Just before my birthday celebration, I got a couple of reality checks to remind me of first of my age and second, the mortality of a passing loved one. The day before, I had volunteered for a local children's charity to assist with sorting, boxing, and organizing small children's clothing that had been donated by local retail stores. I showed up full of energy and was eager to get at it. After just one hour, I had a box in front of me that was essentially half full and went to pick it up and move it atop another stack that were being put on the shelves and got my first age related wake up call. With the box already at waist level, all I had to do was bend slightly, lift it, and pivot to my left; a seemingly harmless maneuver I'd performed countless times in my life. However, this time the turn sent a shearing pain across the middle of my back that I'd liken to being sliced with a razor, followed by the strange sensation that this 10-15 pound box suddenly felt more like 100 pounds. I put it down and took a step back. Yes, the pain was real and it wasn't going away. With fresh beads of sweat breaking out on my forehead, a familiar fatalist thought popped into my head, "no good deed goes unpunished." I walked to the front of the building, advised our head volunteer that I'd tweaked my back and was reassigned a completely benign task for the remaining time. The pain didn't go away either. By the time I got to work, I had to start hitting some OTC medication to make work bearable and had a friend attach some adhesive heating pads to both sides of my back.
Then the second ominous thing of the day happened. During my lunch break, I was sitting with a friend eating as our team had decided a pot luck dinner was in order as two of us had birthdays a day apart and had brought food. As we were eating, I saw my (ex) mother-in-law's number pop up on my phone. Even before answering, I knew an unexpected call from her during my work hours meant something bad, so expecting the worse, I was saddened to hear it verified. My (ex) father-in-law had passed away during the night and she was calling to deliver the bad news. A follow up call to her son provided the details that only served to dampen my spirits and wonder if this was a harbinger of things to follow. Later that evening, as I removed the heating pads and went to bed, I contemplated whether I should cancel my solo fishing plans for sunup the next morning, but knowing I needed a pick me up, I set the alarm, said my prayers and drifted off as a multitude of memories of my now deceased second dad passed through my head.
The next morning, I arrived at a friend's private lake and was already casting minutes before the sun peeked above the eastern horizon. It was a beautiful, serene morning with little to no wind stirring , dew drops glistening on all the vegetation along the shoreline, and all types of aquatic animals and fish active on the surface of the water. In the solitude, my melancholy mood lifted with each passing moment. This lake has significantly better fish in it and in larger numbers than any other place I fish in Oklahoma, so it wasn't long before I had hooked up several crappie, and had missed or lost a few nice bass. By 9:30, when I had originally planned to leave, my appetite for a big fish had grown significantly in large part due to bad hook sets on my part that had allowed at least three or four to escape my grasp. The heat and humidity were both rising as I tried to remain under the few trees that offered shade. As much as they created shade for me, they also created patches of shade along the western shore of the lake that I was fishing, this shade that also covered patches of aquatic vegetation that spread out as far as 20 feet from the shoreline. I knew I was probably in the best location for fish, but a bait switch was in order if I was going to catch something, but I wasn't confident in the type of fishing I'd have to try in order to maximize my chances.
Thankfully, just a week prior I had met a young, professional fisherman at a local Bass Pro shop as he shopped for some lures to use at a local tournament. After a brief chat session where he told me about his rise through the ranks, I noted he had an abundance of jigs and trailers in his basket. I admitted openly that jig fishing was a weakness of mine due a propensity to grab a spinnerbait, crankbait and swimbait and fish them at the rapid fire pace, compared to the turtle crawl pace of jig fishing. Having watched show after show of the best of the best catching big fish on jig and trailer baits, I was convinced they were undeniably terrific, but having so little experience with them, the two of three in my gargantuan tackle box had been collecting dust for years. With this up and comer in the business standing in front of me, I admitted my ignorance and asked for some pointers. He was a nice Louisiana country boy and he gave me the third grade to undergraduate 10 minute course on techniques and colors, as well as a comparison as to using the trailers Texas rigged and fished like a plastic worm. I left with a fresh supply of jigs, trailers, and the confidence to at least put these baits to use during my upcoming trip.
Around 10 am that morning, I had tried many of my predisposed favorites to little avail and popped open my tackle box and reached for a Pitboss (a four inch soft plastic lure resembling a crawdad), worm hook, and the weight needed to complete my Texas rig and soon after, was flipping it into small openings in the vegetation. It wasn't long before I felt that familiar tug through the fiberglass composite rod indicating a bite, but in my hurry to set the hook, probably didn't remove enough of the slack in the line to get pull it through my nemesis' jaw, but getting a glance of him as it broke the surface was all I needed to assure me I was on the right path. Minutes later, I made another cast beyond a weed bed and began the now familiar lifting of the rod to pull the bait off the bottom, then dropping of the rod to allow it to settle on the bottom so that the crawdad like claws would flair up defensively. After a few repetitions, followed by quick dips of the rod as I reeled up the slack line to observe for any unnatural movements of the line, I lifted the rod and felt a tug at the apex. Instinctively, I dropped the rod tip, reeled up slack quickly and swept the rod tip from about the three o'clock position to high noon. The surface of the water exploded with a nice three pounder trying his dead level best to escape the hook buried in his tongue. My heart was thumping a cadence of about 140 bpm as I lifted him from the water, unhooked him, and snapped a few pics before slipping him back into the grass mats and watching him slosh away appreciatively.
It wasn't long after that I switched to one of the new jigs I'd purchased, attached a pumpkinseed and chartreause crawdad and was working it similarly along the weedlines. When that proved unproductive, I cast it approximately 20 yards out into the lake with the intentions of working it back into the weeds, when another two pounder engulfed it and was soon in my portfolio of fish of the day. A quick glance at my phone verified the temp had already surpassed 90 degrees and with storms building far off to the west, the humidity was making even shade fishing uncomfortable. As I planned out a route to fish that would get me back to my car, I noted the bank in that area was probably the most fisherman intensive due to thick undergrowth and dense trees. Finding a spot was going to be difficult, so I weaved my way into the brunt of it and managed a cast along the short of about 15 yards, pumped the jig a couple times and felt the now familiar thump as it dropped. Compared to my first failed attempt with the Pitboss to this third hookup since, my reflexes and instincts were perfectly in tune and I executed a perfect hookset in less than a second. After photo number three of the day, I graciously fished the next few available spots with the resolve that no matter what, my birthday had done a complete 180 and the proof of it was stored on a memory card in my phone.
After a quick trip home for a shower, I met up with a friend to present her with some prewedding photos I'd finished editing just that week, and after chatting with her while a flash flood and hailstorm drenched my car, I left to join another friend for a dinner consisting of sirloin steak and lamb fries at Cattleman's restaurant. After a long walk down memory lane with her, I said goodbye in order to make a birthday party thrown for a long time friend whose birthday was coming up the following week, but was being celebrated that evening. Since she knew it was also mine, she had made it a duet party of sorts and although I was too full to partake of any of the food they had cooked, I saw watching foodball with her dad, brother and cousins and reveled in the familiarity of how often I'd done this over the past 17 years. Life, or at least my life, had to go on and with the help of friends, and over the course of the next two days on a trip to Lake Murray and The Lake of the Arbuckles, I used the times of silence to ponder the passing of a man I loved dearly.
For my friend, we'll call him D.L. for short, I am forever indebted to you for your kindness, your acceptance of me as a young punk kid, and mostly because of the sacrifices you made in your life to better the lives of those who may never truly know of or could ever appreciate. Your secrets you shared with me over the course of my visits the past four years are immediately thought provoking and undeniably mild-boggling. I pray you've found peace and comfort beyond this veal of tears.