SAN DIEGO — It has been a constant sense of amazement to both my Christian wives, how quickly I can pack a suitcase when we leave on a trip. The spouses would begin packing a week or more before we set out. I never pack until the last few minutes before going out the door. There is a simple explanation, consider the history of my Jewish ancestors, and you can see why. For the last two thousand years, we have always been ready to leave town at a moment’s notice. With that in mind, it is easy to understand when I exclaim: “A Jew can spot anti-Semitism earlier and from more subtle sources than any other person.” We can pick them out in a sold Super Bowl football game, or smell one in a tropical jungle. I personally discovered a previously unknown, festering group, during a four-month road trip my wife Carole and I took around the U.S.A. when we first retired.
Before embarking on the trip, I bought brand new fishing equipment, the very best Wal- Mart had to offer, and we set out. After several days of driving, we stopped for a few days relaxation on the White River at Bull Shoals, Arkansas, known for excellent brown trout fishing. I bought a license and the finest, smelliest bait available. It would be perfect for catching my anticipated legal limit. Our neighbor at the campsite was just coming back from an hour and a half of fly fishing in the river. She showed me nine trout she had caught. Her husband had nabbed five. She generously shared her secret techniques with me and the best holes to cast my line toward. Excited, I headed down the riverbank to glory and dinner. After an hour and a half, nothing, not even a nibble. The next day the neighbor came back from the river and reported they weren’t biting as good. She only had five, her husband a dismal three. Eagerly, I rushed to the river’s edge and cast repeatedly for three hours until tears clouded my eyes. Again, I returned barren. The third day, I fished with those two warriors, knowing that surely their prowess would rub off onto me. I watched in suicidal agony and envy as they pulled them in, and again all I got was sunburned.
A few days later, at another lake, the results were the same. Nothing! A month later, we were at a bayou in South Carolina, standing on a brand new fishing dock. It was just before sunset when fish always bite. We were the only folks around. My wife excitedly shouted, “My god! Did you see the size of that fish? Get your equipment-quick!” I ran to the van and back and just dropped my baited hook just in front of the dock. The fish swam and leapt all around my line.- Nothing!
Three weeks later at my brother-in-law Clyde’s house in Connecticut, I was telling him my fishing problems. Clyde has fished regularly all his long life. He was just back from a week of angling with a professional who had a nationally syndicated fishing TV program. They caught great numbers of huge trout and bass in the Great Lakes area. I knew Clyde would not fail me. We did it right this time. Clyde got out his flat-bottomed boat, and we launched it on a private fishing lake he and some friends own. It’s stocked with fish four times a year. We went during the week and there was only one other boat in sight. We used worms as bait, something new to add to my arsenal. We began casting and I knew my time had come. Clyde started hauling them in. They were crap fish, “Sunny’s.” However, again, I did not get a nibble. I was discouraged and manic. I thought all sorts of terrible things, when suddenly it happened. My rod nearly bent in half and I knew that my jinx had finally ended. This was surely the ‘big one’ that every lake has, that avoids being caught, and keeps getting bigger and bigger from years of dining at the underwater McDonald’s. With great effort, I proudly reeled it in and up popped another “Sunny,” the same size as Clyde’s I thought, as I reeled the monster in, at last I have caught fish, I am a bonafide outdoorsman! With great glee, I proudly raised the fish high to show my brother-in-law what I had caught, and the darned thing pee’d all over me. He kept peeing and peeing, until I had to hold him over the side of the boat, and still he pee’d into the water for about ten seconds more. Clyde laughed so hard he almost fell out of the boat.
A month went by before I got the courage to try one more time. An hour north of Yellowstone Park is the Yellow River. We stayed at the RV park on the river’s edge. The owner of the park extolled the ease of catching rainbow trout. Dutifully I went to the exact spot where he fished every evening. He claimed he never came back empty-handed. Within a half-hour of casting I lost four brand new lures, snagged on rocks in the swift-moving river. The park owner joined me, and within a few minutes he also lost some lures, then moved on to another spot. Discouraged again, I gave up. An hour later, I went to the office. He showed me two beautiful trout he had just snagged at the new location.
Now, if this whole fishing experience is not fish anti-Semitism, I don’t what is. I have decided the next time I go fishing, I will use a gold cross as a weight.
Epilogue: Ten years later, we took the whole family on a cruise to Alaska. After the ship docked and everyone returned home, Carole and I stayed and rented a car for ten days to see the mainland. One night, we stayed in Valdez (of the oil spill disaster fame), a fishing village where the locals told us there was an unusual run of “Reds”(salmon). The normal annual run that came up the fourteen-mile long bay to spawn was thirteen million fish. This year there were twenty-five million. No one had ever remembered such a run. I quickly rented a pole and bought lures and a license. There were salmon everywhere. Fishermen returning from their boats were hauling salmon-laden wheelbarrows with great difficulty up the dock ramp. Everywhere I looked in the bay, there were salmon swimming slowly, or dead from their final journey and laying of eggs in their original spawning waters. There were only two locations where you could fish from land. One was the city dock nearby, where I went to cast off.
There was not much space, due to a big fishing boat that was docked there that took up most of the space. I was also not too happy at the condition of the water. Too much flotsam and jetsam floating by was mixed in with the proliferation of dead salmon, I reluctantly cast six times, and then gave up in disgust, especially when several anglers came onto the dock, which was already overcrowded. I didn’t see any fish being caught and moved to the other spot on the opposite side of the large bay which was in front of the oil terminal tank farm. This is where all the drilled oil that flows seven hundred miles from the North Slope through the pipe line, ends its journey and awaits a ship to carry it to either the lower forty-eight states or Japan.
Again, I was disappointed in the location. I found hundreds of anglers casting their lines beyond armies of dead and stinking salmon hugging the shore. I spoke to an observer on the top of the bank where I parked. “I’ve been here a half hour, and I haven’t seen any fish caught,” he said. So once more my karma held. Due to my presence. I caused twenty-five million salmon to cease running.
This is still not the end of my sad tale. Several days later, we were in Anchorage for the last two evenings of our trip. Our bed and breakfast abode was appropriately named “By the Creek.” It was a lovely private home, that backed up onto a fast flowing stream, “full of Silvers and Trout,” according to our Jehovah’s Witness’s hosts. This was my last chance to catch something in this angler’s paradise. Just the evening before, my wife spoke to her daughter who had been on the cruise with us, and spent a few days in Anchorage with our eight-year-old grandson before returning home. She excitedly said, “ Jacob went fishing for the first time in his life, and caught a salmon.” If an eight year old could snag one, I knew I could too.
The owner of the B&B lent me one of his poles and some hooks, and sold me a license. I bought the frozen fish roe (eggs) he told me were the best bait. The next morning, when the fish were running, we walked down a path a short distance away, and cast into the stream. The smelly fish roe were a mess to put on the hook and my host wound up baiting mine by twisting and looping the line in a method I would have needed months and a Boy Scout merit badge to perfect. We fished for half an hour or more and neither one of us had even a nibble. He then directed me to pack up and move to a spot in back of his home. He had on hip boots and easily waded through a muddy depression to the bank. He instructed me to be cautious and step around the edge of the mud. I gingerly stepped as best I could, but lost my balance and wound up with my shoes buried in the ooze. With great difficulty, I was able to lift one foot out of the muck with my shoe intact. However, try as I may, I could not raise my other foot and get the shoe free. My big burly companion had to rescue me and I was a muddy mess. “Let’s clean you up with a hose at the house, and then we can come on back down.”
What he did not know was at that moment I had an epiphany. It was written that I was not supposed to fish. The fish won! On July 4 1972 I swore I would never plumb again. On August 24 2005, I made my second sacred vow. I would never fish again. However, this only applies to fresh water angling. My wife wants to fish for halibut on a boat out of Homer, Alaska, next summer. It sounds intriguing. Hopefully, all the damn anti-Semites are fresh water.
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Ira Spector is an author and freelance writer based in San Diego. This selection was republished from Spector’s 2011 work, Sammy Where Are You? .An Unconventional Memoir … Sort of. It is available via Amazon.