Think Like a Fish
The Lure and Lore of America's Legendary Bass Fisherman
CHAPTER ONE
My first fishing hook was a bent safety pin.
I was probably six years old, and my mother, Ethel, wouldn't let me have real hooks like my dad, Cletus, and my older brothers had. She was afraid I'd hurt myself. Each member of my fishing family had occasionally let me hold his pole so I could land a fish he had hooked.
Occasionally wasn't enough. I didn't feel that a fish hooked by someone else, then yanked from the water by me, was really my catch.
I wanted to hook my own, even if my hook was a coiled safety pin. I'm sure Mama thought I would never catch anything on the homemade snarl whose lack of sharpness reassured her. She doubted that either a fish, or, more important, I, would feel the pierce of the bent and thin wire.
She was wrong.
I used the makeshift hooks from Mama's sewing kit, worms from the ground, and a "pole" cut from a sapling to entice tiny brim not much larger than minnows along the creek that ran in my parents' 120-acre cotton farm in Chambers County, Alabama. The nearest semblance of a town was Penton, a haml ...
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