I knew there would come a day when I’d be writing these words. This past Mother’s Day was the first one I awoke to without my mom.
Every Mother’s Day before, I had the opportunity to present her with a card, a box of candy or some little something I’d made or bought just for her. In turn, I would receive her thanks and her love.
Thinking of how I looked into her eyes on those occasions, I have remembered every stomach virus, scraped knee and broken heart she rode out with me. I knew that I’d never be able to repay her for all those times, and for so much else.
I did not know what I would write. I tried to type the words, but they never flowed, never proved coherent, never left me knowing that I’d stood and delivered my story of Mom.
Then I read an article that recently appeared in this publication, one of Keith Sutton’s accounts, about how to make a family fishing trip more fun. His introduction to that subject included a tale of a childhood trip to a spot called the Carp Hole. There, his grandmother fashioned an outing just for her grandchildren, providing all with a day to remember and the youths with a lesson they’d come to understand later on down life’s road.
That trip reminded me of my first fishing foray. Dad had purchased some of those screw-together cane poles at the local Fred’s store. One of my siblings and I, with assistance from Mom and Dad, dug some worms and tried our hand at catching a few crickets and grasshoppers. We supplemented our bounty with a purchase at the local bait shop and headed out of town.
Just a couple of miles down the highway, we veered onto a gravel road and began to wind along a blackwater slough. One turn to the left, and we were at our destination — on old wooden bridge that separated parts of the slough and served to move farming equipment from one field to another.
Our preparations done, Mom tutored me on the introductory points of fishing. Dad assisted my brother, or my sister. I say “or” here because my memories have my brother David going on the trip, while my sister Debby’s memories have her — the only girl in the family — along for the ride.
I definitely do remember us pulling out fish after fish after fish. The various sunfishes were mostly under 4 or 5 inches in length, but they appeared amazing giants in the eyes of two youngsters.
Mom pointed out a large grinnel, or bowfin, hiding in the shade between some buckbrush and a stump. She explained how this bigger fish was waiting for something smaller to come by so it could have some lunch.
All went well until a noise from under the bridge signaled our imminent departure. When we peered over the side of the bridge and into the water beneath, a rather stout water moccasin looked right back at us. It was then that Mom and Dad declared we’d had enough fishing for one day.
That trip awakened the outdoorsman in me. Curiously, it would be the only fishing trip I actually ever went on with Mom.
Still, I reveled in the tales Mom would occasionally offer of what she’d experienced outdoors in her younger days.
There was the one about a snake — Mom said it was a racer — that chased her from the mailbox to the house one day. The mailbox was at the main-road end of the gravel road where she waited for the school bus.
Another snake story was about the chicken snake that would try to get in the hen house and steal the eggs. Mom and a long-handled gardening tool won that war after repeated skirmishes.
Then Mom shared about how her father, Paw Dick, and several other men had gathered at Clear Lake, an Arkansas River oxbow that straddles the Lonoke-Pulaski county line west of England, to do some turtling. It was late summer, and the lake was very low — a combination of the farmers needing water for their crops and the skies not replenishing the supply quite as quickly.
Back then, in the 1930s, any meat was considered of interest for table fare. As my mother and father said, “The only thing we didn’t eat off of a pig was the squeal.”
In fact, the aquatic species many of us now consider trash fish, such as gar, bowfin, carp and buffalo, were desired because of the meat’s ability to hold up well for canning. Canning meant a meal on the table day after day after day, and a welcome alternative to cornbread and beans.
On this occasion, the group was going after snapping turtles in the shallow, turbid water. It was, as Mom described, like on the TV shows about catfish noodling or grabbling. The turtlers would reach their hands or feet down into stump holes, hollow logs or undercut banks and feel for a turtle.
The end result was a pickup loaded down with turtles. Plus, there’s still a picture somewhere (I’d love to lay my hands on it) of Mom as a preschooler riding one of those giant turtles in the yard of her childhood home.
Fast forwarding a few years, Mom also told of how her family and other farming families would group together in the summers for weeklong trips to the backwaters of the White River in eastern Arkansas. Once the crop was planted and growing, all of those going on the trip would pack everything they could into and onto Ford Model A’s or other automobiles of the time and head out.
In her memories, this particular journey took the group to East Lake, an oxbow near Clarendon. The river bottoms that had been inundated with water just a few weeks before were still hard traveling. That meant pushing, pulling and more to keep the “wagon train” from failing. She said the men even went and borrowed some mules at one point to separate one of the cars from a mudhole.
Once at the lake, the “menfolk” prepared to fish while the women tended to setting up the camp and having everything ready for the main course their men would surely provide through their angling activities. Older children would assist the women, while the younger ones would be allowed to play.
As the other younger children busied themselves at play, Mom decided to try her luck with the fish. She sat on the dock at the campground and used worms, crickets, grasshoppers and whatever else she could find, coupled with one of the handful of cane poles lying on the dock.
Mom caught fish all day long, losing a few baits and even a few poles to bigger fish like the large alligator gar that called the lake home. She even resorted to using a safety pin as a hook by day’s end. Each fish she judged big enough to keep went into a cooler at the dock.
When the men arrived back at camp, they brought bad news. The fishing was terrible. They’d only caught a couple all day long, and they were way too small to keep. Dinner would have to be sandwiches or something else they’d packed for their time away.
Repeatedly calling his name and tugging at him, my mom finally got her dad’s attention. Reluctantly, he followed her to the cooler. Upon pulling up the lid, he asked where Mom had gotten all those fish, knowing without a doubt someone must have given them to her.
Her mother, whom we called Big Maw, then spoke up along with another of the women in the group. They confirmed that this little girl had outfished all of those grown men. In fact, she had caught enough fish to feed all who made the trip.
As I grew older, my love affair with fishing continued to grow, spreading to other outdoor pursuits such as gardening and quail, duck and deer hunting.
All the while, Mom was there. She was there to take the Polaroid pictures of my catches with my fishing buddies, there to show how duct tape can be used to patch a leaky flatbottom boat, there to use her old cast-iron skillet to fry up whatever I caught and cleaned.
Mom was even there to make sure that Squeaky, the neighborhood’s pet fox squirrel, had an ample supply of shelled pecans so I’d be ready to feed her when she stopped by on her frequent rounds.
My dad, refusing to be outdone by Mom, shared stories of his youth — the caves and Native American relics he found on the side of Petit Jean Mountain when he was in his single-digit years, rabbit-hunting trips with only clubs as weapons and days of bream fishing with some of his family members on Lake Conway.
Yes, I love and miss my dad, too. I’ll tell you about him another day, though. As for now, I remember a line from a country song that fellow Arkansan Glen Campbell performed. In “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” he sang the line: “There ought to be a hall of fame for mamas.” I think Keith would agree to a wing for grandmothers, too.
Staff writer James K. Joslin can be reached at (501) 399-3693 or jjoslin@arkansasonline.com.