Today is the one year anniversary of my fathers passing and I thought I would share a story about him. My father loved to go fishing. His favorite place in the whole world was Grays camp at Reelfoot lake Tennessee. Let me set you up with a little back ground of the place. Reelfoot lake came about in 1811 when a massive earth quake caused the land to swell up and then cave in causing Mississippi river to flow backwards and filled in over 15000 acres with water. Its a beautiful place and looks somewhat pre-historic. The water is rather murky because it doesnt have a fresh water source feeding it. Its also fairly shallow in the area we stay. There are cypress trees growing up in the middle of the lake and Lilly pads with thousands of frogs croaking off in the distance at night. The variety of wildlife is tremendous, If you didnt know any better you would think there could be a dinosaur hiding somewhere close by. Davey Crockett is known to have hunted there too. People travel there different times of the year for different sports that come into season. Theres even duck blinds right in the middle of the lake.The boats you rent are wooden and hold no more than 3 people. Theyre also flat bottomed so that when you glide over a hidden stump it doesnt tear the hull. I never spent a lot of time fishing but just about every spring I would drive 6 hours down there just to be with my father. It really is a beautiful place. He had been going there for over 40 years. We would bring all kinds of gear and sometimes hed trade off rods to fish for bass but we mainly fished around the trees and Lilly pads for blue gill. In the summer we would always have a big fish fry with what we brought home. This particular time my son went too. We always start out early and fished until lunch, go to the cabin for a bite and head back out. When the day was over we always looked forward to going into town for a catfish dinner. It was a little uncomfortable in the boat. I was the engine man, my dad had the trolling motor with my son Trevor in the middle on cooler duty. There was always two cages full of crickets for the blue gill to start the day and if you werent careful the birds would eat your bait while you were off the boat. Well, we had fished most of the day and were running short on crickets with only a few left in one cage. My father said why dont we fish the tall grass closer to the shore before we go back in so we just kind of drifted with the current trading fishing holes and using the few crickets we had left. We set the cage on top of the cooler and had to pass it back and forth to grab a cricket. The whole time it was a balancing act because of the narrow boat and not much room to move around. Either Trevor or I leaned over too far and the cage started to slide off and head towards the water. My father reacted very quickly and kind of dove towards the cage not wanting to lose one of his prized possessions. I guess the boat started to tip and my father went head first with his pole into the water disappearing from view. As I gazed into the water for what seemed like an eternity, I started to wonder if he was going to pop back up, thinking I was going to have to go in after him. Just about then he popped up in dirty waste high water. My father was holding his glasses and had a disgusted look on his face. He wasnt very happy about falling in. Young Trevor looked at my Dad and said. Did you see any fish down there Grandpa? It really was the perfect thing to say and we all laughed as it broke the tension of the moment. Its a story our family still laughs about. On a similar note, Maureen, Me, my Mother, sister, brother and Ruby took my fathers ashes back to Realfoot this past May. We stayed overnight and got to the camp early, rented 2 boats to take his ashes to his favorite fishing hole. Well wouldnt you know my brother who has had knee replacement fell into the lake trying to get into the boat. We couldnt help but laugh and said that Dad pushed him in. It helped ease our feeling of loss... we all had a good time. We even went back for that catfish dinner before heading home.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 14:25:56 +0000