The fisherman

One of my nieces was going through her father’s things the other day and sent me this:

It’s from sometime in 1964. I was born that January. That’s my sister, Brenda Williams, on the left. Her stepdad, my dad, L.M. Tomlinson, is holding me up.

He would have been 49 at the time. I was the first child he had fathered, and one of the many things I regret not asking him is how it felt to wait that long to become a dad, in a time when most of his friends would have had kids in their late teens or early 20s. I do know this. When I was a baby, and I would cry at night, he would put me in the car and drive around the block until I fell asleep. This went on for months until my mom made him stop. She knew that at some point a baby just has to cry it out, and its parents just have to endure it. My dad delayed that moment as long as possible.

You see the boats in the background of the photo. I’m pretty sure it was taken at Altamaha Park, the place where we usually put in when we fished the Altamaha River in south Georgia. By the time that photo was taken my dad had already been a sharecropper, a logger, a soldier, a member of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a small-appliance repairman, a carpenter, and the man who kept the machines running at a giant seafood packing plant.

But more than anything else, he was a fisherman.

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He didn’t tell many stories about his childhood. He grew up hard and I think it was a time he tried to forget. But he did tell this one: When he was a teenager, his family’s church planned a big cookout for homecoming. But there was a problem with the food—the hog they were planning to cook wasn’t going to be ready in time, or something like that. So on Sunday morning they sent my dad to the river. He came back with stringers weighted down with perch, enough to feed everybody. Somebody else brought the loaves. He provided the fishes.

We didn’t have a whole lot of money growing up, so we didn’t eat much store-bought food. Most of what we ate was what we grew or caught. We’d take our boat to the river on a Saturday morning and find a spot where the channel cut close to the bank. There were all kinds of catfish in the river but channel cats tasted the best. We’d bait our hooks with earthworms and drop them to the river bottom with sinkers and wait for the stuttering tug on the line. Some days we would fill the cooler. Back home we’d skin and gut them in the sink my dad set up in the back yard. My mom would fry some of the fish for supper. The rest she’d stuff into milk jugs with the tops cut off. She filled the jugs with water and stuck them in the old chest freezer on the back porch. Encased in ice, the fish tasted fresh six months later.

My dad knew all those honey holes in the river. He knew the spot where you had to push your boat over a submerged log to get to a lagoon full of bass. He knew the overflow ponds way out in the swamp. We’d tie up the boat and walk to the ponds in mud so thick I’d lose both my sneakers. But we’d come back with enough fish to eat for weeks.

One time we pulled over to the bank to tie up under a big willow tree. As my dad got out the rope, I just happened to glance up. Maybe eight feet above our heads was a gigantic hornet’s next.

I whispered: Dad! He turned around, puzzled. I pointed up. He looked up and I saw his eyes get big.

He took a paddle and carefully placed one end against the trunk of the tree. Then he slowly pushed back. The boat drifted out into the current. When we were a safe distance away, he cranked the motor and we took off.

If we had disturbed that nest, there was only one option—we were going in the river. But at the time, I don’t remember being scared. I was with my dad. I knew he’d figure something out.

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My dad had only two vices: tobacco and fishing gear. He smoked for most of his life, then switched to Levi Garrett and spit cups. He read the Bible most every night but the real sacred text in his life was the Bass Pro Shops catalog. In there was the stuff of dreams.

Every time we went to town, he’d wander into the sporting goods department of Sears or J.M. Fields and come out with a little something: a new lure, maybe, or a spool of 20-pound-test line. He filled tackleboxes with spinnerbaits, bobbers, tiny hooks stored in old pill bottles.

Once or twice a year he would splurge on a new rod and reel. In the ‘70s, Speed Stick rods and Garcia Ambassadeur reels were the top of the line for bass fishermen. They were probably the only top-of-the-line things my dad ever owned. He was so proud of them.

I watched how he kept his gear clean, how he made sure the outboard motor had the right mix of oil and gas, how he washed down the boat every time we got home so the algae from the river didn’t stick. He took good care of his tools. It was one of the many lessons I learned from him, even though I have not always followed through.

All that tobacco finally took him down. He was in the hospital for my high-school graduation. He spent his last few years tethered to an oxygen machine. My mom called on my 26th birthday in 1990 and said I better come home. Four days later, as she sat by his bedside in the hospital, he raised up out of unconsciousness, looked around and took a deep breath. Then he lay down and died as I sat in the waiting room on the other side of the wall.

He has been gone more than half my life now. That doesn’t sound possible. I still think about him every day. Every so often he appears in my dreams. For the longest time he never spoke in the dreams. He was not a big talker when he was alive, so that made sense. But the last couple of times I’ve dreamed about him, he’s spoken to me. I can’t remember what he said. It doesn’t matter. The idea that he’s still talking to me is enough.

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Every morning, when I look in the mirror, I see part of my inheritance—the blue eyes he handed down to me.

There are lots of things I didn’t inherit—his skill at building and fixing things, his old-man strength, his taste for liver and onions. But I like to think I inherited his kindness, his tolerance for all kinds of people, the quiet way he let us know that he loved us.

I am drawn to the water, too, and I know that comes from him.

I am thinking of him this Father’s Day, of course. But every time I cross a river on a bridge, every time I stand on a pier and look out over the ocean, I think of my dad with a rod in his hand—feeding his family, sure, but also feeding something in himself. I never saw him happier than at the helm of his bass boat, headed upriver, leaning into the wind.

In my office, just to the left of my desk, is a rod rack from Bass Pro Shops. There are all kinds of rods in there, but the real treasures are my dad’s old gear—those Speed Sticks from the ‘70s, outfitted with those Garcia Ambassadeur reels. The classic reel in that line, at least back then, was the 5500C. Sometimes I say the phrase out loud—Garcia Ambassadeur 5500C—because the rhythm sounds like poetry, the poetry of the gears and the fish and the days on the water. It feels like a poem to him.

So sometimes I do that. And sometimes I just pick up one of those old reels and hold it in my hands, the way he once held me.

—TT