Last Updated on March 15, 2019 by Terry
There is an old story of a father teaching his son a lesson about life. The story takes place back in the 1950s.
There was a creek near their home, and it was the son’s custom to go fishing with his buddies every Saturday during the spring. They would grab their poles and take off as soon as their mom would let them go after breakfast.
This particular morning, the father wanted his son to help him with their garden. They planted quite a crop of fresh vegetables that they would enjoy for months. The son was now old enough to help his dad and good old dad wanted him to help out with some of the chores.
The son was devastated that he could not go fishing with his friends. His dad informed him that he could go, but he would have to plant the green beans while the dad was on the other side of the garden planting his tomatoes and potatoes.
Dad had showed him how to make a row in the dirt, drop in the seeds, and cover them up just right. He was doing just fine but noticed there were a lot of seeds. He remembered that his dad had told him: “As soon as you finish all the seeds, you can go fishing.”
Suddenly an idea formed in his young brain. “If I just sling these seeds across this end of the garden, they will all be gone.” So, he did just that. He went to the other end of the garden where dad was and showed him the empty bucket. Dad thanked him for helping and told him he could go.
A couple of weeks went by and one Saturday morning at breakfast dad asked the son to walk with him out to the garden and let him show the son all the vegetables that were starting to sprout.
They started at the end dad had planted and worked their way to the other side. When they got to the area where the beans had been planted, they could see where a couple of rows of beans were popping up through the soil and suddenly beans were coming up all over the place. It was obvious what had happened. The father turned to his son and said, “Always remember son, in life the beans will always come up.”
One afternoon back in about 1977 or 1978, you know who and I hooked up to our boat and headed to a large creek with an area you could barely launch your boat.
You couldn’t back in too far or you might get stuck. We saw some buckets near the launch and being nosey we looked around. There were small perch and tadpoles that you could use for baiting trotlines or yo yos in the buckets.
We had a few yo yos with us, so we took the buckets. I backed in the trailer and the Camp Boss cranked it up and pulled the boat off the trailer. I pulled the truck away and parked it and ran to the boat and jumped in.
We were fishing some spinner baits in a lot of brush along the bank and setting a few yo yos. We noticed someone had tied out many limb lines baited with live perch and tadpoles. We made fun of the guy being he didn’t really know how to fish.
About a half mile from where we started, I noticed up ahead one of the limb lines had a fish. As we got closer, I could tell it was a pretty good flathead catfish. Turns out he weighed about 7-8 pounds.
We discussed our options and decided that the lines were abandoned and the fish would die if we didn’t take it off, so we saved the fishes life by putting him in our live well. (Of course, it would be short lived as we would fillet him later for food.) We caught a few bass to go with our big cat and it was getting late. We headed for the truck.
When Allan ran the boat up to the bank, and I had jumped off to back in the trailer. There was now another truck there. It was the fellow with the limb lines. We had a confrontation with him about an hour earlier as we crossed paths in our boats. He asked if we had caught any.
We informed him that we were proficient at fishing and of course we had caught many. He asked us what we had caught. We told him “many bass and one big catfish. (We’re kinda stupid.)
He accused us of stealing his flathead. We insisted that we had caught the fish on a spinner bait. He assured us he knew more about catfishing than anyone and flatheads would only be caught on perch or tadpoles.
An argument ensued and he finally relented knowing he could not prove it. He informed us that we may have gotten away with his big fish but he knew that we knew we were lying. He made some smart alec remark about “hoping we choked on it” and motored away.
Anyway, I backed the trailer in the creek. Allan started running the boat up on the trailer. I saw in the mirror that he was not able to get the boat all the way up on the trailer so I decided to back in a little farther. Suddenly my back tires dropped about a foot straight down.
The bank had a drop off and we were stuck! We tried everything but the truck would not pull out. We looked at the other truck and the keys were in it and he had a chain in the bed.
He should have known better than to leave his keys in his truck, but since he did, we concluded that he wouldn’t mind if someone borrowed it. We started the truck and backed it up to ours. We tried as hard as we could but could not pull it out.
We were spinning all over the place and probably overheating the guy’s truck and probably burned up his clutch. We finally gave up and walked up to the highway and we headed for the nearest house. An older lady lived there and was very reluctant to allow us in to call for a wrecker. We attempted to convince her we were not ordinary criminals and just because we were all muddy and haggard looking it would be ok to let us in.
She did not agree and locked us out of her house, but she did make the call to the wrecker service for us. We walked back to the truck and waited. By now other trucks were there to launch. We had everyone blocked. The guy whose fish we rescued, and whose truck we borrowed offered to help.
We thanked him but turned him down since we knew it wouldn’t work from trying it earlier. We told him we had a wrecker on the way. We wondered why he would offer to help us, knowing we had taken his fish. We decided that GOD must have spoken to him about helping those that can’t take care of themselves or something. The wrecker finally came and pulled us out.
So, although we didn’t choke on the fish, we borrowed some bait, rescued a fish, borrowed the guy’s truck, scared an old lady, and made a bunch of people mad that couldn’t get their boats launched. Of course, we got stuck and had to pay a wrecker. Like the man said: “your beans will always come up!”
