Over The Edge

Go fish, and take someone with you

I was one of the lucky ones.
My dad corrected me the other day as I was reminiscing to some younger folks about my early days. It seems that I had been fishing before the first trip I was able to recall. Dad chuckled about putting a crappie on my line when I was in the bathroom of the old fishing barge. Geez, how does a man forget his first crappie?
I vaguely remember hiking down what at that age seemed an endless trail, continuously untangling my long cane pole from the brush, toward a creek off the main lake. Across the cove, an old silver-haired black man sitting on a paint bucket waved and lifted a stringer full of silver slabs from the water to demonstrate that the crappie were biting. It seems that I remember us getting there too late for the bite, but a kid on the bank of a creek needs little else to keep him entertained.
It’s just hard to imagine spending my days the way so many of our youngsters do today, staring at a television or computer screen or playing video games. I would have considered these types the underprivileged, urban kids who had to resort to playground basketball for an outdoor activity. Don’t get me wrong, I like basketball, especially in March. But I’ll surely be missing some of the NCAA tournament because I am out on the lake or in the woods scouting for turkeys.
It just makes me sad to think that some kids in this world have never been camping. They’ve never laid in a sleeping bag afraid of howling coyotes or that rustling of leaves right outside the tent – likely an armadillo that sounded more like a rhino coming through the woods.
There are lots of reasons for kids not getting into the outdoors these days, but I tend to blame parents for the most part.
Now I know things were a little different in my younger days. Growing up on the Texas Gulf Coast, my folks felt perfectly safe dropping me off with my little brother, Jeff, to fish for a day on the Texas City Dike. Ten bucks would buy us a burger apiece, a couple of Cokes and enough bait to get started. We caught most of our bait in a cast net, and that was as much fun as the fishing. We put all our fish on the stringer in those days – not knowing what some of it was, and not realizing until flesh was broken that a particular creature had a mouthful of teeth – and dad would sort it all out when he picked us up. We ate a lot of fish in those days.
I realize that if you go into your teenager’s room, and inconvenience them to take off their headphones, that they are likely to turn their nose up at the idea of camping, fishing or just going for a hike. You have to start them young, when it is an easy sell. Just take your little tike to the edge of some body of water and see how long it takes them to get wet. Even that teenager will get into it if you can coax them out there.
Feed a kid a fish and they’ll start whining for Long John Silvers instead of McDonalds; teach a kid to fish and he’ll put down the Wii controller.
I realize that part of the problem is that many parents weren’t exposed to the outdoors when they were young. This is where it is incumbent on us outdoors types to introduce such neglected people to fishing and the like.