Monday morning I flew out to San Diego to carry out an assignment as producer/shooter of a video for one of our clients. They’re a membership organization which I shall leave nameless, and they operate a charitable foundation that gives to many different charities and needy organizations throughout the year. They give often to organizations that help children. One they wish to highlight this year is Friends of Rollo.
Named in memory of an avid sport fisherman and boat captain, Friends of Rollo focuses on providing fishing trips for inner city- and other economically challenged or underprivileged children. The charity works with the owners of sport fishing boats and charter companies, and gets tremendous discounts on day-and half-day trips they purchase for the groups, as well as on the rental of rods and reels and the purchase of bait.
While out to sea, the boat crews feed the groups on Friends of Rollo’s tab, and provide expert instruction on fishing techniques and tricks, as well as helping the kids reel in some pretty big fish!
We headed out at noon after I conducted some interviews, and we were barely underway when we stopped at the bait “store,” an extension off a pier that housed an untold number of bait pens. The boat’s crew leaped down to one of the pens and lowered a huge net to lift the sardines and anchovies (no pepproni or mushroom (nyuk, nyuk!)) and hold them captive, and then they grabbed smaller nets on poles and performed a “bucket brigade,” carrying netfuls of bait fish from the large net up to the bait tanks on the boat.
Out to sea at full throttle for about 20 minutes and we stopped for some fishing. After some brief instructions and the laying of some ground rules, these kids ranging in age from about 5 up to about 15 were each responsible for catching their own bait, baiting their own hooks and reeling in their own fish! the crew did help out a lot, especially when the fish weren’t biting so well, and it called for a little know-how.
The biggest frustration all day long was the presence of the sea lions. They chase the boats out to sea and loiter wherever the people are dropping or casting their lines, and then they go for the bait on the hooks. Worse, when someone catches a fish, the sea lions chase the catch and eat it before the fisherman can reel it in! The sea birds – sea gulls, cormorants, ospreys(?) and pelicans – hang out over the fishing lines, too, diving in after the bait when it’s cast out there. The boat captain hooked a fighter on the line and handed the rod to one of the kids, but then took it back when he realized that he had hooked a cormorant around its beak and through the roof of its mouth and one eye-socket. It was unnerving to watch as he used a pair of wire-cutters to sever the eye, which dangled from the socket, and then worked the hook out of the poor bird’s beak. He threw the bird back into the water where it then dived out of sight. I don’t imagine that bird will live much longer.
The last time I was out on a boat of that approximate size – a 75 footer – I did just fine, but, for some reason today, I could not get my sea legs and spent much of the time trying to shake the spinning from my head. I can still say I’ve never gotten seasick, but today I was close. A couple of the kids were looking over the side of the boat, but I don’t know if they fed the fish….
We changed locations a few times and, finally, the sea lions had thinned out enough that the crew were hooking good-sized yellow-tail, bonito and barracuda, and then handing the rod & reels to the kids to bring in. It was sometimes funny to watch as the crewman would bring the fish over the rail. Some kids – boys as well as girls – were absolutely freaked about seeing or touching the fish. But one girl, about age 9, was absolutely fearless. She was snatching her own bait, baiting her own hook, and when the boat captain hauled in a yellow-tail (about 20 inches long and maybe ten pounds) for her, and he told her to hold the fish and smile for the picture (my video camera), she was all about holding that fish! And then she carried it to her bag to keep it.
Around 4:30, after the fishing was done, we headed back for San Diego. One of the crewmen began prepping the fish for the kids to take home, and I videotaped him at work. It was amazing to watch as he deftly gutted each fish species in a distinctly different way, keenly aware of each fish’s anatomy. At one point, as he cleaned one of the yellow-tail (which, I guess is a type of tuna(?)), he sliced off a small chunk and held it up for me. “Here,” he said. “The freshest hamachi you’ll ever taste!”
It was fantastic! If I had never had sashimi (not “sushi,” which actually refers to how the rice is prepared), I would have begged off politely. But I knew better, and probably seemed too eager to chomp on that little morsel! Then I felt guilty…what if the kid who was taking that fish home saw me munching on his family’s dinner?
When we docked, every kid walked off that boat with a small bag containing at least one fish, and others with several pounds of fish to bring home to their families! Some of the kids seemed a little perplexed by the cleaned and dressed fish they had, wondering, I think, what happened to the head, and why it was all cut up!
And now, as I sit here and type, the room seems to be rocking to and fro, as now I can’t shake the motion of the sea, and I fear I’ll get seasick sitting still!
This post begs for photographs, but I was not tasked with shooting stills. It was well enough that I had to conduct and shoot interviews and all the other footage by myself while fighting off seasickness; I would never have had the time to take photos!
Friends of Rollo certainly seems like a worthwhile cause if you're into supporting charities that provide disadvantaged kids with interesting, horizon-expanding, possibly life-changing activities. Give them a look.
Showing posts with label fishin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fishin. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Reuniting and Reminiscing: A Weekend of Looking Back
This weekend brought something that I had been anticipating for 5 years, and looking forward to for about 6 weeks. Because just about everyone my age is in the midst of trying to raise 2.3 healthy children with their heads screwed on straight, or trying to secure as much capital to sustain them in their Golden Years when Social Security has been cashed out by the politicians, nobody in my high school graduating class was interested in taking on the daunting task of organizing our 25-year class reunion.
But then, sometime in the middle of September I received a notice in an e-mail that we were having an informal, unofficial, hastily assembled reunion on November 10. WOO HOO!
It was held at a sports bar down in the same Chicago south suburb where we all attended high school, a bar which, as it turns out, is co-owned by one of our classmates!
I can’t even begin to describe the joy of seeing so many familiar faces, as well as some faces not so familiar until I read the name tags! There were a couple of people there who had missed the 10- and the 20-year reunions, so it was doubly fun to see them for the first time in 25 years.
As I now live approximately 55 miles from the town where I grew up, and I was certain that I would leave the venue at a late hour, and there was likely to be more than a little alcohol on my breath, I decided to make a weekend of it. I booked a hotel room in the area and planned to spend the night there after the reunion, and then to spend Sunday visiting my father, who is living in a nursing home.
And that’s just how it worked out, except I didn’t exactly spend the night in the hotel room, but more like the morning, as I didn’t get back into my room until a little past 3:30 a.m!
The good thing was that check-out time was noon, and a mere 30 steps away (give or take) from the hotel is a honkin’ huge Cracker Barrel Restaurant! Another good thing was that in eight hours of partying, I drank a grand total of three beers, so the only thing threatening my drive back to the hotel was fatigue…and the freak November thunderstorm that struck while I drove, and there wasn’t even a hint of hangover.
•------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------•
I slept in just a little this morning, arising around 9:40am. Breakfast at Cracker Barrel was quick and yummy, and soon I was checked out and on the road to visit Dad. Since I was in another suburb a few miles west of where the reunion was held, I followed a different route than I usually would follow to get to Dad’s.
I’ve driven down Illinois Route 50 certainly hundreds of times throughout my life. And if I go far enough south, through and past the town of Monee (pronounced moe-NEE), heading toward Peotone (pronounced PEE-uh-TONE), my mind fires to life with childhood memories. Mom had an aunt and uncle who owned a farm just off of Route 50, where they raised pigs and chicken (and probably more, but all I remember are the pigs and chickens) and, during the summer, especially, Dad and Mom, just about once every two weeks, would throw two or three of us kids in the back seat, and we’d ride through just a little bit of country until we got to the farm. I’m sure Mom got the family discount on eggs, as we always returned home with about three-dozen!
If my life depended on it, I couldn’t find that farm again today…if it even still exists. I don’t remember which road it’s on from Route 50, or even how far to go along that road.
But there’s another memory along Route 50, one that is more precious and more vivid than any of the rides to the “egg farm.”
With Dad off on Mondays, he would often lift the burden of watching me on summer days from one of my siblings – as Mom had gone back to work – and take me with him on his errands and visits to friends around town. Every couple of weeks it was to Joliet, where he would get his hair cut by the barber under whom he had apprenticed. Other times it was off to the junkyard to drop off brass and copper he had scavenged or had collected from handyman jobs he had done for friends around town. Once in a while we picked up barber supplies.
But one particular Monday morning – I was around age eight or nine, my best guess – he said to me, “Let’s go fishin’.” I climbed into his blue Ford F-150 pickup truck and watched our little world go by as he worked through the gears of the “three on a tree” to get the truck up to speed and out to Illinois Route 50.
We hummed along the Route for a few minutes and then he pulled to the side of the four-lane road, essentially in the middle of farmland. I looked around and asked, “What’s wrong?”
Dad just said, “We’re here.”
I climbed down out of the truck and looked around. There was no lake or pond to be seen in any direction.
“We’re where?”
“Just follow me,” said Dad, and I did.
He grabbed the poles and handed me the can of earthworms we had picked up at a bait shop, and he led me away from the pavement and into the tall grass beside the road, down the embankment and into a small gulley, actually a dry creek bed that bent and ducked under the road. He pointed in the direction away from the road and said, “Through there.”
I looked to where he was pointing and saw what, to me at that time, was one of the coolest sights ever: a concrete spillway underneath a concrete arch bridge supporting the Illinois Central Railroad over the creek – only I didn’t know those things then. It was just the coolest thing!
“I hope there’s water back there,” he said as he ambled over the loose river rocks.
In the moment, I took him to mean that he had never been there before, and that we were both discovering it together. But since then, I realize it’s possible that he wasn’t sure if it was as dry back there as the creek bed where we stood. I followed him through the tunnel formed by the archway, over the smooth concrete floor. Out the other side I saw that there was a small pond and, at my feet, a ledge where I could sit and dangle my legs over the water while our bobbers stood sentry over our worms dying below, savage hooks rammed through their bodies, and drowning to add the final insult to their injury. The water was clear enough to see minnows and the occasional larger small fish swimming around near the shallows and near our ledge, so Dad was encouraged and confident we’d catch something.
Dad had even packed a lunch – his favorite, and sometimes mine – hard salami on buttered Italian bread.
We did catch a few fish that day, but they were all tiny and not worth taking home. We left empty-handed though not unhappy, but I unwittingly brought with me a memory I would have, it turns out, for a lifetime.
On Sunday, as I passed through the other side of Monee, those memories along Illinois Route 50 fired up again. I drove past what I thought might be the turnoff to the “egg farm,” and, as the landscape rolled under me, my surroundings told me I was close to that special spot to where Dad had brought me that fine summer day so long ago.
I had tried to find it once before, one summer day; I think heavy foliage on the side of the road had obscured it from view and, at 55 miles per hour…or faster…I just missed it. But today, since November has stripped the trees of their camouflage, after doubting such an idyllic spot could remain after so many years, I was able to spot the tunnel with ease!
I drove on past it, but nostalgia nagged at me to turn back, to gaze upon the archway, to take photos with the camera I had brought with me to capture reunion shots! So I did. I returned, finally, to the spot that has decorated my memories like cherished photos in an oft-opened shoebox.
I stood on the bridge that carries the cars over the creek, and I gazed upon the hole beneath the train tracks.
I was in no hurry. Dad didn’t know I was on my way to see him. Nothing else was on my agenda. So down the embankment I went!
The creek bed was dry – the past summer’s drought had probably kept it dry for months. I ambled over perhaps the very same individual rocks Dad’s and my shoes had touched those 35 years ago!
I walked through the tunnel and came out the other side and… it’s exactly the same! My educated and experienced eye updated my memory and I now understand that the pond where we caught and tossed back a handful of fish is actually a sort of flood basin. The embankment beyond the pond shows evidence of some quite fierce water flow where man -- long before Dad and I were there -- has manipulated the earth to forcibly divert the creek through the tunnel, under the rail bed, under the roadway, and off through the farmland. In the spring, this is probably a very dangerous place to be!
I don’t remember the strangely constructed pipeworks, evidently drainage from somewhere, and the water appears now to be quite filthy. I saw no fish swimming about. It could be contaminated by pollution, or it could just be that the pond spent too much time unrefreshed by rains and creek flow, and its population went extinct in the stagnant water.
But it’s still there! That idyllic spot from my memory exists relatively intact! Autumn has taken away most of the foliage, and today’s gray November sky painted everything in drab, but physically, the spot is exactly as I remember it.
I drove on to visit Dad at the nursing home. He’s 84 now. His condition may not have worsened, but he certainly hasn’t improved. His mind is still pretty sharp, but he doesn’t recall the day he took me fishing in that secret, special spot so many years back, not even after I showed him the photos.
I’m neither surprised nor upset that he doesn’t remember it, or that it didn’t resonate with him as such a monumentally special, memorable moment with his youngest child. That day I think he just wanted to catch some fish!
The funny part of it all is that I can’t stand fishing. I’ve always hated it.
But I love my dad. And that day was a perfect, golden, special time for me, with him.
But then, sometime in the middle of September I received a notice in an e-mail that we were having an informal, unofficial, hastily assembled reunion on November 10. WOO HOO!
It was held at a sports bar down in the same Chicago south suburb where we all attended high school, a bar which, as it turns out, is co-owned by one of our classmates!
I can’t even begin to describe the joy of seeing so many familiar faces, as well as some faces not so familiar until I read the name tags! There were a couple of people there who had missed the 10- and the 20-year reunions, so it was doubly fun to see them for the first time in 25 years.
As I now live approximately 55 miles from the town where I grew up, and I was certain that I would leave the venue at a late hour, and there was likely to be more than a little alcohol on my breath, I decided to make a weekend of it. I booked a hotel room in the area and planned to spend the night there after the reunion, and then to spend Sunday visiting my father, who is living in a nursing home.
And that’s just how it worked out, except I didn’t exactly spend the night in the hotel room, but more like the morning, as I didn’t get back into my room until a little past 3:30 a.m!
The good thing was that check-out time was noon, and a mere 30 steps away (give or take) from the hotel is a honkin’ huge Cracker Barrel Restaurant! Another good thing was that in eight hours of partying, I drank a grand total of three beers, so the only thing threatening my drive back to the hotel was fatigue…and the freak November thunderstorm that struck while I drove, and there wasn’t even a hint of hangover.
•------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------••------•
I slept in just a little this morning, arising around 9:40am. Breakfast at Cracker Barrel was quick and yummy, and soon I was checked out and on the road to visit Dad. Since I was in another suburb a few miles west of where the reunion was held, I followed a different route than I usually would follow to get to Dad’s.
I’ve driven down Illinois Route 50 certainly hundreds of times throughout my life. And if I go far enough south, through and past the town of Monee (pronounced moe-NEE), heading toward Peotone (pronounced PEE-uh-TONE), my mind fires to life with childhood memories. Mom had an aunt and uncle who owned a farm just off of Route 50, where they raised pigs and chicken (and probably more, but all I remember are the pigs and chickens) and, during the summer, especially, Dad and Mom, just about once every two weeks, would throw two or three of us kids in the back seat, and we’d ride through just a little bit of country until we got to the farm. I’m sure Mom got the family discount on eggs, as we always returned home with about three-dozen!
If my life depended on it, I couldn’t find that farm again today…if it even still exists. I don’t remember which road it’s on from Route 50, or even how far to go along that road.
But there’s another memory along Route 50, one that is more precious and more vivid than any of the rides to the “egg farm.”
With Dad off on Mondays, he would often lift the burden of watching me on summer days from one of my siblings – as Mom had gone back to work – and take me with him on his errands and visits to friends around town. Every couple of weeks it was to Joliet, where he would get his hair cut by the barber under whom he had apprenticed. Other times it was off to the junkyard to drop off brass and copper he had scavenged or had collected from handyman jobs he had done for friends around town. Once in a while we picked up barber supplies.
But one particular Monday morning – I was around age eight or nine, my best guess – he said to me, “Let’s go fishin’.” I climbed into his blue Ford F-150 pickup truck and watched our little world go by as he worked through the gears of the “three on a tree” to get the truck up to speed and out to Illinois Route 50.
We hummed along the Route for a few minutes and then he pulled to the side of the four-lane road, essentially in the middle of farmland. I looked around and asked, “What’s wrong?”
Dad just said, “We’re here.”
I climbed down out of the truck and looked around. There was no lake or pond to be seen in any direction.
“We’re where?”
“Just follow me,” said Dad, and I did.
He grabbed the poles and handed me the can of earthworms we had picked up at a bait shop, and he led me away from the pavement and into the tall grass beside the road, down the embankment and into a small gulley, actually a dry creek bed that bent and ducked under the road. He pointed in the direction away from the road and said, “Through there.”
I looked to where he was pointing and saw what, to me at that time, was one of the coolest sights ever: a concrete spillway underneath a concrete arch bridge supporting the Illinois Central Railroad over the creek – only I didn’t know those things then. It was just the coolest thing!
“I hope there’s water back there,” he said as he ambled over the loose river rocks.
In the moment, I took him to mean that he had never been there before, and that we were both discovering it together. But since then, I realize it’s possible that he wasn’t sure if it was as dry back there as the creek bed where we stood. I followed him through the tunnel formed by the archway, over the smooth concrete floor. Out the other side I saw that there was a small pond and, at my feet, a ledge where I could sit and dangle my legs over the water while our bobbers stood sentry over our worms dying below, savage hooks rammed through their bodies, and drowning to add the final insult to their injury. The water was clear enough to see minnows and the occasional larger small fish swimming around near the shallows and near our ledge, so Dad was encouraged and confident we’d catch something.
Dad had even packed a lunch – his favorite, and sometimes mine – hard salami on buttered Italian bread.
We did catch a few fish that day, but they were all tiny and not worth taking home. We left empty-handed though not unhappy, but I unwittingly brought with me a memory I would have, it turns out, for a lifetime.
On Sunday, as I passed through the other side of Monee, those memories along Illinois Route 50 fired up again. I drove past what I thought might be the turnoff to the “egg farm,” and, as the landscape rolled under me, my surroundings told me I was close to that special spot to where Dad had brought me that fine summer day so long ago.
I had tried to find it once before, one summer day; I think heavy foliage on the side of the road had obscured it from view and, at 55 miles per hour…or faster…I just missed it. But today, since November has stripped the trees of their camouflage, after doubting such an idyllic spot could remain after so many years, I was able to spot the tunnel with ease!
I drove on past it, but nostalgia nagged at me to turn back, to gaze upon the archway, to take photos with the camera I had brought with me to capture reunion shots! So I did. I returned, finally, to the spot that has decorated my memories like cherished photos in an oft-opened shoebox.
I stood on the bridge that carries the cars over the creek, and I gazed upon the hole beneath the train tracks.
I was in no hurry. Dad didn’t know I was on my way to see him. Nothing else was on my agenda. So down the embankment I went!
The creek bed was dry – the past summer’s drought had probably kept it dry for months. I ambled over perhaps the very same individual rocks Dad’s and my shoes had touched those 35 years ago!
I walked through the tunnel and came out the other side and… it’s exactly the same! My educated and experienced eye updated my memory and I now understand that the pond where we caught and tossed back a handful of fish is actually a sort of flood basin. The embankment beyond the pond shows evidence of some quite fierce water flow where man -- long before Dad and I were there -- has manipulated the earth to forcibly divert the creek through the tunnel, under the rail bed, under the roadway, and off through the farmland. In the spring, this is probably a very dangerous place to be!
I don’t remember the strangely constructed pipeworks, evidently drainage from somewhere, and the water appears now to be quite filthy. I saw no fish swimming about. It could be contaminated by pollution, or it could just be that the pond spent too much time unrefreshed by rains and creek flow, and its population went extinct in the stagnant water.
But it’s still there! That idyllic spot from my memory exists relatively intact! Autumn has taken away most of the foliage, and today’s gray November sky painted everything in drab, but physically, the spot is exactly as I remember it.
I drove on to visit Dad at the nursing home. He’s 84 now. His condition may not have worsened, but he certainly hasn’t improved. His mind is still pretty sharp, but he doesn’t recall the day he took me fishing in that secret, special spot so many years back, not even after I showed him the photos.
I’m neither surprised nor upset that he doesn’t remember it, or that it didn’t resonate with him as such a monumentally special, memorable moment with his youngest child. That day I think he just wanted to catch some fish!
The funny part of it all is that I can’t stand fishing. I’ve always hated it.
But I love my dad. And that day was a perfect, golden, special time for me, with him.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)