By Howell Raines | June/July 2009 | Features

Letting Go

A few things I learned from the brother who taught me how to fish

This will be a fishing season like no other I’ve known. In 2009, for the first time since my brother, Jerry, put a cane pole in my three-year-old hand, I won’t have the option of fishing with him. Jerry died last July of a heart attack at the age of seventy-five. When I went down to Birmingham for the funeral, I found his gear from our annual spring fishing vacation sitting in the entrance hall of his house, still unpacked. It had been there since April, a mute message to me that he had known for several months that his race was run. He was not a man suited for old age. Time had eroded his strength for the quail hunting and daylong deer stalks and hard-core fishing he loved. For the last three Aprils of his life, I had abandoned my practice of fly fishing the mayfly hatches on mountain streams in favor of roots fishing with him for crappie,his favorite freshwater fish. As a young GI stationed in Massachusetts and Germany, he had fly fished ardently for brown trout, but he was a jig-and-minnow man at heart. And he had an uncanny gift for locating red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico and finding “calicoes,” as crappie are called here in Pennsylvania, on any reservoir you put him on, north or south.

He had grown particularly fond of a lake near my home where few people fished for crappie. We were a hundred miles or so north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but it was old-time Southern bait-and-bobber fishing. At five thousand acres, this lake was small compared with the reservoirs he fished in Alabama, but starting in 2006, our annual one- to three-week trip had become the high point of his year. For those trips, my jet-powered river boat, with its casting platforms fore and aft and its custom-built holders for rigged fly rods, mutated into a crappie platform. He loved to watch the 200-horsepower bass boats zoom past while we quietly “thrashed the hell out of the crappies,” as he put it, on the secret spots he found by studying the lake’s topography. As we crept along on the trolling motor, he’d keep one eye on the bottom machine and one on the shoreline. Sometimes he seemed to operate on ESP. He hunted crappie like Dirty Harry hunted felons. I’d get the anchors set, and he’d say, “Pull ’em up. We’ve got to move the boat thirty-five feet up the bank and ten feet farther out.” Or “This spot is going to turn on between four and five o’clock. We’re wasting our time here until then.” Several times a day, sometimes many times, we’d follow his hunches and catch fish. There was no greater thrill for him than calling the shots this way on new water. “I can catch them anywhere,” he would crow cheerfully.

It’s fair to say my wife, Krystyna, and I never converted Jerry to catch and release, and he regarded as a disaster the one day he surrendered to our urgings. He didn’t mind releasing trout or bass, but crappie and bluegills were another matter. With panfish, he was a dedicated and precise fish-frying man: peanut oil, Indian Head corn meal, temperature steady at 365 degrees, not the 375 you’ll find in a lot of recipes.

We ran into a problem in 2006, when we limited the very first day on crappies of up to two pounds. “The freezer is full,” Krystyna said. “Don’t bring any more home.” As it happened, we had found the single most productive brush top either of us could remember, including the glory days of the great Alabama crappie explosions at Guntersville Lake in 1950 and at Weiss Lake in the sixties.

So the morning after Krystyna imposed her crappie ban, Jerry and I boated and released a couple of dozen average fish without too much complaining from my brother. Then he pulled a whopper off that brush top. It wasn’t his personal best, which was a three-pound, four-ounce fish from a lake near Birmingham, but it would easily clear two pounds. I watched Jerry out of the corner of my eye. He held the fish by the lip and lowered it into the water. Then he pulled it back out. He lit a cigarette and looked it in the eye, turning it first one way, then the other. He dipped the fish again to let it breathe, and on the next lift, he dangled it over the water for so long I was afraid its scales would dry out. Finally, with a silent shake of the head, he released this beautifully speckled, flawless example of the black crappie tribe, and it swam slowly out of sight. Absolute silence in the boat. He shook his head slowly. After a bit, he said, quietly, “That was hard.”