I took my boys fishing this weekend. It wasn’t the first
time, but it might be the last. It finally occurred to me why it’s
traditionally the grandfather who takes the kids fishing.
I'm their dad. I'm the one that had to pry them out of bed
with a crowbar before the sun came up. I'm the one who had to hear them
complain about their pants being the wrong ones, and how disappointing it was
that we didn’t have the right kind of breakfast cereal. I'm the one who had to
hear them griping in the car and fighting with each other. I was already sick
of hearing from them before we even got to the lake. Now we're going to
commence with a sport that can frustrate even the most patient of men? And
we're asking single digit-aged boys to do it? None of my kids have even a
measurable ounce of patience, and two out of the three have the attention spans
of a gnat on crack. The other one – the one that can really concentrate – has
the attention span of a clean and sober gnat.
I’m really not even sure why we take kids fishing in the
first place. It is completely unnatural. Here, kid, hold this long, flexible,
whippy pole with this amazing spinning contraption that has the inviting crank
handle attached to it. Now just sit there keeping the rod perfectly still and
don’t turn the handle. You might as well give them bottle rockets stuck in an
ice cream sundae, hand them spoons and a book of matches, and expect absolutely
nothing to happen.
I would cast it out, hand them the pole, and say, “Just
leave it out there,” then turn around to help one of their brothers with his
pole. Before I got two steps away I would hear, “Dad, it’s back. I need more
bait and I need you to cast it.”
I finally just gave up because I couldn’t think of any other
ways of saying, “Stop reeling it in. Leave it alone.” I even tried Spanish in
case they were bilingual and didn’t tell us.
Worse than the constant re-baiting and re-casting is dealing
with the headstrong boy who is determined to cast the rod himself. I think hell
might be a place where you are constantly baiting and casting rods for two
small boys who can’t physically stop themselves from reeling, even under threat
of death, in between unsnarling a rat’s nest of fishing line from a reel being
operated by a boy who does not yet possess the motor skills, coordination, or
willingness to even tie his own shoes. As all three boys complain that fishing
is no fun. In the hot sun. With bugs.
At one point, my son handed me a pole that had a knotted
ball of fishing line the size of a bath sponge hanging under the reel. He had
actually managed to lodge some of the line back up inside the reel, but from
the bottom, so it was disappearing up into the microscopic circular gap between
the stationary part and the spinning part. I don’t even know how that is
possible. When I asked him, “Why didn’t you stop long before it looked like
this?” he answered, “I was trying to fix it.”
Added to all that, we had casting over each other’s lines,
leaving the cap off the salmon eggs and spilling half the jar into the dirt and
grass, walking in front of each other and snarling one boy’s fishing line
around the other boy’s pole and neck, and my personal favorite, having a boy
trip over the pole that I happen to be baiting, and yanking the small, barbed
hook deep into my index finger. A pair of pliers and a few curse words later,
and I had about had it.
The grandpas tend to handle that kind of stuff better. They
didn’t start out annoyed, so they can take more of it in stride. They are older
and more patient, and invariably wiser.
For instance, they bring the right kind of bait.
I was fed up with the whining, and all the mechanics of
baiting, casting, and unsnarling, but mostly I was fed up with not catching
anything. Needing a little break, I made a short trip down to the general store
and bought a Styrofoam cup of worms. We made the switch from salmon eggs to
worms, and almost could not keep the fish off the hooks after that. I made the
first cast out, and had a fish on before I could even hand the pole to my son.
The day improved drastically from there.
Sure, I still had to do a lot of baiting, casting, and
unsnarling, but it turns out it’s not as bad when the kids aren’t complaining while
you’re doing it. Apparently, it’s the catching fish part that is fun for the
kids. Who knew? I always thought it was the sitting in a lawn chair drinking
beer part that made fishing fun, but now that I think about it, kids don’t get
to do that, so actually catching fish really improves their mood.
Grandpas already know all that, because they went through
all this already. Grandpas are smart, and they have more free time. They do
recon ahead of time, when they get to sit in the lawn chair and drink beer, and
figure out which bait works. Then
they take the kids and actually catch fish.
Genius.
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen
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