My dad loved fishing. I think it was like candy to him. However bad things got, there was calm to be had out there on a lake. When he said to me “let’s go fishing” I was ready already.
For some reason he never owned his own boat. Instead, he had his own outboard motor, always an Evinrude. Back then, in 1947, there were also Johnsons and Mercuries and Martins, but Dad ignored those. He carried his Evinrude in the car trunk to and from the boat docks. There he rented boats and attached his own Evinrude.
Most people who rented boat dock boats rented them with the motors. Dad sometimes got the side eye as he came carrying his own motor down the dock. He also brought his own gas can with gasoline already in it. The boat dock sold gasoline but higher priced than at the filling station.
Beside our rods and fishing tackle, there was the matter of bait. The boat docks all sold bait, but Dad never bought any. Instead, we brought our own minnow bucket with minnows already in it.
To get the minnows for the minnow bucket we took it with a minnow net to a nearby creek. Dad called it “seining,” a word I never understood or liked. To get it started, Dad would determine a likely spot for minnows. Then he would wade in the creek and stretch the net across it. The net was homemade. It had two poles made from tree limbs, one at each end, attached to the net in between. The bottom of the net was lined with lead fishing sinkers to hold it down on the bottom of the creek.
I was sent upstream some distance and told to slip around and not scare the minnows. When Dad was all set, he gave me a hand signal. I would wade in and begin scaring minnows down the stream.
I liked my job because after being told to slip and be quiet I got to splash and holler and tromp and beat the water with a stick. Sometimes I threw rocks. It was a raid, a raid for sure. No minnow in its right mind would stay put with me on the way. The only choice was to race down toward the net. Race and get caught.
When the net had enough minnows in it, Dad would lift the net, carry it up the bank, and drop the minnows in the minnow bucket filled with creek water. Some minnows usually fell out on the ground flopping around and I helped grab them and put them in the bucket where they belonged.
Of course, there were good minnow catches and there were disappointing ones. As if to prepare a 10-year-old for his life ahead. Often just moving upstream or downstream would work. Sometimes we had to get in the car and move to another creek.
Since you want your minnows alive and wiggling on the end of your fishing line, we always headed right to the boat dock.
Sometimes, if fishing was good, we would run out of minnows and have to go second rate with worms dug up from the garden and brought in a Maxwell House coffee can filled with dirt. If the fishing wasn’t good there could be minnows left over. These would be released in the lake because they couldn’t live in bucket water very long.
I liked to be the one to release the left-over minnows to their freedom. To do this, I liked to dip the whole bucket down in the water and then tip it so its water mixed with the lake water. The minnows usually recognized their opportunity right away and headed out into the lake.
I sometimes wondered what would happen to those minnows. I knew they might well be eaten by a hungry fish. But I also imagined they might find their way to a nearby creek where the fish couldn’t get them, a creek like they came from.
I decided the life of a creek minnow is pretty complicated.
You might get caught in your own creek and taken away for fish bait. You might get put on a hook and killed by a fish that grabbed you and tried to eat you. You might be lucky and get released into the lake alive and well. And you might escape the lake fish okay. But that creek you found and ran up to escape could still have enemies.
Diving kingfishers, grabbing raccoons, pouncing bullfrogs, snapping turtles, and twisting water snakes.
Considering all that, I knew I was lucky to be a boy in a small Tennessee town and not a creek minnow.
You can email Ed Briggs HERE
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Love the way you told the story. My imagination wanted more. Thanks for sharing. I am in many pictures you took of Knoxes Creek folks long ago. I am Penny. The youngest child of TJ and June Shelton Morris.
What a sweet and delightful story.