Written by J. Mitchell Brown
ack up on our family farm in Lexington, we’ve got a couple of irrigation ponds that used to feed pond water to the high volume sprinklers that kept our fields and crops watered. There was a little spring-fed pond that had a small spillway that poured into a larger horseshoe-shaped pond that was down a grade of probably 10 or 15 feet below the little pond. There’s an old cinder block hog barn, now defunct and full of junk, on the banks of the Little Pond that my grandfather and his brothers used in the raising of their prized Berkshire hogs, and later used as a tomato grading shed for our farm grown tomatoes.
Down near the irrigation pumps on the deep end of the Big Pond, we had built a triangular sty to keep the occasional trapped wild boar we would get off the bigger farm property called the “River Swamp” that we farmed along the banks of the Congaree River. My dad, when he was a younger man and didn’t have children to chase all over God’s creation, had built a rudimentary fixed dock at that end of the big pond to fish from or tie a jon boat to.
I would spend my days working on the farm in the country store, either back behind the meat counter where the saws and meat slicers were, giving my mother premature grey hairs every time my arm would pass within an inch of the table saw blade that was buzzing through the bone in a pork loin, or behind the vegetable counter where I would package countless thousands of pounds of shelled butterbeans, field peas or frozen sweet potatoes. Some days I’d be out in the field picking strawberries, driving stakes in the ground for tomatoes, occasionally working on the transplanter we pulled behind an old Massey-Ferguson with one of the nice black ladies who worked for us. Still on other days, I might be out in the greenhouses or in the shelling shed doing whatever needed to be done.
But nearly every day at lunchtime, when my grandfather would go to the house and take a 20 or 30 minute nap, I would grab my fishing pole and head down to the ponds to see if I could trick some hapless largemouth bass or bream off their bed and onto my hook. Nothing felt better to me than toting back up the hill a five-gallon pickle bucket filled with some pond water and four or five bass or bluegills.
My uncle Penan, who still remains the best freshwater fisherman I know, would keep his bait-casting rods leaning in the corner of that old cinder block hog barn, the entrance of which was right next to the “sweet” corner of that Little Pond. I would go down there with my spinning rod, all dusty and grimy from a child’s neglect, and cast an old and dirty topwater plug a few times. I’d try to emulate Penan by making that plug pop and splash and dance across the water like I’d seen him do, but it would be to no avail. Distracted, I would hear that sweet siren song of my uncle’s fishing rods, shiny and sophisticated with their professional looking knots and gleaming Heddon Torpedo lures dangling from them, and the temptation would be too great. They caught fish for him on a regular basis, surely they could do the same for me.
I never knew how to cast a bait-casting rod the proper way, keeping just enough pressure on the spool to let the line sail off the rod, but not go freewheeling into oblivion leaving you with a perfect bird’s nest of fishing line knotted around the reel. And inevitably, I’d get that fishing rod all screwed up, panic, and then tuck it back in the hog barn, behind the other reels, all the while hoping I’d see someone else within a hundred yards of that pond that day so I could lay blame on them before my uncle had a chance to come down at the end of a hard day to cast a few times and see the destruction. I’m quite certain the need to respool his reels because of me has cost him dozens of hours of his life. Never once has he complained to me about it.
But my uncle’s father – my Papa – his style of fishing was completely different. His was a more native and basic style of fishing, a style that I have since come to embrace.
Papa and I would steal away every now and again to go fishing, though I generally didn’t know that’s what we were going to do. I’d be in the greenhouse filling bags with potting soil and he’d come in and say, “Come with me. We need to run an errand.”
We’d hop into the old brown pickup truck and drive through the middle of a field out towards the “superhighway”. I’d look at his right foot, the tip of which was barely touching the corner of the accelerator, and wonder how it never slipped off. We turn here and there, and then down a dirt road and come to stop at this impossibly tiny little building and just sit there while the lazy dogs barked out front, never getting up from the ground, just sort of raising their heads.
A dark haired lady would come waddling out of her trailer, greet us with a circle of cigarette smoke, and open the front door of the bait shop. We’d walk in and smell the nutty smell of crickets by the tens of thousands, their song deafening us as we raised our voices to tell the lady what we wanted. Millions of shiny hooks and bobbers hung on the wall behind her.
“Did you bring the cricket bucket?” Papa would ask me.
“I didn’t know we were going fishing,” I would inevitably reply.
“Well, we’re gonna need one of those to put ‘em in” Papa would tell the lady, pointing to a wire cricket trap. We have at least four dozen of those things hanging from the walls of barns at the farm today.
Papa would pick out a cane pole from the stock the lady kept outside. He would always get a really long pole, sometimes more than 12 feet long. “To get to the big ones,” he would explain.
We would spend the next few hours, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoons, but always when the fish were biting, sitting in lawn chairs along the sandy banks of those irrigation ponds. We’d put a cricket on the hook, cock our arms in just the right way, and using an underhanded motion, swing the line and cork out until *plop* it would land just so at the end of its arc. We’d wait to see that orange bobber do its little dance then disappear underneath the surface of the brackish water. Once it did, with a swift pull on the cane pole, we knew we had dinner on its way.
I thought of these stories because there is a tree called the catalpa tree, and I ran across one this week right here in downtown Bluffton. It was supposed to be called “Catawba”, like the Indian tribe, but that got lost somewhere in translation.
Anyway, it occurred to me that we didn’t have any of these trees at the farm, and that’s a shame. I could have saved my grandfather a lot of money on crickets and cricket buckets.
The catalpa is also known as a “fish worm tree” and is a native tree to the south. It has huge leaves on it, bigger than a tobacco leaf in some cases, and a beautiful spring time bloom. It will generate large bean pods, sometimes 18 inches in length, to reseed; they look just like a string bean.
But the real trick of the catalpa tree is that a yellow and black moth caterpillar, called the catalpa (or Catawba) sphinx moth, feeds solely on the leaves of the catalpa tree. And what loves to feed on the catalpa worm? Freshwater fish.
In fact, the worm is so revered as fish bait that farms of catalpa trees are sprouting up just to harvest the worms. The tree grows so quickly that a worm infestation has the opportunity to strip a tree twice in one season. And with the worms’ thick skin and sweet smelling and juicy innards, fish, particularly bream, can’t resist them.
We never had any catalpa trees along the banks of those ponds on the farm. And what little time I do get to spend fishing now is generally spent on a mud flat chasing down a saltwater redfish.
But from time to time, I do head up to the farm to visit.
I think this next time I go, I’ll just stop by that catalpa tree and see if there are any caterpillars on it. If so, then who knows? Maybe we’ll have some fried bluegill for dinner that night.
I wonder where that old cane pole is?
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