A Fish Story

My wife, Ginny, and I are fortunate enough to spend our summers on a beautiful lake in New Hampshire. A while back, Ginny’s college roommate, Barb, came all the way from California with her family for a visit. They arrived late morning, and Barb and Ginny immediately started catching up, Barb’s three grown daughters headed for the beach, and Barb’s folks, who had also joined us, retired for a nap. But Barb’s husband, Tom, is a fisherman. His opening words were, “Hi, Joe. How’s the fishing here?” I set him up with a tackle box, a spinning rod, and a suggestion that the deadwood stump off the point would be a good place to start, and I left on an errand.

When he opened the tackle box, Tom, being a good fisherman, immediately spotted my “Sebago Special” lure. This is a curved piece of stainless steel with three treble hooks, one at the top, one in the middle, and one at the end, and it looks like sweet manna to big fish. In short order, Tom had caught a few nice bass, and he settled in for a great day of fishing.

An hour or so later, Tom hooked a corker of a pickerel. Well, pickerel are great fighters, and Tom was in fisherman Nirvana. When he finally landed the fish, he found that the pickerel was no where near ready to give up. It flipped and flopped into the blueberry bushes, tangled the line, and then flipped back onto the sand, and Tom spotted his chance to pin the monster down with his foot. It was a big pickerel, but no match for Tom’s 180 lbs, and Tom relished his moment of victory. He savored the view of that beautiful fish on the bottom hook, and the Sebago Special and its other two hooks gleaming in the sparkling sunlight.

As Tom reached down to unhook him, the pickerel burst into another thrashing fit, and the center hook snagged Tom’s sneaker. Oh, well, no one ever said fishing was easy, but a veteran fisherman handles such complications with ease. Tom wasn’t a bit flustered. Like a real pro, he grabbed the needle-nosed pliers, planning to unhook his sneaker, being very careful, of course, not to damage that amazing lure. But the pickerel was not done yet. Oh no! As Tom reached down, the powerful beast gave a mighty heave, slipped out from under the sneaker, wriggled his head, and flung the top hook into Tom’s thumb.

What a lure! My Sebago Special had simultaneously snagged a pickerel, an Adidas, and a Californian! The pickerel, of course, was even less happy than Tom with this development and continued to thrash about thus causing the other two hooks to sink even deeper. Tom, ever the intrepid fisherman, immediately recognized the seriousness of his predicament, and began to scream for help. The wives and daughters, meanwhile, were happily immersed in girl talk, and interpreted Tom’s painful supplication as a joyful outburst.

Thankfully, after a few minutes of continuous cries, Barb became suspicious, suspecting that even a really nice fish would not cause an outburst of that duration. By the time she and Ginny went to check on Tom, the situation had deteriorated into a fully developed calamity. The fish was flopping, the hooks were digging, and Tom was doubled over trying to pin down the thrasher. He screamed at Barb, “Cut something!” Well, eventually the girls rescued Tom, the sneaker, and the pickerel (who, by the way, probably still regales his fish friends about the time he caught the big Californian), but my amazing lure remained steadfastly imbedded in Tom’s thumb.

So, Ginny, Barb, and Barb’s dad, Charley, now delightedly awake, set out in Ginny’s jeep to rush Tom’s thumb to the ER. In route, Tom was torn between cursing Ginny for choosing the bumpiest road in North America, and begging her to hurry before he expired from pain. Charley, meanwhile, mildly amused by all the carryings on, passed the time browsing through the Book of Common Prayer he had found in the back seat (every good Episcopalian keeps a BCP close at hand). However, as the chaos around him increased, Charley, ever the sensitive father-in-law, began to ponder whether he should do his part to add to all the fun. Suddenly, Ginny hit a big bump, Tom screamed that she was killing him, and Charley brilliantly spotted the solution to everything. It was right there in front of him in the BCP. Charley seized the moment. He commiserated with Tom, and offered to salve his misery and ease his pending demise. Charley then sonorously began to read passages from the “Prayers at the Time of Death”. As Charley “prayed”, and Tom moaned, Ginny and Barb were laughing so hard they almost ran over two deer, a tractor, and a hay wagon.

It was only in hindsight that Tom fully appreciated the humor of that moment, but he swears that, even in the throes of disaster, he remained in awe of the Sebago Special.

And, that’s a true story, more or less.