head with volleyballs.

Don takes us fishing in his old rectangular aluminum rowboat, which weighs roughly the same as an Abrams tank and maneuvers exactly as well as three-wheeled shopping cart filled with bags of asphalt. We don’t so much hit rocks with that boat as we do pulverize them. The boat’s so big that when we turn it over in the tall river grass for its first run of the season, entire ecosystems flee out of it, except for the spiders, which prefer to make their presence known hours later, on your neck.

The first time Don took us out, I said, “Hey man, do you mind if I flatten the barbs on this lure with some pliers so the fish will be easier to take off the hook?”

Taking fish off the hook is the worst part of fishing. It wouldn’t be so bad if a fish would give you a little heads-up as to when it would decide to start violently flapping about in your hand, but you just never know when that fish is going to turn from Seinfeld Kramer into YouTube Kramer. My biggest fear of having kids is that I will be the last line of defense for hook removal, especially for that surgical situation in which the hook gets swallowed, which is the fishing version of the Blue of Screen of Death.

“You don’t need to flatten the barbs. They don’t feel it,” Don said. And he’s probably right. To a fish, getting impaled through your face and then having your entire body weight hanging from your lips is probably just a minor inconvenience, the human equivalent of getting toothpaste on your shirt.

The biggest surprise of these fishing trips has been Kara’s enthusiasm for them. Once she gets a hold of that fishing rod, she’s like a different person: a person who actually likes to fish. After she caught her first one, she got so excited that she started swinging the fish around through the air, repeatedly smacking it off my back.

“I caught one! I caught one!” she said, as she made the sound of one fish clapping off of one ducking husband’s back.

“Dude, my back! Quit hitting me with the fish!” I said. Luckily, we had a man in the boat with us; Don grabbed the fish and let it go.

A couple of years ago, we came around a bend in the river to a drowning fawn, which was slowly losing its struggle to climb a steep, muddy riverbank, its little nose barely above the waterline. Before anyone could talk, Don was out of the boat, waist deep in the water. He gently cradled the fawn in his arms and set it down in the grass beside the creek. It was pretty cool to see my best supplier of homemade venison jerky coming to the rescue like that. I’ve never seen any of my other friends who hunt save a deer, though to be fair, they do all of their deer hunting using nothing but their Hondas.

You can throw Mike Todd a line at mikectodd@gmail.com.