Fishing Stories, The "River"

My dad and my uncles loved to fish, drink, and hunt. For obvious reasons, they would not drink while they hunted, but no one ever got shot while fishing, so drinking while fishing was not only accepted, but expected as well. Fishing had the added bonus of being an excuse to be gone from home for the entire week end, as opposed to hunting which could only be done legally on Saturday.

They learned to hunt and fish from their father, an old time sportsman of the type that nearly depleted America of all fish and fowl. My grand father once told me how they would hunt Quail from astride mules with nets. The dogs would point, and the mules would walk to either side of the dog with the riders stretching a net between them. The mules, for what ever reason did not spook the quail. When the net was in place, the dog would be allowed to flush the quail, and they would become entrapped in the net. My dad told me how, as kids, on early spring nights, they would go into the cane breaks along Cold Water Creek with sticks, and beat the roosting Robins out of the canes. Its a wonder there is a Robin left in the whole world. I have personally never eaten a Robin, but would be willing, were they not protected songbirds. Another favorite past time handed down to my father was telephoning. For you PETF people, let me explain. Catfish have very sensitive whiskers that are used to help them locate food. These whiskers are in turn very sensitive to an electrical current. The trick here is to induce an electrical current strong enough to disorient the fish but not strong enough to disorient the men wading around in the water with nets, waiting to scoop up the electrified fish. May be the reader might remember the old time crank telephones that you might have seen on an early Andy Griffith show. These phones were not in use when I was young, but they were still plentiful. That crank that the caller would turn was attached to a powerful generator inside the box. These old telephones were robbed of their generators and cranks which were then mounted in their own little boxes with wires attached to them which were thrown out into the water. Thus: Telephoning. This activity had to be done very discretely, as, even in those days, it was illegal.

I didn't get to fish much with my dad and his buddies, I guess because I was too young to drink, and too much trouble for a drunken fisherman to keep an eye on. I did get to go on occasion, and here are a few things I remember. When I was around six or seven the fishing spot of choice was at Lilly Bridge on the Pee Dee river. The fishing trips were always referred to as going to the "river", not to Badin, or Tillery, or the Pee Dee, just the "river". This ambiguity helped protect my father and friends from bothersome emergencies like a death in the family or say, my mother going into labor. But I digress. I first learned to fish with a cane pole. It had a lenght of line about equal to the lenght of the pole, a tiny little gold plated hook, a small sinker, or "split shot", and one of those elongated red and white bobbers. I always fished with worms. I don't remember ever catching anything but bream about the size of my, at the time, very small hand. Later I graduated to a rod and reel, which was a big leap for me and a big sacrifice for my dad. Back then, there were no spinning reels, only baitcasters, that is, the kind of reel that has a spool mounted perpendicular to the lenght of the rod. When you cast this type of rod and reel, the trick is to keep your thumb lightly on the spool as the sinker and line flies through the air. Failure to maintain the proper pressure on the spool results in the spool spinning out of control and creating a tangle of line known as a backlash. I'll bet that at lot of younger people don't even realize that this is the origin of that word. Anyway, significant and frequent backlashes kept my dad busy, and resulted in the backlash of not being frequently invited back until I mastered the skill. A little side light. I remember there was a little store at Lilly Bridge. The building was small maybe twenty feet square, and it stocked the basics, crackers, sardines, pork and beans, bait, etc. The one thing that always stuck in my mind. They sold Vienna Sausage. I guess most people are still familiar with these things. They are the type of byproduct food that Upton Sinclair wrote about in "The Jungle". But these Vienna Sausage were special, the label read artificial Vienna Sausage. I wonder what they were made of.

We also fished at Whitney. This is at the upper end of Badin lake, just below the Tuckertown dam. To get there we would go North on 49 to east on 52, take a left at New London, and then a left onto the dirt road to Whitney. Its about a thirty mile trip from home. The reason I've given the directions, is not that I hope you go there, but to point out that when my dad was a child, his dad would load up the boys in the model T and go to Whitney to fish. At that time highway 49 had not been built, so they would go to Millingpoint on highway 73 which was paved, but then from Millingpoint on to Whitney, the roads were dirt, and, according to my uncle, they would have to stop several times each way to repair flat tires. They loved to fish.

There are several things I remember about Whitney. There were always about a dozen wooden rowboats chained to the trees along the river bank. They were flat bottomed, usually full of water, and must have weighed a ton. I never saw anyone go out in one. The banks were beaten bare to the red clay along them by fisherman walking along the shore, and camping on the river banks. One summer, I remember, there was a big cicada hatch, and there were thousands of round holes in the clay where the the cicada larva had metamorphosed and flown away.

I also remember that my dad's friend, Pete Dick(previously mentioned) and my uncle Arthur, and some other reprobates set up an extended stay camp along side one of the ponds impounded by the railroad tracks between the ponds and the river. They were living large. They had a couple of big old surplus army tents, some mattresses, a little dugout place in the branch to store excess fish they caught, and lots of whiskey. I think they ate fish every meal, small little catfish fried crispy so that you could crunch and eat the small bones. I think that the sheriff was finally forced to take action. I don't really know why, Whitney was so far back in the sticks in those days, I can't imagine who they might have offended.

Whitney and Lilly Bridge are just preludes to the main event, the "river" otherwise known as the "Poor Banks".