If I had caught any fish this past week ...

August 17, 2008 01:01 am

— By Larry Dablemont
sports@joplinglobe.com
I don’t want to make anyone real awful mad here but I can’t tell you the name of one politician running for anything that I would want to go fishing with. The whole bunch of them seems a sorry lot to me.
The ones who have won and the ones who didn’t win, I put them all in the same sack. But then, what do I know about politics? If I had caught any fish this past week I’d be writing about that.
I once shook Harry Truman’s hand, and I have to admit that I was impressed with him, even though I was only about six at the time. I also liked Ronald Reagan a lot. I can’t remember much about his presidency, as the hunting and fishing was extremely good back then and I was in the woods quite often, somewhat confused about current events. But I really liked Ronald Reagan in those Western movies he made after he got out of politics.
I have read some things about Teddy Roosevelt that makes me think he was a lot like me, since he liked to hunt and fish so much and float rivers, and did some outdoor writing. He and I looked very much alike too. But of course my favorite president will always be Abe Lincoln, who had two things no president or even presidential candidate will ever have again. He was poor, and he was honest.
Earlier in my life I too was poor and honest, and as a matter of fact I am still relatively poor, and I am being honest about that.
My favorite politician was Davy Crockett. He and I were so much alike that it is just amazing, except for the fact that he did get into politics, becoming a Tennessee congressman. My cousins and I watched him on Walt Disney when we were kids, and if you think I wasn’t influenced by him, you should know there is a big sycamore along the Big Piney River with the inscription carved in it.. “L. Dablemont kilt a groundhog here.” There were no bears in the Ozarks when I was a kid, which wound up being an unfortunate thing for that groundhog.
Crockett was loved by his constituents, just as I am loved by my readers, except for a few ladies who got mad about that recent article concerning female bass.
Crockett was for the downtrodden and forgotten poor country people he grew up amongst. He sacrificed his political career to stand against legislation, which would take land away from the Indians the government had promised to them through treaties only a few years before.
That makes him a better man, in my mind, than anyone you will find in Congress today. He was honest, and he thought of others before himself, and he would not put money above all else. Those traits are not found in people in political office today.
Crockett said, “to heck with politics if it means I have to go back on my word,” and he rode off to Texas and into history where, as I understand it, he went down fighting a bunch of illegal immigrants from Mexico. I would have loved to have fished and hunted with Davy Crockett, or Abe Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt, and would love to vote for someone today with just a whisker of their character.
I might ought to exclude Hillary Clinton from any derogatory comments about modern politicians, in light of the fact that several lady readers got so upset about that recent column about female bass, as I mentioned. And yes it is true that I have a picture of me and Hillary Clinton, taken back when I lived in Arkansas, but it was her that wanted it took, not me.
She was one of those ladies that read my column and wanted to learn more about hunting and fishing. There was nothing between us, and all those rumors are just nothing more than idle gossip.
Uncle Norten has been guiding a lot recently on the river for a fellow who cannot cast well, but catches some dandy bass on rubber lures like flukes and tube baits, just by dipping them along and around rocks and logs in places below shoals where bass lurk. He has a long rod and my uncle says he just paddles him in close to good looking spots and the fisherman gets his rod bent considerably and often without making much of a cast ever.
He loses some of the bigger ones with the long and limber rod, but he lands a considerable amount of fish. That method of catching bass on the river might make a good story, if I can get them to let me go.
I got a good fishing story for my magazine recently from Claudia Mundell of Carthage, which I think folks will enjoy reading. Several ladies have sent me articles for the fall issue of the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal, and it is not going to be easy picking a winner from them. There may be a three- or four-way tie for first place.
One lady, Kathleen Young, from Lake of the Ozarks, wrote about spending a summer on the Meramec River with her grandfather when she was only 10, and she said that she has never been fishing since. Talking to her I found out she has worked in the field of high finance and marketing, which is something my magazine is sorely in need of, especially the high finance part. So she has promised to do some work for me in return for a float trip for her own 10-year-old daughter, Gabriella.
We took an afternoon float last week and the little girl was scared to death of the trip until we got started, not realizing that in the hands of a grizzled old veteran riverman like me, her chance getting dumped in the river was almost non-existent. She was hoping to see some wildlife, and did. We floated right up on a muskrat, and she took a picture of it only a few feet away. She also collected tadpoles and frogs and crawdads and rocks.
I hadn’t looked forward to taking a 10-year-old on a float trip until I got there, and the little girl, who was so fascinated and excited with everything, made me enjoy the trip, even though the fishing was poor.
A really unusual thing happened on the trip, as her mother, who hadn’t caught a bass in her entire life, fished hard for an hour with a topwater jerkbait I gave her and couldn’t get a strike. She had purchased a good spin-casting rod and reel and was doing a good job with it, putting the lure in the right places and working it efficiently. But the bass wouldn’t cooperate, and she hadn’t had a strike.
Finally she got the lure hung along a rocky bank and I paddled her over to retrieve it. When it came loose, she just dropped the lure beside the boat only a foot or so from the bank, to reel in slack line, and a two-pound bass came up and jumped all over it. What excitement she had then.
That, along with Uncle Norten’s experiences lately, are making me rethink the way I fish the river.