To kids, a fish is a fish and that鈥檚 good
Giovanni Guerriere (left) and his cousin Eli King of Chalk Hill pose with the smallmouth bass they landed on the opening day of trout season, the only fish of the day. Bud (Uncle Buddy) Eicher untangles their line in the background.聽
In this 缅北禁地 file photo, Gary Michaux of Uniontown teaches his son, Camryn Witkins, how to cast his fishing line after the skies cleared on July 16, 2015, afternoon at Dunlap lake in Menallen Township.
It鈥檚 fortunate that kids think about fishing differently than adults. To a kid, every fishing trip is an adventure. I know this because when I was a kid, our neighbor, Art Thomas, worked at the pipeline compressor station (then known as Texas Eastern) at Lemont Furnace. As an employee, Art could fish in that little pond that still lies at the bottom of the northbound exit ramp to Connellsville Street from Route 119. He often took my sister Kim and I fishing there. Those outings felt like such exciting events that the pond may as well have been the wilds of Alaska.
In a child鈥檚 universe, a fish is a fish. There鈥檚 no value judgement in a kid鈥檚 brain that grades a wild brown trout higher than a carp, or a deft fly-cast above a bobber-lob. This innocence allows wonder and glee to arise from the most mundane of angling circumstance. All these truths proved themselves on the opening day of trout season last week.
For many years, friends and I have enjoyed opening the trout season at one friend鈥檚 camp, near a popular stream. We gather there late on Friday afternoon, grill a feast that would alarm our respective cardiologists, light a fire and pass the evening laughing about the misadventures of past trips.
The following morning, we leave camp early, make a short drive then a long hike to claim our traditional spots. Many times, we have been rewarded with good fishing (from the adult viewpoint).
This year, Giovanni, 8, and Eli, 4, came along with Rob Guerriere, their granddad and camp owner. Gio is a bit of a veteran himself now and has known 鈥済ood鈥� fishing. For his cousin Eli, though, this was trout-initiation. But after all the buildup and ritual, the cookout and campfire, after the purposeful march to secure our spots and the waiting there with rambunctious boys for the legal hour, nobody caught a single trout. We never witnessed another angler catch a trout, and never even saw a trout in the stream. When a guy walked by at mid-morning with one forlorn rainbow hung on his emptily rattling chain stringer, Rob jested, 鈥淵ou bring that one with you from home?鈥�
The guy just shook his head dejectedly and shrugged.
Our adults grew mildly disillusioned. We all wondered: Had high water washed the trout downstream? Had someone poached all the fish pre-season? Had the stream never been stocked at all? We discounted that latter prospect but, still, the adult consensus was that, for whatever reason, no trout were available there on that particular day.
Meanwhile, the boys jostled and played, dividing their attention between their fishing rods and the hot dogs we鈥檇 roasted. After the adults had concluded fishing was futile, the kids continued to make occasional casts to unlikely spots. The disappointment that lurked among the adults failed to phase them. They were free (relatively) along a creek in the woods, within easy reach of water, mud, worms and hot dogs.
Then it happened. Long-time participant Bud Eicher, was drifting a minnow through a deep run we鈥檇 fished all morning. The kids aren鈥檛 kin to Bud but, endeared by a lifelong friendship between he and their grandfather, they call him 鈥淯ncle Buddy.鈥�
Uncle Buddy got a bite. He set the hook and the splashing of a fish commanded the rest of the skunked anglers鈥� attention. But despite this being the day鈥檚 initial hook-up, Bud鈥檚 motive was not to land the fish himself. 鈥淕io, Eli, come here and catch this fish,鈥� he offered.
The boys sprinted over and teamed up to land the prize, one cranking the reel while the other gripped the throbbing rod. After a lot of inefficient effort and tangled line, they dragged it onto the bank, but to the great surprise of the grown-ups, it proved to be a smallmouth bass.
Those kids could not have cared less. It was no trout but it was a wriggling, shining fish, and they pranced around it like adults might celebrate a world-record Atlantic salmon. They poked it, caressed it, washed off the sand for a photo, then set it free, delighting in its streaking return to the depths.
Those kids had landed a fish, and everyone, Gio and Eli most especially, felt the whole elaborate enterprise was a whopping success.
Ben Moyer is a member of the Pennsylvania Outdoor Writers Association and the Outdoor Writers Association of America.