My Fish in a Bucket List: What I Absolutely, Positively Have to Do While I Still Can

Bucket lists were never my thing. But I never turned 70 before. At the end of this month,?I will. And a single item has emerged as something I absolutely must do – or rather return to doing – before the final curtain: Go fishing.

In the role that won him his second best-actor Oscar in 1995, Tom Hanks, playing country boy Forrest Gump, tells everyone he meets, “My mom always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” I can say the same thing about fishing.

I grew up as a country boy, too, and learned from fishing that you never know what might be lurking beneath the water’s surface. When you feel that electric tug on your rod and start cranking the handle of your reel, you never know if you’ll pull up a big, beautiful bluegill, a rainbow trout or a sleek Walleye pike. Or it could be a bullhead catfish with fins as sharp as razor blades, or a vicious snapping turtle, or a slimy, rything eel, an ugly relic of the Cretaceous Period a hundred million years ago. I want to feel that magic and mystery again.

But there’s another reason fishing has risen from the depths of my mind all the way up to the top after my being away from it for 30 years. Turning to another movie analogy, I think of the 1941 classic, Citizen Kane. Orson Wells got a best-actor Oscar nomination for playing Charles Foster Kane, a wealthy media baron. As a broken old man, Kane dies in his mansion, Xanadu, holding a snow globe and uttering his last word: Rosebud. Turns out that was the trade name of the cheap little sled he had as a child, and it represented the simple comforts of home and his mother’s love.

Family Affair

My Rosebud is a fishing pole, or rather, fishing itself, which I was introduced to very early in life. On a balmy early fall day circa 1957, when I was around 6, my mom and dad took me on a short drive from our farm in central New Jersey to the placid natural setting of Carnegie Lake on the grounds of Princeton University. My mother packed a picnic lunch, as she would always do for fishing trips. My father taught me to bait my hook with a worm from a small milk box of them we’d bought at a sporting goods shop in town. My parents relaxed on plastic beach chairs as I stood on the lakeside, watching my red and white bobber float a yard or two off shore.

After a while, it started to twitch a little, and then the little red button on top stood straight up. Suddenly, the whole thing darted beneath the surface. My little hands shaking with anticipation, I held the rod tight and reeled in the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen – a sun fish, whose proud dorsal fin flared like a regal mane above a round, blue and golden body and a face with dark eyes and pouting lips and a black spot on either side where the ears should be. I was thrilled and happy and ready to rebait the hook and do it all over again.

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?????????????????????????????????????? Sunfish. Photo by Shutterstock.

My dad dropped my catch into a burlap bag and my first fishing experience continued. But no more luck. Before we left I reached into the bag to take another look at my?catch. It broke my heart. The once-proud dorsal fin had wilted, dramatically shrinking the fish to a puny miniature of its former self, and the once-radiant colors had begun to fade. I burst into tears.

My parents found it funny, but did their best to console me before we all drove home, with me sniffling in the backseat of our two-toned Chevy Bel Air, where I felt safer than anywhere in the world.

The lone sun fish was too small for my mom to cook, so we fed it to the wild cats who lived on our farm, and they devoured it with abandon.

Eating, Sleeping and Breathing…

I would go on to fish avidly for the next 30 years. On weekdays in the summer of my childhood, I’d fish by myself in our florist neighbors’ irrigation ditch; on weekends my dad would take me fishing in streams and ponds, lakes and rivers, on the narrow canals that ran along both sides of the Delaware River in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and every once in a while on a group charter boat off the Jersey shore.??

When I’d close my eyes at night, I’d see red and white bobbers floating on a in pond. On the nights before going on special fishing trips with my father, I’d lay awake in excitement, rarely getting a wink of sleep. My mother would make us hoagies stuffed with kosher salami, lettuce, tomato and pickle, along with a thermos of coffee for my dad and orange juice for me.

These sacred excursions were marred, though, by my dad’s OCD. He’d have to check multiple times to see that the four burners on our gas stove were off before we walked out the front door, and we’d often have to come back after we’d left the driveway to check one more time. But once we finally escaped the gravitational pull of my father’s twisted psyche and made it out onto the road, these adventures formed the most cherished memories of my youth.

Sometimes we’d fish for shad off the Trenton Makes the World Takes bridge, using only shiny golden hooks to attract the silver siblings of the herring species. Hanging several hooks from our line, we’d sometimes pull in two at a time.

Once while fishing off a makeshift bridge made of wooden boards strewn across the Delaware Canal at a juncture called Jacob’s Creek Road, my father hooked a giant large-mouth bass and let me reel it in as his pole bent clean in half.

One of our favorite spots was along the canal behind the Black Bass Hotel in Lumberville, Pa., a quaint little hamlet in Bucks County. We’d know we were getting close when the sweet fragrance of maple syrup from the dark-red-leafed trees that lined the narrow road wafted through the open windows of our Chevy – now a silver-blue 1963 Bel Air. Picking a spot behind the historic hotel, we’d set up our chairs, lunch and bait. Fishing for carp, we’d string a few kernels of canned corn on the loop of our hooks, or use a secret recipe for dough balls made of water, flour and corn meal drenched in honey. Then we’d rest our poles on Y-shaped twigs anchored like stakes in the ground so we could relax and enjoy the meditative state of angling.

I got so relaxed one time that I fell asleep. Maybe my dad dozed off too, because when I opened my eyes my Y-shaped twig was gone, along with my pole, hook, line and sinker. A king-sized carp must have swum off with it. To this day I sometimes think about that poor fish having to live the whole rest of his life tethered to my 20 feet of line attached to a cumbersome rod and reel.

End of the Line

The last time I remember fishing was sometime in the mid—'90s, when I was around 45. My father was long gone, and my mom was retired and living in a nice development in Florida, where one of her neighbors had his own boat. He invited me out ocean fishing one day and between the two of us, we must've caught over a dozen porgies. My mom scaled, cleaned and gutted them, as she’d taught me to do when I was a kid, and turned them into a fantastic fish soup that we enjoyed for the rest of our visit.

No longer a country boy, deeply immersed in a corporate career and bereft of fishing opportunities, I left a beloved part of my life behind. That was three decades ago.

Now I want it back. I long for my fishing past and all it represents. I imagine my fishing future, and envision trying fly fishing. I think of Brad Pitt gracefully flicking his rod on the glittering stream in “A River Runs Through It,” the tan fishing line drawing a graceful arc in the clear, blue sky. I think of Robert Redford’s heart-rending narration, articulating the splendor of the experience. “All existence,” he said, “fades to a being with my soul and memories of the sounds of the … river and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.”

How I hope that I will go fishing again soon, and that a fish will rise, along with all the other treasures that this once-essential activity in my physical and spiritual life harbored.

Such a lot to pack into one final wish. I never believed in bucket lists. Now I think I’m gonna need a bigger bucket.