Back in the Flow

by Olive L. Sullivan


Spike is passionate about fishing. If there is water, he’s wondering what he can catch.

When he found out I’d never caught a fish, he expected that teaching me would be a chore. He thought he’d spend all his time untangling my line and getting my hook out of trees and bushes. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that I knew how to cast, bait my hook, and untangle line. He was even happier to find that I know quite a bit of fishing etiquette. I can even be happily quiet for a good long time, and I believe that a day spent by water is never wasted. You see, it’s not that I had never been fishing, it’s just that I had never landed a fish. For Spike, the final clincher that made me his favorite fishing buddy was the fact that I have a canoe, and I know how to use it.

So we’ve been spending a fair amount of time out at Witmore Pits, west of Pittsburg, floating serenely, me composing poetry in my head, and him seriously pursuing the sport.

The first time we went out, I really didn’t expect much success. I figured I would enjoy the canoeing part, and Spike would enjoy the fishing part. He would catch a couple of fish, and I’d help him eat them. We were fishing with minnows. In the past, I had fished mostly with lures, and it was a challenge to get used to the visceral part of baiting a hook with live bait.

It was a bit disconcerting watching Spike do it. He seemed to have no qualms about it at all, and he certainly had no qualms about ripping the poor thing’s little face off when it was time for a fresh minnow. At first, I took the girlfriend prerogative of letting him impale the minnows for me, but I finally decided if I was gonna fish, I was gonna cut bait, too.

As I scooped a minnow out of the bucket and gingerly approached its quivering jaw with the hook, I said, “Sorry, baby.”

Spike looked at me disapprovingly over the tops of his glasses. “Real fishermen don’t apologize to the bait,” he said sternly.

“And real Buddhists don’t fish,” I retorted. “I’m screwed either way.” Then I jabbed the hook through the minnow and tossed him into the water.

I went through a few minnows unsuccessfully. One came back looking somewhat the worse for wear, after I’d had a pretty ferocious nibble. “Maybe a turtle,” my guide opined. “Did you see a turtle sticking its head out of the water?” When I shook my head he said, “Would you recognize a turtle head if you saw it?”

It was my turn for a scathing look. “You forget, I grew up roaming these woods and pits,” I said. “I ain’t no city girl.”

“Good thing,” he said. An aside: My friend Jenny disagrees. She believes anyone who considers whether her earrings and bandana match her fishing outfit is exemplifying distressingly citified behavior.

After a while, Spike broke out his fly rod and poppers. All was tranquil. It was his turn to cast, so I sat with my minnow dangling in the water. Suddenly the rod was practically wrenched out of my hand. “Oh!” I said, or something equally witty.

“You got something? Set the hook!” he said (we had earlier established that yelling, “Set the hook! Set the hook!” does not work, but he was excited). Before you could spit, I had landed a nice 12-inch bass, and Spike was prying the hook out of its gullet. I watched him work on the bleeding fish, and felt slightly queasy. I struggled between the atavistic thrill of contributing to the cooking pot, and the fact that we were killing another living creature (somehow I expect if I had to hunt down and kill a cow to eat it, I’d give up steak). It was interesting, to say the least.

I downplayed the event. “I didn’t actually do anything,” I pointed out. “I didn’t even set the hook. He just committed suicide.”

“That counts,” said Spike.

So that was one. The second was equally anticlimactic, but easier. Spike assures me that eventually I’ll quit counting. Then, I really will be a fisherman.

Meanwhile, learning to fish has had an unexpected bonus, one that Spike surely didn’t see coming.

It’s helping me get my next job.

The day I was laid off from my “real job,” I called Larry Dablemount, who writes an outdoor column that is published in the Globe and Pittsburg’s Morning Sun. He’d been looking for “a part-time lady” to help him with his publishing projects. I figured I could be a lady part-time, and we had been in touch about how we could work together. One of the first questions he asked was if I liked hunting and fishing. I said I was mostly into hiking and canoeing, but had recently taken up fishing. So we had agreed to meet when we could find a time. And here I was, in Joplin on a Wednesday with the whole day ahead of me. We agreed to meet in Springfield at Bass Pro Shops, and by the end of the day, we had a plan.

See, Larry wants to write a book about World War II combat veterans. The book would include 25 interviews with vets, each interview becoming a chapter in the final book, to be published by his Lightnin’ Ridge imprint. And since my first ghost-writing effort was a book about a World War II prisoner of war, I was all for it. That book, A Glimpse of Hell: The World War II Years, was based on transcripts of tapes by Jim Brooks, in Pittsburg, and included stories of how he grew up hunting and fishing near Arcadia, and how some of these skills helped him survive when his plane was shot down over Germany. He was the radio operator on a bomber, and managed to live on his own for several days before being captured by the Nazis. The story is riveting, and all the more so for being true.

So I’m now looking for vets to interview. If you know one, or are one, please contact me at olive@olivesullivan.com, and we’ll talk.

I’m noticing how everything seems to be coming together. I spent nine months at the real job where I was – dare I say it? – like a fish out of water. When I got the axe, I sunk back into my real life without a ripple, just like a trout released back into the stream. One of my friends commented about the way the Law of Attraction seems to be working in my life, and I joked that if I had known all I had to do was ask, I would have asked for something more. Then I realized that, in fact, saying it is the first step to achieving it. Back in college, I was a double major in English and biology, before being defeated by the math required in science. People used to ask me what I was going to do with that combination, and I said I was going to write about animals. It’s only taken me 30 years, but it looks like I’m about to keep my word.

My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on July 20, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.