CityView Magazine

8 | June 2020 O M C F A D Y E N ' S M U S I N G S BY BILL MCFADYEN O ne of the rites of spring in a culture such as mine is the grasping of a varnished length of cane. Knotted onto its wispy end is a strand of thin monofilament line of approximately the same length as the cane itself. readed onto the line is the smallest of natural corks, the kind with a thread through its middle to which the monofilament is first tied and then pulled through the center of that cork. Using one's front teeth, a tiny piece of slotted lead is bitten onto the line below the cork. e last accoutrement is a wire hook tied with a blood knot to the line's end. So armed and following a trip to the cricket, worm and minnow store, a man in my culture is ready to enjoy the bounty of post-winter waters. ankfully, I have friends in North Fayetteville who have allowed their primary water feature to overpopulate with fish. While they built the pond to be home to black crappie, arguably the finest meat fish in our region – and certainly so in a culture such as mine – the better known largemouth bass had overtaken their pond, as bass are prone to do when le unregulated by those who own fillet knives. On this late April morning, one of cloudy skies with brisk, but not cold, temperature, I spent several hours floating around in a very small cra. Impaled on the aforementioned hook were very small sacrificial shiner minnows whose dying act it was to entice those crappie to a last supper. Well, to the last supper where they would not actually be the supper. Over several hours, I did harvest four pretty good ones that ended up in my fryer that night. e chief impediment to more, however, were those prolific and heretofore unmolested bass. I had to go through 25 of them, none more than 10 inches long, to finally make a two- person meal out of the crappie. e chief gamekeeper of the pond instructed me before my arrival that I would encounter such an unbalanced population. He made it my responsibility to begin reversing the overpopulation. Knowing that I am an owner of a very expensive and well-used fillet knife, he said that it would be my job to harvest any bass less than 14 inches in length. He did not care what I did with them, as long as I resisted any inclination to release them back into the waters. About 1 p.m., I reloaded my little boat into the bed of the truck along with my cane pole and tiny tackle box and cooler full of fish. It was only then that I began to think of the toil in cleaning almost 30 fish. You see, while the gamekeeper cared not if the fish were food or fertilizer, I am the former fishing padawan of one Reginald M. Barton, Sr. He taught me how to pick a wispy but strong cane pole. He taught me discrimination toward anything but that tiny cork; how to bite a lead split shot onto the line; when to use a wire hook; and how to tie a blood knot. He also taught me to eat what I killed. Mercy, how many fish did we eat in our 55 years together? So of all options for those fish in the cooler, fertilizer was not one of them. If they were to die, then they would fry. One acceptable Uncle-Reg-approved loophole was M O R E T H A N 1 0 0

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