THE RIVER

All my life we have"gone to the river."  We didn't call it camping or vacationing or anything else. Just "going to the river."

A large part of going to the river involved fishing. And fishing meant a trot line. This is a line with hooks tied all along it, strung out into the river. The hooks were baited with either doughballs or worms.  Mama made the doughballs at home. She stirred milk and meal and flour into a pot and cooked it until it was like paste. When the paste cooled we took a small piece and rolled it between our hands until it formed a round ball. When it dried it was firm enough to stay on a hook.

If we wanted worms we went "fiddling." Daddy would take us to the shady, damp woods with a tub and a handsaw. He sawed down a sapling about as big around as his wrist, leaving a stump two or three feet tall. Then he ran the saw, lightly, back and forth across the top of the stump, making shallow cuts again and again. In a few minutes worms would begin to poke their heads out of their holes. As Daddy continued fiddling they would crawl out all over the ground. The worms were everywhere. Once one even crawled up between my toes. Our job was to pick them up and plop them into the tub. We always gathered a big tub full of worms to take to the river. We didn't mind gathering the worms but we hated baiting the hooks. Some of the worms were nearly a foot long and we had to thread them in loops on the hooks. Our fingers got sticky with smelly worm juice that glowed in the dark.

Daddy ran the trot line at night.  He paddled along the line, raising each hook. If there was a fish he took it off and baited the hook again. I  can remember waking in the tent at night and hearing the boat motor crank up way across the water and I knew that Daddy was coming back. When I heard the splashing of water and the sound of the boat being dragged upon the bank, I could hardly keep from jumping up and running to see what he had caught.   It would usually be catfish which I loved to eat because there were no little bones to choke on. I was deathly afraid of choking on a fish bone, having heard tales of people who choked on one and died. I always kept a piece of bread handy, just in case, because Daddy said you could eat the bread and the bone would stick in it and you wouldn't choke and die.

We spent many, many happy days at the river.  My cousin Snookie would find out when we were going and he would follow around after my Daddy, offering to help him do things, hoping Daddy would let him go with us, which Daddy usually did. Snookie spent the night with us and we had a contest to see who could get ready to go quickest in the morning. Sometimes we slept in our clothes and once Snookie beat me by sleeping in his shoes.

Once we got to the river, Snookie would not help do anything, not even bait hooks. All he wanted to do was stay in the water. Mama got aggravated but she always let him go because she felt sorry for him.  Loretta, Snookie and I liked to paddle around the shore in Daddy's boat. Once Snookie was in the boat alone and it started drifting out. Loretta and I waded out as far as we could and shoved the paddle to him. The three of us agreed that we had saved his life and talked about it for days.

There was a deserted boat house near where we camped and we liked to lay on the walkway inside and look down into the mysterious, yellow-green water where the sun never shone. We dropped bread down to the minnows swimming about but we never could catch any of them. 

We fished for bream along the river bank with bamboo canes and catgut and tiny red and white bobbers. Once while wading in the shallow water along the edge, we saw what looked like eyes closing  in the sand just as we would start to put our foot down. Everytime we took a step, another eye would close. We dug down into the sand and found mussels. They lay with their shells slightly open, hoping to catch something to eat and what looked like closing eyes were their shells snapping to when we disturbed them.

We swam for hours with old innertubes around us, twisting our legs in such a way that we would spin around and around in the water until the earth seemed to tilt and we were so dizzy we couldn't tell in which direction we were going. Late in the afternoon we sat on the river bank, eating supper and watching the fish leap from the water. The whole river would be covered with silvery circles where the fish broke through the water and the air filled with the sound of their splashing.

I always hated when it came time to go home and would keep looking back as our truck climbed the mountain, to catch the very last glimpse of the river. Once home,  I would hang upside down from a tree limb and pretend that the sky was water.