The line suddenly went tight and my body instinctively blocked out everything else but the feel of the monofilament held between my fingers on the rod. Up until that time in my life, there was nothing else that could drown out the background noise and bring my anxious, scattered thoughts into more focus than the chance that there might be a fish nibbling at the bait on the line. I was standing ankle-deep in a lesser-known stretch of Kaydeross Creek, hoping that my aged knee-high green rubber boots would still keep the water out. The primary function of these boots was to keep one’s feet dry, and they offered little in comfort, style, or body heat retention, especially when standing in the nearly freezing temperatures of the Kaydeross in early spring. I was growing bigger each year back then and my feet could no longer be shoved into the boots with a thick wool sock on to act as insulation. So they were cold enough that until the moment when I felt a tug on the line, most of my thoughts had been on how I would know if frostbite was setting in on my toes.
I knew that the line might just be snagged. I was standing at the edge of a pool in the Creek that had formed below a cluster of giant slate-grey boulders which had likely been there since the glaciers retreated from the Adirondack Mountains ten thousand years earlier. They were covered in thick, verdant moss, and large pine branches were wedged and piled up against the boulders creating a small dam over which water flowed furiously down, creating a deeper pool maybe four to six feet deep, all covered by a frothy white foam that bobbed around the surface. It was a perfect feeding ground for trout. One of the best parts of being in the woods this early in springtime was the smell of swift, frigid water mixed with wet, broken pine and damp, thawing earth. I’d let some line out and gently tossed it into the strong current of the pool then given more line as my bait was carried off to the side of the Creek and under the bank where I could no longer see it. By mid-summer, unless we had exceptional amounts of rain, the place where I stood would most likely be dry pebbles, the Creek’s width shrinking to half of what it was now. Trying to pull a fish out of here at that time would be a fool’s errand, not to mention that the black flies and mosquitos would be so thick that no amount of bug spray would keep them at bay.
My father and I fished along the Kaydeross each year at this time. This was one of several secret fishing holes we had along the Creek. Our first stop was always at Bob’s Bait Shop, a business that my father and his father had built, brick by brick, in the early 1950s. Family lore has it that my grandfather (Bob Sr.) decided our small town needed a place to buy fishing supplies after realizing that the nearest such business was three towns away. Soon after, he purchased an old, leaning barn (more of a shed, really), and pulled it across the street from our town’s small beach located on the Hudson River. Bob Sr. hung out a hand-painted sign to announce the opening of the store after digging up enough worms to sell and finding a place to buy a small amount of fishing tackle (on credit). Bob’s Bait Shop was born. By 1955, the business was lucrative enough for him to purchase some land just outside of town and build a more permanent and less leaning building which has continued to provide generations of locals and summer tourists with all their fishing needs.
On the day I stood in the creek, my mind laser-focused on the might-be fish on my line, I had little notion that I would take my turn at owning and running the Bait Shop someday. I just knew it felt nice to be spending time with my dad, who spent much of his time at one type of work or another. My father and I usually fished a few times together each season back then, mostly in April and May, just after trout season opened. We stopped at the Bait Shop for worms, of course, but also to get the latest update from my grandfather about which local pond or stream had been stocked with trout by the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). My grandfather befriended a local DEC Ranger (and gave him deals on bait and tackle) in return for what at that time was fairly guarded and clandestine information. Nowadays the NYS DEC has a website complete with virtual stocking maps for every county in the state, which completely takes all of the fun out of it.
After finding out where our best chances to catch some fish were, my dad and I would stock up on hooks (always Eagle Claw) and a few small spinners (always Mepps). When I was younger, bobbers were essential, but I’d grown out of using them over time, preferring to cast out and then hold the line between my thumb and forefinger, just the way my father taught me. The strong current and small pools would have made bobbers useless on that stretch (and most stretches) of the Creek anyway. We chose that particular place because Bob Sr.’s DEC insider reported the Mill Pond (downstream and near the Paper Mill) had received 300 stocked Rainbow Trout the day before, while upstream the Ice Pond (aptly named until electric refrigeration caught on around town and people no longer bought the large blocks of ice extracted from the pond during the winter) had gotten 200 of the stocked Browns and Rainbows. We positioned ourselves halfway between those two ponds on the Kaydeross Creek which connected them. On the way there, we passed the Ice Pond and noticed a large group of adults and children standing on the shoreline, their lines and bobbers frantically casting and crisscrossing out in the water. Someone had obviously squealed about the recent trout stocking.
Some sections of the Kaydeross had clear, well-worn pathways for anglers, but not where we were. We both had tackle boxes at home, but for this type of bushwhacking a smaller canvas creel was more practical. My father had gone further downstream with just such a creel. I preferred the bulkier wicker style and had been given one as an Easter gift by my grandparents. It was filled with chocolate eggs and malted milk balls. I never remember paying for a new fishing rod or reel when my old rigs needed replacement. The choice was always a Zebco push-button reel, built and sold exclusively in America back then. Over the years, I’ve refused to use any other type of reel, and I continue to carry an extra Zebco 202 as a backup or for amateur fishing buddies to use. My grandfather insisted on buying as many American-made products for the store as he could, even if it cost him extra to do so. I sometimes wonder what he would think about how dependent we’ve become on producing so many things outside of the U.S. now.
He would only package the worms and night crawlers (yes, there is a difference) in Buss Bedding. If you’re unfamiliar, Buss Bedding is a mixture of shredded recycled paper mixed with peat moss that, when combined with just the right amount of water, provides healthier and longer-term storage for worms and nightcrawlers than regular soil. It also doesn’t get your fingers dirty when you’re digging around to grab the squirmy critters. I don’t know of any bait stores that use Buss Bedding anymore. It’s more expensive and requires a good deal of time and effort to get the water/Bedding ratio correct. Bedding that is too wet will cause everything to congeal, killing all the contents. If it’s too dry it will absorb moisture from the worms, also causing them to die. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I’ve mixed hundreds of thousands of pounds of Buss Bedding in my lifetime, first in old belt-driven washing machines and later, when those became extinct, in concrete mixers. I haven’t found any research about long-term respiratory damage humans might suffer from inhaling the grey, dry powder that plumes up when you start churning Buss Bedding and spraying hose water into it, but any amount of peat moss and wood pulp drawn into one’s lungs over an extended period of time hardly seems healthy. I thought at first that my grandfather might be willing to spend the extra money and effort to support reusing all the paper in the Buss Bedding. This was long before recycling anything became the norm, and there were countless old newspapers in the world back then to make worm food with.
But I soon realized that reusing and recycling and doing our best to save the Planet from Climate Change probably wasn’t his first priority. I think this became clear when he and I were standing near the 55-gallon steel drum he used to burn most of the garbage from the Bait Shop (even though it was free to go to the local dump back then). My grandfather had once pointed to an airplane in flight and assured me that “Those goddammed things are going to litter up the sky beyond repair!” As I watched him pour used motor oil (he swore it was the best barrel fire accelerant) into the flames of broken Styrofoam and various plastic products that would only ignite at higher temperatures and I saw and smelled the thick, toxic black smoke rise into the blue sky, I asked him if he thought we, too, might be adding some litter to the sky – maybe just a little bit?
“No,” he assured me, as he took another drag off the unfiltered Lucky Strike dangling from his mouth, “this will just float off into space. And space is endless. Look, it’s already blowing away up there.”
I’d seen Star Wars by then (Episode IV – the best one), and space did seem pretty big, but even so, I had to hold back on my follow-up questions. Instead, I just replied in the way I often did with my grandfather about such matters and said, “Huh.”
In case you’ve wondered (or even if you haven’t), the nightcrawlers and worms people purchase by the dozen to go fishing don’t crawl into those containers by themselves. Someone has to count 12 of them in there – after they go out and find 12 to count. And the biggest supplier of worms and nightcrawlers used to be from golf courses around NYS. I spent countless hours riding shotgun with Bob Sr. in the large Chevrolet Cargo Van (he only bought Chevrolets) back and forth to Utica, NY where he had found a man who hired people to go out on a local golf course every night and pick nightcrawlers. The pickers placed about 500 nightcrawlers (I learned later that an average weight was taken for this amount) in square-shaped, thick Styrofoam containers which were then filled with topsoil and placed in a large, constantly-lighted refrigerated room to be purchased by bait shops. Bait shop owners hired workers to package up the nightcrawlers into dozens to sell (in our case, this is when the Buss Bedding was added). Refrigeration and constant lighting were required. If someone neglected to leave the lights on before the nightcrawlers had a top over them, it quickly became apparent how they earned their name. For this reason, crawler pickers always went out at night, and picking was especially plentiful during heavy rain when the nightcrawlers were forced to rise from the earth or drown.
Because my grandfather was one of the only bait shops around, he saw the opportunity to wholesale worms, nightcrawlers, and live bait (minnows and crayfish) to other small stores in nearby towns that might want to add these products to their inventory. At the height of the Bait Shop’s wholesale business, our delivery route stretched from the Albany region up to small Canadian-bordered villages. We would make this trip out to Utica at least once every two weeks, and return with an average of two-hundred thousand nightcrawlers to be counted out and delivered. We drove to Massachusetts for the minnows, which were also sold by weight and dumped (as gingerly as possible) into the large, homemade tanks my grandfather had built in the van. When these tanks were full, they required agitation to add oxygen to the water for the baitfish to live. It’s hard to accurately describe how loud these agitators made the inside of the van, but suffice it to say that I blame a good deal of my hearing loss on the unending cacophony we were subjected to on those long rides. The minnows were harder to keep alive and store than the nightcrawlers. We sold hundreds of pounds of them weekly then returned to Massachusetts for a fresh supply. The drive to the crayfish supplier was closer. The story I remember about him was that he had owned a bait shop somewhere in Albany but sold it after shooting and killing a would-be robber. He then bought a large piece of property off in the woods near the Vermont border and dug several ponds in which he began to breed and sell crayfish. We transported thousands of them each week in the same tanks we used for the minnows. Luckily, they didn’t require water or the agitation system to be turned on (they were also extremely durable and could be stored for longer periods).
My grandfather never equipped his vehicles with more than an AM radio, which was barely audible over the agitators, but I do remember hearing “The Rest of the Story” with Paul Harvey, along with many other talk radio programs on those trips. I also remember that my grandfather would insist on taking our lunches at small, family-owned diners rather than the McDonald’s or Burger Kings that were starting to pop up just off the interstates. He also always ordered strawberry shortcake for dessert if it was on the menu and he paid for everything in cash. I noticed that most of the bait shop owners dealt in cash, usually large wads of the stuff pulled from their pockets and rolled up with a rubber band around it. Behind the cash register at the Bait Shop, my grandfather hung a sign which said “In God we trust. All others pay cash.” It’s another wise adage that seems lost in modern times.
One of the last memories I have involving my grandfather is all of the empty chairs at the funeral parlor following his death. His wife, my grandmother, had passed away a few years earlier in the bedroom of the old house just up the street from my own home. He died there as well. And it seemed odd to me, even back then as a young child, that a man who had spent so much of his time and energy interacting and serving our small community for the majority of his life didn’t attract a larger group of folks to mourn his passing and celebrate his life. In the years that followed, I would discover that he was considered a highly disagreeable and deeply melancholic man by many, especially after his son James, my father’s brother, was killed by lightning a few weeks before his high school graduation. James was trout fishing on the Kaydeross Creek less than a mile from the Bait Shop at the time.
It’s odd the things you remember and the things you don’t about people and times that have swam or floated past and are now so far downstream or washed out into far-away rivers and oceans that you’ll never find them again to separate fact from fiction.
I started writing this blog after trout season opened in April. It’s now June and I’ve deleted more than half of what came next in my original retelling of events. The impetus for getting this all down was a rumor, now verified, that Bob’s Bait Shop is up for sale. After seven decades in business, there is a very real possibility that it may go out of existence altogether.
The deleted parts of the tale involve more details about the cost and sacrifice any family business takes on those involved in running it. For me, those burdens cascaded over two previous generations and gathered a powerful current of unspoken expectations mixed with the unmet desires of sons to hear fathers say they were proud of them. All of this occurred while each of us tried swimming desperately against a tsunami of greed and convenience that literally submerged and drowned the majority of small businesses in the way. If anyone hasn’t been involved in a family business, or if your dream is to open a business of your own in this lifetime, I encourage you to contact me and read the entirety of my thoughts and experiences on the endeavor before you set sail.
Of all the blogs and writings I’ve done over the years, this one churned up the most wreckage and debris – what my various counselors and spiritual advisors refer to as “artifact emotions.” They tell me these sunken feelings will continue to rise to the surface from time to time until they are properly felt, processed, and given a burial at sea. In case I haven’t mentioned it before, most of the reason I continue pecking away at my keyboard and churning out these blogs is to maintain a degree of sanity along with my sobriety – not so much to give you all a piece of my mind as to gain some small peace from my own mind. I’m not sure if purge-writing is a phrase yet, but it certainly applies to my technique.
Sometimes, but not always, there is catharsis through this process. And that is the gold. The small bit of solace that makes the hours of writing and revising worth it all. Cheaper than talk therapy but much more time-consuming. It happened with this writing, although it took longer than usual. But eventually, like jagged pieces of an old broken bottle worn smooth into sea glass by sand and surf over time, I found a few rare and beautiful things to carry around in my pocket and not get cut anymore.
One of them was the good memories of times with my grandfather and father that I wouldn’t have had if we weren’t working together. It’s taken a long time to recognize and reconcile that I might be the first in my family to suffer from a substance use disorder, but Workaholism (not clinically diagnosable but certainly real – and damaging) was certainly encouraged if not imposed on me from past generations. When your true worth is solely contingent on how many hours you’re engaged in production and staying busy, busy, busy, it takes a toll on all interpersonal relationships as well as your ability to enjoy the calm and silent moments of life. By dredging through these old memories and messages about work and life and true success or serenity, I was able to find some moments that make me smile and remember certain times I had with the most important men in my life with fondness. They were good men, and I do believe they did the best they could.
Another gift I uncovered during this piece was the fishing. It’s the essence of what my grandfather wanted to encourage and assist people to do. I was lucky enough to be a part of watching countless people, both young and old, learn to fish – one of the few things that hasn’t really changed over time. I also continue to enjoy it immensely. It’s a natural high (I’ve heard people say the tug is the drug), a source of solace, and a communion with nature that no other activity can compare to.
So I’ll end this piece as Paul Harvey would. By telling you “The Rest of the Story” from that day on the Kaydeross with my Dad. And I invite you to look for the small bits of sea glass from your own fishing trips – if you’ve never taken one, or if it’s been awhile since you cast a line in the water, I highly recommend stopping by your local bait shop and getting out there soon.
The pull I had felt on my line could have been a snag, or a piece of stick or debris floating through the current and striking the line – but I knew it wasn’t. For anyone who has felt that first tug of a fish, especially when it’s a nibble on a nightcrawler or worm, you know the difference. It’s strong, sharp, and fast. And the fish is going to do it again. But unless you set the hook at just the right time, your bait will soon be gone – stripped clean with the second strike.
So I waited, rigid as a cat before pouncing, to feel that next hit on the line. My right hand was positioned about halfway up the fishing rod. It was four-foot long, small and compact, which is still my favorite type of rig. When the trout struck again, I yanked the rod straight upwards with my right hand while tightening the grip of my left hand around the pistol-style handle of the rod and taking a step backward in the Creek. The line tightened and I heard the Zebco’s drag start clicking, giving more line out as the surface of the water near the edge of the pool started to roil. I kept the line tight and the rod held up and over my head as I stepped back again and pulled. The drag whined and I felt more line go out, not much but enough to let me know that this was a sizeable fish – certainly not one of the stocked trout that were just added.
I heard my father come thumping up the side of the Creek behind me.
“You got one?” he asked?
“I think so,” I answered.
“Well,” he advised, “keep that tension on him and be careful not to bust your line. Is your drag set?”
“Yes,” I said, daring for the first time to try reeling just a small amount of line in. But as I moved the reel’s handle down, the drag just clicked again, refusing to retrieve even an inch from whatever lay underneath the flowing water in the small pool. I stepped back again, which took me out of the water and onto the edge of the Kaydeross. As I did I saw the line move from under the opposite bank and into the deeper water, heading downstream. I moved backward again and up onto the embankment while raising the pole, which was now nearly bent in half, as high as I could.
The April sun filtered down through thick, crisp pine needles above us and glistened off the drops of water falling from the taut line connecting me with the fish. Everything around me was bathed in warm light at that moment, and I wondered if there had been a sudden break in the clouds or if the change in perception was some type of internal hardwiring in my brain which intuitively told me this was a moment to be remembered and cherished.
Just then the fish broke the surface of the water. It was beautiful. The trout’s back was such a dark shade of green that it appeared almost black, and its sides were covered with dark circles. The midsection was an iridescent pink so vivid that the stripe appeared painted on. As the trout rose into the air, twisting and turning furiously to dislodge the hook, its white silver underbelly shone and reflected off the pool below.
“Whoah!” I heard my dad shout from behind me.
I never brought the fish to shore. I could see when it surfaced that the Eagle Claw was barely set in the side of its mouth, and I was surprised the fight lasted as long as it did. Once the trout broke water it shook the hook out with ferocity and disappeared somewhere in the Creek. This only made the moment and the many times my father and I would recount the outing all the better. It became a great fish story, like so many others throughout history.
And those great family fish stories filled with magical remembrances and wonderful embellishments are the treasured gifts I’ll choose to remember and continue to seek out and pass on to future generations …
Great story Brian. I think that the hard work of our fathers and grandfathers was their way of expressing their love. In those days men were taught to be tough by they weren’t taught how to express themselves or to engage in self reflection. Like u put it so well, they were good men!
So you lost the fish!! I was hoping
that you’d say…..”What do you think
happened?”
After the dust settles, it so nice to
remember those great memories and the
good stuff. Afterall, as you say, they did the best that they could.
I lived on Eggleston st and worked at the Farr’s little store I was young about 14 I think ! My brother Greg Cowles was a good friend to Jimmy Farr . They used to fish together! He was very upset that he lost his good friend. I have many memories of that time growing up in that neighborhood!
Great story Brian. I think that the hard work of our fathers and grandfathers was their way of expressing their love. In those days men were taught to be tough by they weren’t taught how to express themselves or to engage in self reflection. Like u put it so well, they were good men!
So you lost the fish!! I was hoping
that you’d say…..”What do you think
happened?”
After the dust settles, it so nice to
remember those great memories and the
good stuff. Afterall, as you say, they did the best that they could.
Well done Brian, I was there with you! Sadly, things we knew as kids fade away as we age.
I lived on Eggleston st and worked at the Farr’s little store I was young about 14 I think ! My brother Greg Cowles was a good friend to Jimmy Farr . They used to fish together! He was very upset that he lost his good friend. I have many memories of that time growing up in that neighborhood!