Once I said I’ll never do this again; now I’m teaching my grandson how

There are seven nice catfish in the cold-water tank outside my basement which I will have to clean later.

My grandson and I took them earlier this morning from the nearby river on a trotline and some limb-lines. Ryan is only 6 years old and it was his very first trip.

I wanted to take him because I went on my first trotlining trip with my dad when I was about his age at the Henry Hayes Eddy. Back then, trotlines were always set for big flathead catfish because the Big Piney had no channel catfish.

Grandpa always said he thought it was because a low-water dam at Fort Leonard Wood kept them from coming up out of the Gasconade.

There I was at the age of six, in the wooden johnboat with my dad, about midnight, running and re-baiting the line in the glow of his carbide headlamp, when the water around us seemed to explode and a monster surfaced. It scared the mischief out of me for a good week. It was a 26-pound flathead, the first one I had ever seen, and it was engulfing, as much as possible, another flathead which was about six pounds. The smaller fish had been caught, and the larger one for some reason or another had tried to swallow it and couldn’t spit it out.

Dad landed them both, and there they were in the darkness, flopping around in the boat and I said right then and there if I ever grew up I would never do that again.

But I did, bunches of times before I graduated from high school, and hundreds more times since. Last night was just one more time. My daughter Christy helped me catch 24 green sunfish out of a nearby pond, and went along to be sure that her little nephew was safe on such a perilous trip.

We set 14 hooks on the trotline and 10 limb-lines. I would explain the difference, but shucks if you don’t know the difference already you shouldn’t be reading this column, you are probably beyond all hope and ought to move to the suburbs. I keep explaining that this column is for grizzled old outdoor veterans.

Anyway, Ryan couldn’t grasp the whatfor’s and whereas’s of it all, until this morning when he saw the results. When a 10- or 12-pound flathead whipped that trotline back and forth in my hand, and splashed water on him with its tail, his eyes were the size of spinner baits. Half the limb-lines had nice channel catfish, which made those limbs dance up and down as we eased in close to land them.

In view of such excitement, it won’t be Ryan’s last trip. He has it figured out and has come up with some ideas to make it all more productive.

This little boy is about to start first grade, and I am a little worried about the fact that he is a great deal like some of my college professors. He has spent way too much time with the books and not enough times out in the woods and on the river. As we sat there admiring the difference between the flathead and channel catfish, he told me the smaller fish was the official state fish of New Hampshire.

Then later, we got to talking about hard-shell turtles and I mentioned dinosaurs, and he got into things I never heard of, telling me that it had recently been determined that the Brontosaurus was actually a non-existent creature because the paleontologists who discovered it got the wrong skull to go with the big creature’s body.

He explained that the name Brontosaurus meant “thunder lizard” and that actually scientists had renamed it, (and he told me the name and spelled it for me but I can’t remember it) so that now it is a creature whose name makes it known as “deceptive lizard.”

I told him we were going to talk about things he could better understand, like bullfrogs and blue herons. But somehow, he kept getting off on deeper subjects and we always wound up with me asking him questions about something, and I still don’t know if the kid knows what he is talking about or if he is just having some fun with me.

Ryan keeps urging me to finish the fishing book that I have been working on for years, “Recollections of an Old Fashioned Angler.” I know some of you won’t believe this, but I swear he has read all of my other books except “Ridge Runner,” which his mother won’t let him read because she thinks it might be too strong for him. So now he is writing his own book and he wants me to let him write a chapter in “Recollections” which would be his account of catching his first big fish, a one-pound bluegill he caught from a neighbor’s farm pond.

I wish I could take my little grandson back to the wondrous outdoor world I saw as a boy, but much of it is gone. He will learn about what is left of it from me, as I learned from my grandfather and father. I don’t want him to be like those college professors and most of the new breed of outdoor writers who get it all from a book.

There is so much to see, and marvel at, that the books can’t touch. It might be that his grandfather is the only one who will teach him about life the way it is, rather than how we want it to be. He has to know that when a bobcat pulls down a fawn, or a hawk begins to eat a quail before he kills it, there is nothing wrong about it, any more than there is anything wrong with a man taking a squirrel with a gun, or skinning and eating a catfish which fell for a baited hook. He may not hear about creation when he gets on the computer or in college, but he will hear it from his grandpa, and it will be something I show him more than tell him.

It is a strange world we are about to see, I hope he can learn how to escape the absurdity of it, and grasp the solid down-to-earth, unchanging, common sense principals that are the same today as ever. Sometimes you can’t find those in a concrete and pavement, anything-goes world where men are changing the definitions of what is “good” and what is “normal.”

“Yes Ryan,” I told him on the way home this morning, “If you spend time outdoors, you will see that things change constantly, and yet forever remain the same.”

Not wanting to get him too confused, I changed the subject. “Now this thing about the channel catfish being the state fish of New Hampshire, are you sure about that?”

“Positively, Grandpa!” was his reply.

“I have to be sure about stuff like that if I am going to put it in my column,” I told him. “Nothing goes in there without some solid research behind it!”

It is hard to cover all I would like to talk about in one column per week. But next week, I will be writing about the eagle nesting nearby, the rain-crows that have just moved in, soft-shelled turtles and green sunfish and other amazing things I see outdoors each week.

There are black raspberries all over up here on Lightnin Ridge, and I would be willing to share them with anyone not afraid of ticks and copperheads.

Address correspondence to Larry Dablemont, Box 22, Bolivar, Mo., 65613. Send e-mail to lightninridge@windstrea.net, check the Web site www.larrydablemont.com, or call (417) 777-5227.

Volunteers from Tuscaloosa paying it forward in Joplin

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