The an old fisherman tries to reinvent himself and escape for a little while post got a nibble from my good friend down Key West way, Todd German, with whom I surfed many tsunamis, so to speak.
Great post Sloan, even if you whined a bit too much. Go fishing again and again, you need the escape. The weight you mention will probably always be there but let fishing be your sanctuary. All the struggles you had the other day, will be simple next time you try. Maybe next time you’ll even catch a fish!
I replied:
I wanted to go back to the lake the next day, yesterday, but felt so bad in my gut that I barely could drive to the grocery store half mile away and I wondered if I might end up in an ER?I felt so bad and weak after the first run in the boat and back to the dock that I had to get a Gatorade and sit on a lawn chair for a good while wondering if I should go home. But it passed, and I made the second run to the shaded bank.What I described is what it’s like to be my age, wanting to do something but it almost being undoable, but I was very glad I did it, and I felt it was really important I did it, and I caught several fish that were parts of me that had left for a while, and taking that break paved the way for the realization that Biden needs to resign and Harris needs to become the president, and that was a fish about the size of the whale that swallowed Jonah.
And, you nibbled.
If I feel well enough this afternoon, I will drive down to the lake hoping, it being busy Sunday, they will have a bass boat free to rent. If not, I will practice casting off the dock for a while and enjoy looking at a beautiful lake nestled between two forested ridges developers will never get their hands on, because the lake is the Birmingham Water Works Board’s source of drinking water.
P.S. This morning, Tuesday
As it turned out, I didn’t feel up to driving back to Lake Purdy, and I stayed home and watched the final round of the St. Jude golf tournament, which is a fundraiser for kids with cancer who go to St. Jude Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. I married my first wife and mother of my children in Memphis on July 4, 1964. As I watched the golf tournament, I wondered if what is chewing up my gut is cancer? I hoped the doctor I will see tomorrow will be able to tell me.
My friend who does the tech work for my books at the free internet libraries and The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast and the Not Sweet Home Alabama Podcast at You Tube and Torrent platforms, reported a nap dream yesterday in which a man is fishing and something keeps biting his bait and breaking his fishing line, and actually is fishing for the man and encourages the man to keep trying.
Before dawn today, I dreamed of my mother, who knew I loved to fish and I would die if I did not get to fish. My father did not like to fish, so she found men to take me fishing, and she drove me to lakes to fish, including Lake Purdy. She left me there with a sack lunch, and when she came back in the evening, I had a catch or not, but I was happy because I had gotten to fish. She wanted me to be a priest, but she did not understand priests catch souls for the church, and a fisherman catches souls for God. Nor did she know the fish were God, the lake was their church, and when they had taught the boy to fish, they would send him forth to be a fisherman.
Todd is a US Army Special Forces combat veteran. He is a Republican. He voted for Donald Trump. After the January 6, 2021 insurrection, Todd told me the insurrectionists should have been shot dead, and I could quote him.
I also got a nibble from the lawyer I lived across the street from in the white upscale Mountain Book suburb, aka The Tiny Kingdom, home of the Birmingham Country Club, which as far as I know still is all-white. If you want to read really interesting Birmingham Country Club fishing stories that never got told there, and other really interesting fishing stories, which segue into whitewater paddling stories, which finally segue back to fishing and paddling in God’s Kingdom stories, please continue reading.
J
Your absolutely valid comment below brought back a special memory for me about fishing in Coxes' Creek, a slough off of Lake Purdy, with a boyhood friend (Billy S) and his father before an approaching thunderstorm:
A thunder storm was brewing to the west of the lake yesterday, and I wanted to stay, because, as I told the nice young man who had come to help me load my car, bass start moving and feeding ahead of a thunder storm when the barometer starts falling, and after the storm passes through, nothing you do will get bass to bite and it’s time to go home.
We were using bait casting reels- this was before "spinning reels" became common in the US (I think from Finland- this without AI aid), using Creek Chub darters modified to make them dive and run shallow, and adding a "skin" from frogs we had gigged and pasted when wet and applied "shrink-wrap" style to the plugs. We got the 'shallow diving' modification idea from a "knock off" version of the Creek Chub made briefly by "PawPaw" which was a shallow diver, and I had used on the shallow pond on the BCC West Course with a one-time spectacular result (as sometimes happens with a "new" lure).
But back to that late afternoon at Lake Purdy, we made a last minute shop at Coxes' Creek on our way in and Mr. Sulzby had a huge bass blow up on his Darter only seconds after it landed. And by the grace of the fishing god I was able to land it as "net man" with Mr. S hollering "don't lose it"- this was before I had been schooled to never try to net a fish tail-first. It turned out to be 5#, for us enormous, and Mr. Sulzby had it mounted🐳
Me
Mr. S and his son Billy and I fished Lake Purdy one Sunday afternoon. Billy read his Latin book from the dock to the old iron bridge at Grants Mill Road. Mr. Su puttered the wooden rental boat under the bridge and we started casting to the left bank and several small striped bass took passes at Billy’s small frog darter, but did not bite it. That was all the action we got that day. I later fished the Cahaba River off Grants Mill Road with Billy, and I went on a dove and a quail hunt with him in high school.
On up from the iron bridge where the Little Cahaba runs into Lake Purdy is where Riley Strange had himself a very interesting extraterrestrial hook up while bass fishing with a worm jig. Years before, Riley and his future life partner Mary Lou Snow caught some large shellcrackers on the Little Cahaba above where it merges with the Cahaba River. They, Riley especially, had a thrilling adventure with a large cottonmouth moccasin under the 280 bridge above the dam, where the strange little Pleiadean/Buddhist village Kundalina was situated.
My somewhat sophomoric first novel, not exactly for prudes, the faint of heart, Bible thumpers, Tiny Kingdom church worshippers, a free read now at archive.org.
J
I didn't know about your Billy S connection. Billy and I traveled to swim AAU distance races together- he was good, I just "swam pretty" and long. We were both "Best Swimmers" at Camp Seagull in successive years.
I practically lived in their house on Fairway Drive one summer, and we fished every inch of Watkins Creek and both lakes on the golf course. Billy reported that he caught a 5# bass on the West Course pond one night at midnight using a black Jitterbug (we spent one night on Lake Purdy with Mr. Sulzby trying the same thing without success).. And we spent a lot of time out at the Woods place and that ice cold spring pool in Roebuck- I think they were Mildred's parents (I understand that Woody owns it now). Billy and I stocked that little upper spring pond that didn't get "Blue Stone" treatment with red eye bass and Creek Chub that we had collected from Watkins Creek from the deep pockets under the golf cart bridges using Cherry Bombs and "TNT" firecrackers stuck to rocks with candle wax to sink the "bombs".
I also hunted with them, mainly dove, but some quail, using those antique LC Smith double barrel shotguns they had, I think 20 gauge. Those barrels were probably "twist steel", and would probably blow up using today's shells.
Me
Heh, for sport I terrorized some fish in that country club creek with cherry and TNT bombs wrapped in the hard beige-yellow clay that was on the bank, to sink the treat,
The largest bass I pulled out of the pond by #2 hole on the West Course was about 2#. Using wasp larvae Mark T and I pulled out of nests we knocked off the eves of the Country Club building, and a hand line or cane pole, I caught a lot of nice bluegills in that pond.
After my father won a fly rod in an international potato chip convention golf tournament, I caught a lot of nice bluegills on a fly out of that pond. I got the flies from the hardware store in Crestline on Church Street.
A back man, who worked at the country club, sometimes fished #2 hole pond all night, casting and retrieving a bassmaster, and every now and then he caught one of the behemoth bass in that pond.
One afternoon, I raised about a 10# bass in that pond on a fake redworm with red beads and a silver propeller, but it sounded instead of chomping the fake offering and turning me and my spinning rod and reel and 6# test every which way but loose, forcing me to jump into the pond to try to win that surreal contest.
I caught stringers full of nice blue gills out of the pond under the tee on #14 West Course, by tossing white bread on the water to chum them up, then I gave them compressed dough balls with a hook inside on my cane pole and white string line. Took all of those fish home to my black manny Cha, who loved to fish and eat bream.
Martin W raised one of the behemoth bass in the #14 pond with a fake baby plastic snake pork rind on a hook, and it followed the fake snake all the way to the bank and gave us the finger, it seemed. Billy Sulzby was there that day, or another day, with his fly rod catching bream, which is what gave me the idea later to catch bream on a fly. Billy S fished some with me at Lake In the Woods, where my father’s father built a getaway home.
I went to the freezing cold Roebuck spring lake with Billy several times, to swim. I remember it had a blue rock in it to kill fish that might want to take up residence there. He lived there for a while, later in life, as I recall. There is a pond across the road, and one day we flushed a bunch of wild ducks out of there.
I was fishing on the Crystal Beach pier out from Destin, and Billy showed up with a girlfriend I had not met. Billy had his mono line tied directly to a wire leader, and I told him to put a swivel between the wire and the mono if he wanted to keep the wire and his lure after something in the water decided to give it a contest, but Billy just kept casting.
I think the last time I saw Billy was in the Jefferson County Courthouse after he was practicing law. I had thought all along as a boy he would be a doctor, as that was what he and his mother talked about him being. She tutored me in algebra, when I was at Ramsay.
Driving me to Ramsay the first day of class, my father said he thought I should take a typing course, because being able to type had been handy for him. I enrolled in a typing class with about 25 freshman girls and Billy :-).
From time to time over the years, I wondered if my father, or someone, wished he had not persuaded me to take that typing course? :-)
My urologist, who had attended Indian Springs School, told me one day he was checking me out that another doctor had missed Billy had prostate cancer. I never heard how that turned out.
After moving from Key West back to Birmingham in 2018, I saw my pee stream was getting weak and I called my doctor thinking it was his office, but it was his home, and his wife got him on the phone with me, and he said he had retired and then his life got really boring, and he told me to call his old office and ask for his old medical partner, which I did, and that’s how I learned I had prostate cancer.
They convinced me radiation was probably best for someone my age, and if I had surgery instead, they might miss some of the cancer, and then I would need radiation or worse, chemotherapy, so I went with the radiation, which had ms so weak at the end of the 5-week treatment,that I felt like I was 100. But that passed.
Now I’m pretty sure there is cancer elsewhere, and I’m seeing a specialist about it this Wednesday, after my G.I. doctor said he would not do a colon exam, because he did one 2 years ago and I was okay, and colon cancer takes 10 years to set in.
Maybe so, but I had 5 weeks of radiation, which is known to cause cancer. This new gut doctor also is a surgeon, and I expect he will figure it out and then we will see what is next.
Our friend Mat J. told me you are all stove up and I hated hearing that. When people ask me how I’m doing, I might say, “Okay, for a dinosaur.” Sometimes they laugh. Occasionally, someone asks, “Aren’t dinosaurs extinct?” I smile.
I think the last time I saw Billy was in the Jefferson County Courthouse after he was practicing law. I had thought all along as a boy he would be a doctor, as that was what he and his mother talked about him being. She tutored me in algebra, when I was at Ramsay.
Driving me to Ramsay the first day of class, my father said he thought I should take a typing course, because being able to type had been handy for him. I enrolled in a typing class with about 25 freshman girls and Billy :-).
From time to time over the years, I wondered if my father, or someone, wished he had not persuaded me to take that typing course? :-)
My urologist, who had attended Indian Springs School, told me one day he was checking me out that another doctor had missed Billy had prostate cancer. I never heard how that turned out.
After moving from Key West back to Birmingham in 2018, I saw my pee stream was getting weak and I called my doctor thinking it was his office, but it was his home, and his wife got him on the phone with me, and he said he had retired and then his life got really boring, and he told me to call his old office and ask for his old medical partner, which I did, and that’s how I learned I had prostate cancer.
They convinced me radiation was probably best for someone my age, and if I had surgery instead, they might miss some of the cancer, and then I would need radiation or worse, chemotherapy, so I went with the radiation, which had ms so weak at the end of the 5-week treatment,that I felt like I was 100. But that passed.
Now I’m pretty sure there is cancer elsewhere, and I’m seeing a specialist about it this Wednesday, after my G.I. doctor said he would not do a colon exam, because he did one 2 years ago and I was okay, and colon cancer takes 10 years to set in.
Maybe so, but I had 5 weeks of radiation, which is known to cause cancer. This new gut doctor also is a surgeon, and I expect he will figure it out and then we will see what is next.
Our friend Mat J. told me you are all stove up and I hated hearing that. When people ask me how I’m doing, I might say, “Okay, for a dinosaur.” Sometimes they laugh. Occasionally, someone asks, “Aren’t dinosaurs extinct?” I smile.
If I was a beloved pet, my loving owner probably would have had me put down already, but many great industries depend on dinosaurs living for as long as possible.
[Several times when I lived down Key West way, I dreamed of Billy S and I figured the dreams were about Evil, which cancer represented in my dreams. But perhaps those dreams were about the prostate cancer, for when it finally was diagnosed in late 2019, my PSA was 22, which is off the charts and meant I had prostate cancer. After the radiation therapy, my PSA slowly dropped to .05 and was .05 when my urologist checked me out about six weeks ago.]
J
Connections. I was later a member at the club for 26 years through my wife's dad, Jim, but resigned after our daughter married and they had no interest. Thanks to my partner Jim B, and like you, I had taken up white water canoeing, and in the spring, when the water was up I just fell out of the golf habit. Incidentally, Jim's son Jimmy was a hell of a paddler- rowed dories in the Grand Canyon etc. for an outfitter for several years before law school.
Incidentally that ice-cold spring fed walled "pool" of the Woods in Roebuck did at least double duty. One morning Billy and I went out there early, and beneath the outflow pipe where the road crossed some local entrepreneurs had cached 3 gallon-size jugs of "orange" whiskey to cool, which we reluctantly decided to leave-be. And the outflow went into the "lily pad" pond just below, and then under the road to form the creek that runs through the Roebuck Golf Course, and from there to become either Village Creek or Valley Creek. That area must have been a magnet for early native hunting and settlement- Billy dug out a white quartzite arrowhead from a tree trunk that had grown half way around it.
Interesting that we both came up with a "depth charge" technique with TNTs and Cherry Bombs for creek fish collection. One night Billy and I decided it would also be fun to toss Cherry Bombs under moving cars on the road (name?) that runs parallel to hole #1 on the East Course, figuring that the hedge and small ditch along there would be an adequate barrier to reprisals.Unfortunately, we had failed to notice a small break in the hedgerow about 40 yards away, and we tossed one in front of a cop car (we just saw the headlights). But the driver cop wheeled through that opening with their lights and siren going and the other cop straddling his open door to chase us down. Billy and I split and took off with him heading to the creek, and me for the little "grove" that sheltered the nearby potty. Fortunately their car followed Billy, and I was able to also make it for the creek a few seconds later. The cops cruised the two adjoining roads for several hours, periodically playing their searchlight across the course trying to light us up, and we didn't make it back to chez-Sulzby until after midnight.
Bill R on this thread had a place at Lake in the Woods where we nearly burned down his boat house at a law firm 4th of July "celebration". And Jim B had one upstream at Echo Lake (I think they used the lake for their drinking water), which is only a few miles from the source of the Cahaba. Beautiful area, and I understand good turkey hunting!
I am glad that my mother was successful in getting me to take typing before college, but I didn't have the benefit of there being "25 freshman girls" in my classroom. And if your dad was still around, he might well rue the day you did👺
Mat was spot on with his "stove up" comment about me, primarily due to spinal stenosis and rotator cuff issues (they can't cut because my shoulders are artificial), so I am using a little foldable 3-wheel walker to get around these days. But I've got a good compatible exercise routine, and an extremely agile wife- my wife made it to the top of the climbing wall at Lakeshore at age 79, and is still walk-running. And I still have my hand in as "general counsel" (emeritus) of the Freshwater Land Trust and 'doing deals'
Board of Directors - Freshwater Land Trust
Me
Your medical sounds pretty rough to me. For a number of years, whitewater paddling kept me sane. I spent weekends on the Ocoee River in my Blue Hole canoe and C-1, which looks a kayak, but you sit on a pedestal and use a canoe paddle, and a lawyer friend in Tuscaloosa had a C-2, which we paddled on the Ocoee and the Chattooga. I ran the Chattooga maybe 10 times. And the Nantahala and the Hiwassee and the Telico, and the Locust Fork and the Mulberry Forks of the Warrior River many times as well.
My first whitewater experience in the front of Jim B Sr's aluminum Grumman canoe on the Locust Fork, I think you were on that trip. We wiped out in the Double Trouble rapid, as I recall, that beautiful warm April day maybe 1974? Ran Bulldog Bend on the Cahaba several times, too. I joined the Birmingham Canoe Club and took their whitewater classes, and eventually was teaching new club members on the Hiawassee, Nantahala and Ocoee.
A couple of friends and I “discovered” the whitewater run on the Mulberry Fork one day when that river was pretty high, and we stopped paddling the Locust Fork because we liked the Mulberry Fork better.
Eventually, a real estate developer bought part of an old farm on the road in to the takeout, and subdivided it. The lot nearest the takeout was the egress to the takeout, just below what became known as the Hawaii 5-0 rapid and beach. I got a country guy in the canoe club to drive up there and find the developer and sign a contract to buy that lot, and he did it, and we closed it in a lawyer’s office on US 31 in Homewood, and I had put in the deed to me a covenant running with the land which left the beach and the entire lot open for anyone to use for camping, picnicking fishing, swimming, festivals, etc, because the locals had been using that beach and swimming and fishing hole for generations.
I deeded the beach and lot to the canoe club, and some lawyer got ahold of it and told them they would be liable if anyone got hurt or died there, and they asked me to rescind the the covenant - they had not recorded my deed to the club, and I told them I wasn’t going to do that, l did not say I didn’t trust them to protect the locals. They recorded the deed.
Then, they started having a national whitewater slalom race at Hawaii 5-0 every March, I think, when there was good water running all the time. The locals got involved selling arts, crafts, food, drink, and it was very well attended and paddlers came there from all over America, because there was not a better slalom course rapid in America than 5-0 at that time.
I sometimes saw Jim B Jr when I paddled the Ocoee and he worked for one of the paddling outfitters. I bumped into him about a month ago at my chiropractor’s office. We talked about old times and he remembered my bumping into him and his dad at the Golden Temple after I moved back to Birmingham from Colorado in 1995, with my tail between my legs.
I’d just had it out with my father in his office across from Magnolia Park, after he told me I should find an entry level job in a law firm, and I said I ddn’t think my heart would be in it, and he got the meanest look on his face, and he said, “I can’t believe 55 year old man never got over the death of his son", who had died of SIDS when I was in law school at Alabama.
Well, over lunch with Jim Jr and his dad, I asked Jim Jr if he was having fun practicing law? He said not really, but he had gotten a divorce and he had bills to pay. I thought to myself, well, l guess I’m not gonna be looking for a job in a law firm.
I started practicing law in 1973, after working 4 years for Golden Flake. About 2 years later, I resigned from the Birmingham Country Club, because I wasn’t using it, and I was interested in other things.
When I told my father I had resigned, he said he would pay the dues for me. I said it was all done, they had accepted my resignation. I knew that was the best way to do it, because he would have tried to talk me out of it.
He was a good enough golfer when he was young to be a professional golfer, but he preferred the world of business. The only time I ever beat him, I didn’t count all of my strokes. He played golf the old way, like the book Golf in the Kingdom. X-ray of the soul. Something Donald the OT will never grok.
The game got the best of me after I won the junior tournament at the country club, but I kept trying to take it back up until I hurt my back really bad in 2012, and ended up with naturally fused L-4 and L-5 discs.
I still love watching good pro golf tournaments on TV, especially the British Open. I played St. Andrews once, with a Scot lawyer and a Scot playwright in 1969, about a month before I went to work for Golden Flake, which was probably not the smartest thing I ever did, but it was educational.
J
Sloan,
The Land Trust now has hundreds of acres on the Locust and Mulberry Forks, more on the Cahaba and its tributaries, and a good bit in the works on Hatchet Creek. And we have canoe launch sites throughout, some of those launch sites in partnerships with local governments and/or TNC. And our surrounding river land is permanently protected from development, but is available for recreational use.
I think it is an organization you would like, and almost all of their 10,000+ acres is river land. LS is our in-house lawyer and land protection director, and I have copied her if you would like to see where our river land is located.
Me
Good for Y’all, I’d like to see the maps.
If I tired to roll a c-1, c-2 or canoe today, my spine would sue me for elder abuse. Same if I tried to swing a golf club. Or even lean over and pick up a cinder brick anchor.
I came to understand that my time learning how to paddle whitewater was similar training to learning how to fish, for in many ways I ended up paddling a whole lot of white water rivers, most of which were very difficult, and some were very dangerous.
I also came to understand something else.
One day in 1969, my bowel didn’t work right, and never again would work right. Nothing medicine tried made any difference, and when something alternative I tried calmed down my irritable bowel, something reacted so violently in me that I felt I was in peril and I stopped doing what was making my bowel feel better. In that way I learned whatever was behind it was intelligent, and I figured it was God, or karma I had created, and now it may be cancer.
I don’t know if I will tell the doctor the spiritual part of that whitewater fishing story tomorrow, because I want him to do what he knows how to do without him thinking I’m batshit crazy and he is distracted by that.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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