Gun Laws Work. I'm Living Proof

Allow me to introduce myself.

     I’m 55. I’m a single dad. A college graduate. I work for my alma mater, I have a business on the side, I work as hard, or harder than anyone else I know. I am a member of a local church, attend regularly, read the Bible daily, and even write Faith-based books. I’m pretty much, by all accounts, a decent guy.

     I’m also a perfect example of why gun laws work. And why they don’t.

A month ago, I traded a friend of mine a nice MacBook Pro for a Ruger SR9. It was the first gun I’ve owned in 28 years. In fact, it was only the second gun I’ve even touched in 28 years. Not because I am anti-gun…I absolutely love shooting and love hunting and the outdoors. In fact, my dream is to write the kind of articles and books that the late Gene Hill wrote. Stories of the emotional attachment, and the memories created by fine firearms, and days in the field.

     But, until September 28^th of this year (2018 for future readers) I was prohibited from owning or possessing firearms. I was a convicted felon.

     I never did anything violent, just stupid. In 1990, I had a construction business. I also had a partner. He had a drug addiction. Having never been around drugs and being unfamiliar with the signs of addiction, I didn’t recognize the telltale traits. We were cruising along, doing well, and I decided to take a week of vacation to hang with my best friend before he got married.

     The Friday before I left, my partner and I wrote out our bills, I signed the checks, (Lindsey, for some reason, never wanted to sign a check, even though our account was set up for either of our signature, not requiring both) we sent them out, and I told him I’d see him about ten days later.

     When I returned, my answering machine (remember those?) was full. Employees were calling, suppliers were calling, customers were calling. “Where was Lindsey?” asked the customers, because he apparently hadn’t shown up on the job he was running all week. “Why did our checks bounce?” asked our employees. We had two crews, and both Lindsey’s crew and my crew went to the bank to cash their paychecks and were told the money was gone. My suppliers repeated the same lament.

     Before I left, we had deposited about $12000 in receipts from jobs we completed, so the money was there when we wrote the checks and I signed them. I called Lindsey but could not find him…or my checkbook. The next morning, Monday, I went to the bank. The lady we normally dealt with looked up my account when I told her what had happened, and she went white. The account was overdrawn almost $7000. She checked the recent history and saw that Lindsey had gone to another branch -where nobody would ask why he was doing this without me—and withdrawn $9000 of the $12000 we’d deposited. Then he vanished.

     I found out later that he went on a drug bender and wound up in a rehab outside of Washington DC. My checkbook mysteriously reappeared on the front seat of my truck overnight, but Lindsey never contacted me again. I sold the extra truck, and the extra tools, (fortunately, the business was all mine before I met Lindsey and I still owned the assets). I managed to repay about $5000 of the debt within a week or two. My crew got paid, most vendors got paid, but there was still about $4000 outstanding. I went to each person personally and asked them for patience. I explained what happened. Most were kind and waited until I paid them back. But some of the vendors were larger corporations and had rules they could not bend for me.

     In a two-week period, I was arrested 11 times for bad checks. (Since I had signed them, I was on the hook) I could have gone after Lindsey for embezzlement, but I had no idea where he was and he had nothing of value. I was too busy trying to salvage my own life now. Three of the checks were over $500 (the largest being $1025) and so in Delaware, I was now charged with a felony.

     Long and short of it…by the time I got to court I had repaid most of the debts, but the state wanted at least a piece of a scalp and so I accepted a plea deal to plead guilty to two felonies and drop the other to a misdemeanor. I was stupid to do so, but I was 27 years old, I had never been in trouble before, I was afraid I would go to jail, and I had a public defender. That added up to me accepting the felonies.

     I walked out of the courthouse, thinking I was lucky to be walking to my car instead of the DOC van, heading to prison. I got probation and within two years, all of this was in the past. Except that I couldn’t own a gun anymore. And I couldn’t vote. And whenever I filled out a job application I had to check that box. I was ashamed and broken-hearted.

     The day after court, I took my beloved Glenfield Model 778 shotgun to a pawn shop that a friend of mine owned and sold it to him. I knew Dave would give me a better price than anyone else. I tried not to cry when I signed it over to him. I saw the notch on the fore stock where I’d commemorated my first buck. I thought about all the years hunting with my best friend and all the times we’d had as boys -becoming men— with our guns in hand. 

     That was March of 1991. Other than one afternoon in 1997, when we were in Utah on our honeymoon and my wife’s friends who owned a farm insisted we go out back and shoot some clays…I had not held a gun, owned a gun, possessed a gun until three weeks ago.

     In 2011, my “adopted dad” Poppa John passed away. Pop was a legendary hunter and shooting instructor back home and he’d always wanted to go hunting with me. He knew about my legal issue and he kept pushing me to pursue a governor’s pardon. I investigated it once back then, but the paperwork was daunting. We always talked about eventually hunting together, and Pop teaching me to shoot trap. But Pop passed before I got around to getting that pardon and to my regret, we never hunted together. (Even as I write these words, I have tears. I miss Pop and I miss the hunts we would have had)

     I’ve had opportunity to shoot. I was offered a Beretta P380 once. A friend of mine, who had no idea that I was restricted, had taken it off a guy at a bar where he was a bouncer. The guy was also a felon and did not try getting it back. I told Mike I didn’t have the money to buy it and that was that.

     In 2013, Delaware restored voting rights, so I could vote again. That got me started back on the road to a pardon. And so, in 2017 I started the process. In June of 2018, I appeared before the Board of Pardons and was recommended. In September 2018, Governor Carney signed my papers and restored my rights. I will tell you that twice in the process I wept. The first time, when the Board said they recommended me unanimously without my even having to testify. The second was on that Friday, September 28^th, 2018, when I opened my mailbox and saw the letter from the governor. I went in my house, opened the letter and read those words. I saw the gold seal affixed to the page and I broke down in tears. I did this right. My fellow citizens decided that I had lived my life in such a way that I deserved to be restored to normalcy.

     I never mentioned it to anyone during the process and no one asked, but I was proud of the fact that I abided by the rules from the moment I became a felon, until the day my pardon was in my mailbox.

     And that is the point of this story. The current gun laws are more than adequate. They succeed because of people like me. People who understand where we messed up -even if we were a victim ourselves—and we understand what it takes to get this fixed. And in the time between, we abide by the law. I knew the penalty for having a gun. I chose to obey the law. There are criminals in this world who also know the penalty. They choose not to obey the law. They straw-purchase, or they steal guns, or they buy them in the black market. But regardless how they acquire a gun, they’ve acquired it illegally.

     They were already law breakers, so they just see gun laws as merely another law to break. Me…I saw them as a guaranteed trip to prison. My obedience to the laws came at a great cost. It cost me years in the field with my best friend. It cost me precious memories with Pop. I was ashamed and embarrassed. But I abided by the law.

     Gun laws were made for people like me. Because people like me abide by the law. Criminals do not. And no law on any books anywhere will change that. In 27 years of restriction, I never used a gun in a crime. Never shot anyone. Never robbed at gunpoint. Because I chose to abide by the law. The laws are just fine.

I’m living proof.

Taking the Time...

  It's August 11, 2018. Another summer careens to it's end. No other season seems to speed by the way summer does. Winter drags on for what feels like an eternity. Spring, with it's endless rains and quirky temperature shifts, seems to last several weeks too long. Spring is tolerated only because we've grown so weary of winter that we'll endure yet another rain storm, because it means summer is just that much closer. Fall is confusing. It begins as nothing more than a date on the calendar. It's still warm and the insects still buzz about, and the days are still somewhat longer.

     Then, sometime around the third week of October, fall shows her self. One morning you wake up and you can see your breath again and the trees begin to turn colors. In the south, fall can be a very pleasant time of year. When I lived in Tennessee, fall was easily the best of the three seasons. The blistering summer heat was finally gone, and the chill of winter never really showed itself until Christmas. The fall months were full of warm sunny days and cool, but not cold, nights. Here in Virginia, it's similar, although the pleasant fall weather gives way to the cold of winter a few weeks earlier, and winter stays much longer.

     Back in the Delaware Valley, where I grew up, fall was a brief respite, a quick break between the sweltering dogs days of summer, and the seemingly eternal grey, cold of winter. By Halloween you needed a coat. Not your "big coat" reserved for the depth of winter, but a coat nonetheless. By November you woke to frost on the ground and had to scrape your windows -albeit lightly-- a few times each week.

By Christmas, it was cold. Mostly. There was always the inevitable warming trend around Christmas. Back home we dream of a White Christmas, every year the weather patterns tease us and give the impression that "this will be the year" ...and then it rains. It rains on Christmas Eve. Period.

     But today it's the middle of August. Technically five weeks of summer remain, but everyone knows that summer ends on that horrible Tuesday morning in September, the day after Labor Day, when all fun comes crashing to an end. It's August 11th, and I've fished once this year, so far. 

Once. 

     I live in a place where the choice between which of the four beautiful, pristine, productive rivers I want to fish is as hard to make as which new Corvette I'd want someone to give me. The answer is "yes." I dreamed of living in a place like this when I was a little boy. A place where no matter what direction I pointed my truck, I'd find a place to fish that was the stuff of dreams. And yet...I have fished once this year.  Part of that is because it has been a miserable, rainy, horrible-conditions summer. It has rained, and rained, and rained. And then it rained again. The James River, where I fish the most, has been out of it's banks all summer. In June, it looked like it does in March: high, and turbid and fast. Fish were holding anywhere but where you could fish for them. It probably affected the spawn and I'm worried what next spring will look like. 

     The plan now is to try my hand at fall / winter Smallies on the James. (And the Tye) I've wanted to for the four years I've been here, but never got around to it. This year, I will have to if I want to salvage anything of the fishing season of 2018. I plan on it...but I already doubt that I'll find the time.

     Finding the time is getting harder these days. I am a single dad, trying to put my daughter through college and help her put her life back together again after some very rough years. Her mom and I divorced when she was only 18 months old, and her mom married a man who terrorized them both. Divorce laws, and life's twists and turns prevented me from getting her out of there altogether. All I could do was remain active in her world, and let that jackass know that if he crossed the line, the hounds wouldn't even find his scent. Finally it got so bad that she moved with me here to Virginia. She was sixteen and allowed to make that decision for herself by that point. 

     Being a dad is my favorite thing. When she was little, we'd fish together at a little five acre pond near my house. She had a little "Barbie" spin casting set and she'd be thrilled with a bluegill now and then. Mostly she was just thrilled to be fishing with her daddy. Nowadays she has a boyfriend, and we're more roommates than father and daughter. But it's okay. She's with me and she's safe. But the arrangement doesn't allow for much free time. College is expensive, even for a guy who works for the school and gets her tuition for free. I have a side business. So fishing suffers.

     This fall I hope that will change. I've taken steps to minimize the demands on my weekends and I spent the summer getting my trusted, well-worn 1996 GMC Yukon roadworthy again. I will make the time somehow, because time, like real estate, isn't being made anymore. I wish I wasn't fishing or hunting alone, but that can't be helped. I've been here four years and a man in his mid fifties doesn't develop friendships like a boy of eleven does. When I hunt and fish I'm deathly quiet anyway, using the time and place to turn my thoughts inside and sort out the ball of yarn that fifty-five years has left me. This can be confusing for those who don't know me well. This silence of mine. So perhaps it's best to go it alone out there. But I do miss the conversations that would break the silence sometimes. The things we talked about when we were boys fishing "Nonesuch Creek" when I was just a child. Or the coming-of-age discussions my best friend Mark and I would have, between casts into the lilly pads on Lake Como, or Lum's pond. Or the wealth of knowledge I gained from Hank Teryzcak and Carl Ramsey when we would hunt deer on an old farm on the outskirts of Kent county in Delaware.         Hank and Carl were friends of my stepfather, who hunted this land with us each fall. My stepfather and I seldom spoke, but Hank and Carl befriended me and taught me how to track, and where to build my stand, and how to dress my first buck when I finally harvested him. There was only silence in the field, but back at the campsite there were jokes and laughter and stories and the transition into manhood. 

     That's what I miss now. I can fish alone in silence and not notice or care. In fact I prefer it. But the pre-dawn rides to the fishing hole or the end of day ride home, or the times sitting on the bank, eating a sandwich, and watching a massive freight train roll by and having no one there to talk with...those moments become glaring. There was something about setting up the evening campfire and one by one, seeing your hunting companions appear out of the lengthening shadows. When the last of us was in the fold, and the coffee pot was full and dinner was simmering, and the stories of the day would begin to be told...it was the best time in the life of that young outdoorsman. The one who hunts and fishes alone now.

    I wish I could have those days again. I wish I had friendship like that here in Virginia where I live. But I know full well that is not possible. Friendships like that are developed over many years. They take time. And time is a scarcity for me now. A precious commodity that the world seems to be in dire shortage of. That and the precious memories...of when there was plenty of time.

Saying Goodbye to my First Fishing Buddy

It would have been the summer of 1971.

We moved into our house in February of that year, and I think that summer I got my first fishing rod and reel. I got it from the guy who sold sporting goods in the New Castle Farmer’s Market on weekends.

Not long after, Tommy Riccio, my neighbor from across the street, took me to the secret fishing hole that the boys on my block all went to on summer mornings. They called it “Nonesuch Creek” and it’s not just a local moniker, it actually appears on maps of the area. A small little outcrop off the Christiana River, about three miles from our neighborhood.

It was tidal, and dirty, and smelled like diesel and dirt. We never caught anything but carp and catfish but that wasn’t really the point. We weren’t there for trophy fish or to catch our dinner. We were there being little boys. Fishing by ourselves, at a time in this world when little boys could jump on their bikes after breakfast, pedal three miles to their secret fishing hole, and spend the day in the sun, hidden from the nearby highway traffic, deep in a meadow that ran alongside this dirty little creek with the mysterious name.

We’d dug earthworms from our parents’ gardens the night before. We packed a lunch of bologna sandwiches and Coke’s wrapped in aluminum foil, in a vain attempt to keep them cold, and we set out on our spider bikes.

Tommy Riccio was three years older, and it wasn’t many more summers before his interests in hanging with the younger boys on the block waned, and he discovered girls and KISS records, and we didn’t do much together anymore.

But for those first few years, he was one of my best friends, and my fishing buddy.

He was creative and funny and mischievous and smart. Like all my other friends on that block, Tommy added the color to my childhood that made it fun and in many ways, tolerable. Home wasn’t the happiest place, but out on the block, with my friends from Monroe Avenue gathered on the white block wall that ringed my yard…I was happy.

Tommy and I grew up, and moved on, but we’d run into each other now and then when I’d get home for a visit and it was always good to see him. Somehow, even after 45 years, I still held him just a little in awe. He was still special to me. They all are, those kids from Monroe Avenue. It is always good to run into my childhood friends and Tommy was no exception.

Tommy passed away unexpectedly last week and the news hit me hard. He’s the second of my close friends from childhood to go, and like Sheila six years ago, this is painful for me. I love his family and I loved Tommy. His mom and dad were always the two people I made sure I visited when I’d get home. His mom passed earlier this year and I still struggle to grasp that. Now Tommy joins her.

I keep thinking about Tommy and that fishing hole and those spider bikes and the time we dissected a bullfrog in his garage and it looked like a scene from a horror movie. I think about the first tree fort we built in the big sprawling oak behind the Ferraro’s house. How we’d tar-papered the roof and it was weatherproof and we would sit up there on rainy summer days and talk about what boys talk about, while the Phillies game was on a transistor radio we’d brought along.

I thought about how we’d all pile into my mother’s VW Beetle and head to the Chesapeake Bay, or to the Drive-In on a Friday night or to the haunted houses at Halloween and we’d all go through them together. One big gang of kids, all from the same dead-end street. Friends to the end.

I’ll be thinking of Tommy next spring, when the snows thaw and the James River runs fast and deep and I begin another season of fishing. The James is a far cry from Nonesuch Creek. It’s beautiful, clean, and surrounded by pristine mountains and the fish I catch are true trophies. It’s what I dreamed of when I was a little boy, fishing that dirty creek with my neighborhood friends. In every imaginable way, it’s better fishing than what Tommy and I experienced on Nonesuch Creek.

Or is it?

There won’t be three other boys there; bikes piled clumsily nearby, with a coffee can full of earthworms nearby and cork bobbers floating anxiously on the water.

We won’t be telling jokes and peeing in the bushes, and getting tanned and sweaty and dirty and enjoying just being out there with each other.

It will just be me. Floating a section of one of the most beautiful rivers I’ve ever seen, like I dreamed when I was a boy.

In my heart though, where the best memories live forever, Tommy will be there. He’ll be there laughing at my jokes, telling me a few of his own, casting to the best spot and watching that bobber with an eagle eye.

He’ll live on in my heart, this old friend of mine, and he’ll fish with me in those brief, flashing moments when I’ll think of him, and Johnny and Richard, with our rods and tackle boxes in our hands, pedaling our way down the path that led to our secret spot.

I can still see his face as it was when we were kids. He’ll laugh, he’ll cast his line in that perfect clear water next to mine, and then he’ll go back to the place in my heart where he’ll be forever.

Godspeed dear old friend.

I’ll see you on a bright Saturday morning next spring. You’ll come out from your place in my heart, and we’ll fish together for a few moments.

Hug your mom for me.

The Soul of the River

The first real “fishing hole” I remember was “None-such creek” back home in New Castle, Delaware. Before that, I’d fished a few times with my grandfather in a little finger of the many creeks that ran throughout the marshy areas that adjoined the Philadelphia Airport, down the street from his house. I lived there for the first five years of my life and that was the first fishing I remember.

When we moved to New Castle, my new friends in the neighborhood had their spot at Nonesuch and they let me come along. Nonesuch was nothing to grow sentimental about. Not the landscape anyway. It was just a tributary of the Christiana River, which, itself, dumped into the Delaware. In the 70’s, when I fished there, pollution was an afterthought and the river smelled like diesel and dirt. You knew better than to eat the fish you caught because they tasted like the water they swam in.

None of that mattered, however, because we weren’t there to fish for food –although we tried that once- we were there to fish. For us, at eight years old, fishing was about being out on our own, away from our homes and families, growing up together. We talked about what eight-year-old boys talked about back then. We brought our bologna sandwiches in brown paper bags in our knapsack and we rode our spider bikes two or three miles to our secret fishing spot.

As dirty as that river was, the meadow that surrounded it was clean and sweet and beautiful. In the summer, it smelled of honeysuckle and hay. Butterflies fluttered about and birds flew overhead. It was a wonderful escape from the sameness of suburban housing. I never remember looking around and thinking about the history I was walking on. I was just a little boy, there with his friends, trying to catch a fish.

Now, though, things are different. Where I fish now is steeped in history and I am of an age that I pay attention to those things. I fish the upper James River mostly. Up above Snowden Dam, almost to Balcony Falls.

I found a parking spot last year and I walk the train tracks from there to Balcony and fish my way back, learning about this river as I go. (The plan is to buy a kayak this summer as soon as finances allow) Walking train tracks has always been an allegorical prop in literature. The wandering. The restlessness. The feeling of always moving along. It’s not that for me, necessarily, as much as it is a thread through history. I walk these tracks and wonder about the trains that have come and gone over the years.

 I came upon a unique marble historical marker on my last trip. It reminded me that this river…as all rivers, has been flowing for a long time. And in that flow, is history. This marker dates back over 150 years. The thing it talks about, this man losing his life to save others…it happened right where I was standing.

When I first moved here three years ago, I started thinking about the historicity of the area. I would, occasionally, look around as I cast my lure, and think about all those who have fished these waters before me. Native Americans who fished for food and drew their drinking water from the Powhattan, as they called it. Explorers, winding their way west through this gorge. Soldiers in the civil war –mere boys, really- fishing here for something to eat, after a fierce battle…or on their way to one. Locals. Little boys like I was when I fished None-such creek. Kids on their bikes, throwing cork bobbers into the water and being thrilled with whatever they caught.

Nowadays, when I fish...I look around. I never used to do that. Yes, I’ve always loved the scenery, but now I view it through the prism of history. These giant boulders that have been worn smooth by thousands of years and millions of gallons of water pouring over them. This gorge that was probably cut into these mountains by the Flood. These railroad tracks.

This river.

My best friend and I are talking about a late-fall trip here when he is done on his commercial crab boat for the season. Mark and I haven’t fished together in about 30 years. Life happens. To wade these waters and talk like we used to when we were boys will be life-giving for me. So much time has passed, and so many miles.

I have a mid-summer trip planned for Harpers Ferry and the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers. Right next to the Antietam battlefield fishing, no doubt, the same waters where civil war soldiers fished and swam and worried about whether they’d make it through the next day. Nothing like that will be on my mind...I'll just be there to fish. But I will be thinking about them, maybe feeling their memories in the river.

The river rolls on...but as I get older, I find that, as it does, it deposits some of its’ memories in my soul.

The River

It’s Tuesday morning and I am getting ready to leave for work. But all I can think of is the spot on the James River that I discovered a few weeks ago. A spot so promising that I can’t believe nobody else fishes it. It took me a while to find this place. Actually, it happened by accident. I was looking at Google Earth, trying to find the dam they were discussing in a newspaper article. I found the dam, and then, out of curiosity, I moved a little farther upstream and saw the spot I usually fish. I continued to scroll upstream and discovered this magnificent spot where the rock formations were perfect and there was an equal amount of deep water and shallow riffles. The satellite images are amazingly clear and I could see beneath the water in a way that I never could with the naked eye. I could see the rock shelf and the variation in depth. I saw the channel that cut it’s way through the bedrock over thousands of years. (I recommend using this Google earth technique when fishing new areas) The next week I went out and walked about three miles to the spot I had researched. It didn’t look like anyone had fished it recently. No trash along the rocky shoreline. No tangled remnants of line stuck in the trees.

It took some work to get there and I imagine that anyone less than a serious fisherman wouldn’t bother.

I’m sitting here at my table this morning thinking far more about that fishing hole than I am about my job. When I was a kid, riding my bike to “Nonesuch Creek” with my best friends, fishing was about fishing. Just catching a fish, any fish, and hanging with the guys was all the motivation I needed. Fishing was just what little boys did.

But I’m almost 54. I am a divorcee, a single dad trying to navigate this life of mine, and learning on the job what it is that dad’s do with 19-year-old daughters, and trying to hurry up and figure out the rest of my life. I don’t fish simply for the fun of it anymore. I fish now, because I need to. Desperately.

I need some sort of connection to a much simpler time. I need the memories that fishing stirs. I need the internal solitude and the chance to unravel the tangled ball of yarn that my soul has become. I need to think, and to pray, and to reminisce, and to see if I can still dream. I dream of writing. Of communicating the questions I ask and the answers I've found. I doubt my abilities to do this but I desire it nonetheless. I think of this a lot when I'm on the river.

Fishing, now, has become my soul retreat. My quiet place where I can recharge. Whether I catch anything or not is of little consequence. Of course, I want to catch fish. But sometimes actually catching a fish is distracting to the things going on inside.

My second cousin is a professional fisherman. We’ve never met, and it was a surprise to me, to learn that he is a relative. He’s pretty well known and extremely popular on the Bass circuit. (Mike Iocanelli, a second cousin on my grandmother’s side. Her maiden name was Iocanelli) Ike fishes for a living and so his approach is, by necessity, far more aggressive and business-like.

When I was a boy, that would have been a dream job. But I watch his video channel and I see how much hard work he puts in to be as good as he is and I don’t think that would be for me. Obviously, Ike loves what he does, but I wonder if he ever gets the chance to simply fish for the fun of it. Maybe someday we’ll meet and I’ll ask him.

My heart is in the spin cycle right now. Turbulent and tumultuous. I realize I am running out of time to make career choices and I feel very far from home. Maybe that’s why I feel like I need to be on the river today and not on the campus at Liberty University. I need to lose my thoughts in the mechanical repetition of casting and retrieving. Of reading the water and looking for structure. To the steady noise of the water as it rushes by and the thrill of a strike. A thrill that eventually loses it’s gravity as I dig deeper into the bird nest inside my heart and try to draw a roadmap for the next 20 years of my life.

Years ago, Rich Mullins, one of my favorite musicians, wrote a song called “The River.”

The chorus says this:

"And I know the river is deep 

And I found out the currents are tricky.

And I know the river is wide.

Oh and the currents are strong.

And I may lose every dream

That I dreamt I could carry with me.

But I know that will reach the other side.

Please don’t let me have to wait too long.”

The river is a metaphor. Maybe for me, the James River is a metaphor as well. Maybe out there, I’m not the formerly homeless guy, or the 54 year old man in a twenty-something world, or the single dad who feels like he’s feeling his way along the back wall of a cave in the dark, when it comes to relating to a 19 year old young woman as a daughter.

Maybe I can be all of that, plus that eight-year-old boy, riding on a spider bike with his best friends, just looking to have fun.

I need to go find out.

The river calls.

Mid-winter daydreaming. Thoughts of fishing, and snow, and long ago

It’s a cold, grey January afternoon here in Lynchburg, Va.

My screensaver on my office laptop is a shot I took during a fishing trip last July on the James River, about two miles above Snowden dam.

                                                      

It was hot. The water was warm by then. The fly hatches were three months removed and the smallmouths were only eating what lives in deeper pools.

But I was fishing, and that’s what mattered.

I remember these long dreary days from when I was a boy. Sitting in class on those seemingly endless Friday afternoons, dreaming of fishing with my friends and knowing that tomorrow was Saturday but I wouldn’t be going to “Nonesuch Creek” or the “A-Bridge” or Smalley’s Dam or any of the other fishing holes we would pedal our bikes to.

I’d be indoors, until after Bugs Bunny was over, and then I would go out to find my friends and maybe play street hockey or skate on the frozen patches in the little storm-runoff-fed creek behind our houses.

Eventually the pull of fishing would get the best of me and I would break out my trusty old True Temper rod and reel and head over to the county park to practice casting.

The truth was I was plenty adroit at casting my line, I didn’t need any practice. But I needed to feel the rod in my hands and I needed to watch the line peel off the spool and I needed to crank the handle and feel it coming back.

In those frozen hours in “Chelsea Manor Park” I wasn’t casting a 5/8” threaded nut that I’d borrowed from my old man’s hardware bin, I was throwing a Rapala broken back on Dale Hollow Lake, like I’d seen Jerry McKinnis do on “The Fishin’ Hole.” I was sitting on the bank of Nonesuch Creek with Johnny and Richard and Tommy and talking and joking like young boys do, until the rod tip bent and another catfish or carp was on our line.

Those winter days seemed like they’d never end, but just when we thought winter had won and would go on forever, spring arrived, and the rivers and creeks beckoned once more. The days grew longer, the fish began biting again, and our friendships ran deeper and deeper.

These days I sit in my office and dream of being on the water again. Last weekend I was rearranging some boxes in a closet and glanced at my tackle box and rod there in the corner. I was ready to load them into the car and head to the river just to see what might be hungry, and I still may do that. Having never been around a healthy stream in mid-winter, I never had the opportunity to try cold weather fishing. I think about it here and I might do it one of these weekends.

But the magic and the charm of daydreaming about my summer fishing holes are what I think about today. I remember that boy who loved fishing so much that he’d endure the chill winds of February to stand in an open field and cast a stainless steel 5/8” nut toward a hula hoop about 50 yards away, just to see if he could hit it. I think about how much he loved the sport, and how often he thought about it because he loved it, and at ten, or eleven, or twelve, there wasn’t anything to be worried about or to occupy his soul. Back then, there were no deadlines, no reports to write or customers on campus to call on. He wasn’t a dad yet, he had few responsibilities beyond cutting the lawns of his customers or delivering newspapers or cleaning up after the family dog.

He whistled his favorite songs and smiled at the thoughts of how, any day now, the weather would break and his best friends would be riding along with him on their bikes, heading for a day of fishing and just being boys.

Nowadays, he is a single dad. He works at his alma mater. In what spare time he has, he builds decks and writes books and works hard to provide for his daughter who is –unbelievably- already a college freshman.  
And when he gets the chance, he writes about things like this.

He daydreams now and then about Lake Como and his best friend Mark and the bass they’d catch in the lily-pad cove. He thinks of Johnny and the backwater section of Lum’s Pond where the biggest bass and pickerel lived.

He thinks about that white True Temper rod with the red reel and cork handle and all the fish it brought to his hand. He’d give a roomful of $300 graphite rods to find that old fiberglass pole if he could.

He misses those days sometimes. Life is great and things have worked out well for an outdoorsman like him.  He landed in a part of the country where so many great streams and rivers can provide him almost limitless opportunity to fish. It’s beautiful here, but sometimes these cold days take him back forty years or so to a young boy who waited anxiously for his Field and Stream subscription each month.

He watched “The Fishin’ Hole” and dreamed of the day he’d be an adult and be able to fish places like that. He remembers the little red tackle box and the Daredevil spoons he bought at the Western Auto store. The cork bobbers and the Eagle Claw hooks (because nothing else was good enough!) and the Uncle Josh’s pork rind in little glass jars. He misses a time when fishing…anywhere, for any species, was good enough.

Because he was fishing.

My friends are grown now, and dispersed all over the country. I haven’t fished with Johnny or Mark in probably 25 years…maybe longer. But on these cold, overcast days when a canopy of grey hides the sun, I find myself daydreaming once again. This time though, I’m not the ten year old boy impatiently idling away an hour dreaming about fishing with his buddies this spring.

I’m fifty-two…and I’m wishing I could be him again.

The Marlin 778. Remembering my first shotgun.

Since starting this blog, and returning to the fields and streams and rivers, I’ve caught myself reminiscing about some of the hardware I used to own when I was a kid.

One of the first stories I wrote here was about my first fishing rod. I also wrote about my first tackle box and the mysteries it held.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about my first, and only, shotgun. I got it for my sixteenth birthday. It was a Marlin model 778, thirty inch, vent ribbed, full choke, skeet sights, chambered for up to three inch magnum shells. This is not my actual gun, but this is exactly what it looked like.

Like I said, I got it for my sixteenth birthday. It was probably the best birthday present I ever got. It was the one time I can remember my mother and stepfather actually throwing a birthday party for me, and it was the one present I ever got that really was something I wanted. My birthday was always close to the start of school and so I mainly got school clothes for birthday gifts. But this one time, they really got it right.

I loved that gun. I assembled it and disassembled it about a hundred times the first few days after I got it. I oiled it and polished the walnut stock and fore-end until it looked like a piece of furniture.

The first time I fired it was with my friend Mark at his house in Smyrna, Delaware. We walked out to the soy fields behind his house and put about a half a box of Remington #8’s through it. I loved how it fired. I loved how smooth and sweet the pump action was. It wasn’t clunky or loose or excessively noisy. A thirty inch barrel with a full choke keeps a very tight pattern for a very long distance. It took some getting used to when switching from geese to rabbit or squirrel. I could knock down a Canadian goose from a pretty good distance. But that barrel didn’t leave much for the freezer when I was hunting smaller animals, so I had to learn how to aim it so that only part of the pattern would hit my prey.

I got good at it though, and over the years during high school, Mark and I were like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, traipsing through the woods near and around his house, or the hunting area near the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, or down at Phillips Nursery. The Phillips’ let people hunt their nursery in the winter because it kept the critters from destroying the valuable shrubbery and trees they were growing for the upcoming spring. You could always count on coming home with a rabbit or two after a Saturday at Phillips’ nursery.

I got my first, and only deer with that gun. A beautiful eight point buck. He walked through the soy fields I was hunting in downstate Delaware and he stepped on the only stalk left in the field after the combine had come through. I heard the crunch from my tree stand and turned to watch him approaching. He was careless and randy, because the rut was in full force and I was perched just above his favorite scrape. He was walking straight at me, about fifty yards out and I waited for him to turn enough for me to take out a leg with a shoulder shot and make sure I didn’t leave him wounded and running.

The old boy never did turn, he got to within about forty yards and stopped. He nibbled something on the ground, looked around –probably for a doe to pursue- and stayed still. I figured the longer he stood there the better chance he’d eventually see me up in the tree so I aimed carefully and took my shot. I was using Brenneke rifled slugs (in Delaware, you can only hunt deer with shotgun or primitive weapon. No High Powered rifles) and the combination of the long barrel and the precision of those slugs, made it an easy kill. I hit him right in the chest, over his heart. He reared straight up, fell back about five feet, took one deep breath, kicked out his hind legs and expired. I doubt he ever felt anything, and I’m glad.

I pumped the second shot into the chamber so fast that I doubt a semi-auto could have been quicker. I stood there in my stand, watching him for a good fifteen seconds, hoping that he didn’t move. He never did.

I scurried down the tree and called out to my hunting partner Hank. Hank emerged from the woods a few minutes later as I fell to work, dressing my buck.

I was nineteen when I shot that deer. A few years later, I was in my mid-twenties, hunting had become more and more infrequent since I had started a business and the lady where we deer hunted had sold her farm. I sold that shotgun to a friend of mine who owned a pawn shop in Elsmere. I intended on buying something more fancy one day, but one day turned into about 25 years of not hunting or fishing or enjoying the places I used to love. I sure do miss that gun.

I don’t know who owns it now, if it’s still shooting straight, and taking game. I don’t know if it filled any more freezers after it filled mine. I don’t know if there are any more notches on the stock.

But I know there is one.

A few days after I took that buck, I got out my pocketknife and carved a precise, small little notch in the stock, just below the point where it attaches to the receiver. I had every intention of carving many more notches into that stock, representing many more deer, but I never did.

Marlin was never a high-end gun manufacturer, but they built very good guns for a very good price.

If you had covered over the stampings and told me it was a Winchester or a Remington or even an Ithaca, I would have known no different. Through the years, I found myself wanting to buy more exotic, pricier, trendy guns. Being Italian I wanted –and still want- a nice Beretta or a Benelli. Maybe a Browning Citori or a nice Remington 1100.

But if I could only buy one gun right now, I’d find that old Marlin 778 from my sixteenth birthday. I’d give the owner whatever he wanted for it, because to me it is priceless. It was my companion, along with my dog Jesse and my best friend Mark, on weekends and early autumn afternoons. It stood by me in the rain and the cold. It was next to me in the goose pit in Middletown when I took my only Canadian geese. It was a symbol of my manhood. It wasn’t a composite stock, or a carbon barrel. It was made of wood and steel, the way guns used to be made. It has a visible notch in the stock for the deer I took in 1981, and invisible notches for all the memories I made with it, with a friend, and a dog, that I loved dearly.