CHAPTER ONE My first fishing hook was a bent safety pin. I was probably six years old, and my mother, Ethel, wouldn't let me have real hooks like my dad, Cletus, and my older brothers had. She was afraid I'd hurt myself. Each member of my fishing family had occasionally let me hold his pole so I could land a fish he had hooked. Occasionally wasn't enough. I didn't feel that a fish hooked by someone else, then yanked from the water by me, was really my catch. I wanted to hook my own, even if my hook was a coiled safety pin. I'm sure Mama thought I would never catch anything on the homemade snarl whose lack of sharpness reassured her. She doubted that either a fish, or, more important, I, would feel the pierce of the bent and thin wire. She was wrong. I used the makeshift hooks from Mama's sewing kit, worms from the ground, and a "pole" cut from a sapling to entice tiny brim not much larger than minnows along the creek that ran in my parents' 120-acre cotton farm in Chambers County, Alabama. The nearest semblance of a town was Penton, a hamlet so small it isn't shown in the atlas, although it has a blinking stoplight at the crossroads beside the single general store. It had two stores and no light when I was a boy. The place was so small that every resident knew which neighbors' checks were good and whose wife wasn't. My official place of birth is a rural route outside of Penton. There were no zip codes in 1932. I was delivered in our cabin by a blind doctor. I was one of eight children, and my parents had no money to pay for his help, so they gave the old doctor a cow. Later, when my parents became more prosperous, they paid him twenty-five dollars for each child he delivered. He'd stay at my mama's bedside until her baby was born, no matter how long it took. I walked to Penton as a barefoot boy on Saturdays, but not for a while after getting my first bent-pin fishing rig. Penton was Mayberry minus electricity, as many of the town houses were illuminated by coal oil. Food was preserved in smokehouses or inside storm cellars. Old men sat on a bench that ran parallel to the only road through town. The old-timers got there as soon as the sun rose, and left as soon as it went down, never leaving their spot unless one got angry about another's move of a checker. The weathered men sported lined faces from too many hours in the sun, gnarled hands that had worked too hard, and invisible body parts that hadn't worked in years. Their seat was nicknamed the "dead pecker bench." My dad thought that was the funniest thing he ever heard. As a child, I enjoyed watching fish as much as I enjoyed catching them. I still do today. I was consumed with the fish's survival instincts. I noticed how fish swam in schools and were smart enough to realize that a larger fish couldn't chase all of them. They realized there is safety in numbers. I marveled at how they would glisten in the sunlight penetrating the water, then become almost invisible by simply swimming upright, eliminating the reflection on the sides of their silver bodies. They knew their backs were dark and would not return the natural light to a predator in the water or to the one on the bank--me. I observed how fish congregated behind rocks that stood firm against the current, especially after a rain, when the current was stronger and faster. I surmised that the fish grew weary of fighting the current beneath the water, just as a boater becomes tired of fighting it above. A boater might tie on to the rock to halt the fight; the fish just hid behind it. To this day, I notice that many anglers fish the most open and pretty part of a stream. They should throw their bait immediately behind obstructions, which fish use as a shield so they can rest against the constant flow of water. Nature has taught fish to think like the vulnerable creatures they are. The fish themselves would teach me, for years to come, how to think like fish. In war, men are taught to think like their enemy. In sport, contestants should think like their opponents. Fishing is the only sport where the opponent, or prey, is usually invisible. If you can't think like him, you won't outsmart him. If you catch him without thinking, you're not skilled, you're simply lucky. Luck isn't as much fun, or as fulfilling, as strategy-born thinking. Fishing was never a pastime or hobby for me. It's been an obsession since I first saw a fin. Beginning at age six, I helped my dad and then seven brothers and sisters work in the cotton field on our family farm. Dad bought the place for $2,500. He made payments each month for twenty years before its mortgage was satisfied. My family sowed cotton seeds by hand on all fours. My dad bought the seed on a handshake loan from a Lafayette, Alabama, banker. Come fall, Dad returned the money with interest. There were no forms or financial statements. Just one honest man doing business with another. It was a different time, when money was just money and integrity was the real currency. During the growing season, my family whacked at cotton patch weeds with a hoe and at the snakes that often darted from beneath the plants. In the fall, they picked the cotton bolls from their prickly bushes. I saw their fingers bleed, and I grew to see my own bleed too. After picking it, my family chopped the cotton plants by hand. The stalks were dried and used for food for our few cows or plowed back under the ground as fertilizer. My job, as the youngest Mann in the field, was to carry water to family members who were actually doing the job. I walked barefoot through the wet rows and felt the mud squish between my toes after a rain. I waded through weeds up to my waist to put two buckets into a stream, then I toted them back to the thirsty folks working the earth. They gave the ground their sweat. It gave them a crop that gave them money for sustenance. The water we drank was warm when taken from the shallow creek and outright hot by the time I toted it to the field in hundred-degree heat. I mistakenly thought that my daddy, brothers, and sisters didn't know I was secretly fishing while I was supposedly en route to the field with their water. Later, I found out they knew all along. I couldn't help myself. The stream and its fish were a magnet whose pull I feel to this day. I hid tree branch poles beneath bushes so I could grab a pole wherever I happened to be on the stream. My bait was worms I had earlier picked from the ground. I learned early in life that worms, especially during the dry days of a hot Deep South summer, would rise to the surface, where the ground was dampened by the dishwater thrown from our back porch nightly. I dug for the worms shortly after daybreak and placed them in a tin can with two holes near the top. I threaded string through the holes and put it around my neck. I was ready to go fishing. I caught minnows, and the occasional snake, by folding screen wire and cutting it at the fold. I'd drop a soda cracker into a Mason jar, then shove the screen into the glass and fashion it into a funnel. I'd place the jar and screen into the stream; the minnows would swim in and couldn't find their way out. Minnows were as plentiful as all freshwater fish in this country during the Depression. I could catch a hundred in about a half hour. Fishermen can catch minnows the same way today. In fact, traps like the one I've described are now mass-produced. My dad and my uncle Alvin taught me how to do the Mason jar/screen wire trick. Stripping the screen from our cabin windows was my idea. My mom had a fit. She wasn't at all happy that my fondness for fishing was taking priority over her aversion to the insects that entered our cabin through our screenless windows. I got many spankings for destroying the screens. I figured the spankings were the price I'd have to pay for fishing. I didn't get as many spankings, however, for screen stripping as I deserved. That's because we ate what I caught, and we needed every bite. By the time I was seven I could catch and clean enough brim to feed a hungry ten-member family. Mama knew that if I didn't fish, we might have only the vegetables from our garden for dinner. My brothers, uncles, and my dad kept our catches for food. We fished for fun and to stay alive. We hunted wild game for the same reasons. We drank water from a well, read by the glow of a kerosene lamp, and were housed by logs fitted so loosely, you could see in between them. There was one spot in our cabin where my brothers and I could literally throw a cat through a gap in the wall. There was nothing between us and the elements except a stack of logs. We had no ceiling, and the warmth from our fire rose into the rafters, leaving us cold down below. I don't remember many snowfalls when I was a boy, but the few I recall left a thin layer of white stuff on our blankets. At times, the wind blew hard enough through the house to extinguish the flames in the lamps. I've heard folks say that life during the Depression was simple, so much so that families were welcome at the homes of others without notice. That's true, and why wouldn't it be? How could anybody notify anybody when there were no telephones? Folks were welcome at our house, but their arrival was totally unexpected. We saw them approaching through the spaces between the logs. We had a battery-operated radio, and we gathered around it to listen to the news, hoping to hear that President Roosevelt and his New Deal were improving the nation's economy. On Saturday nights, we celebrated the end of the workweek by listening to the Grand Ole Opry in faraway Nashville, Tennessee. The rest of the time, we had no input from the world beyond Chambers County. Dad wouldn't let us play the radio, as he wanted to preserve its battery. Loretta Lynn, in her song about Depression-strapped America, described an upbringing similar to mine: We were poor/But we had love/That's the one thing that/Daddy made sure of . . . go the lyrics. That was certainly true of the Mann family. We had love. We also had the drudgery that comes from working too hard for too long so our family could earn too little money. A handful of celebrities got a mountain of bad publicity in the late 1990s because they owned factories where children worked for pennies a day. Those factories are called sweatshops. The United States had no child labor laws during the 1930s and the Mann children were like others in rural America. They worked from daybreak till dark in a sweatshop that was a wide-open field and received no direct income, not even pennies. The county paid for rabies vaccinations administered to the Manns' livestock as well as to neighboring animals. Human beings were given diphtheria shots. My buddy and I once ran from a nurse who wanted to give us a painful inoculation. Once out of sight, we slowed our run to a walk along the shoulder of the road. Suddenly, we heard the screeching of tires. The nurse bolted from a car and grabbed each of us, holding us in a hammerlock while she jabbed us with a one-inch needle. She was angry and we felt it, as she pushed that needle all the way to our shoulder bones. We were safe against rabies. I'm not sure my dad was. He was once bitten by a cow and had to go to the county for rabies shots. In the 1930s, twenty-one incredibly painful shots were required as an antidote to the fatal disease. When dad died in 1986, an autopsy revealed twenty-one cancerous tumors, each in the precise spot where he had received a rabies shot. We didn't know we were poor for a couple of reasons. In a pre-television nation, we could not see how folks outside of Chambers County lived. We thought everyone else in America had a lifestyle like ours. We also thought we were somewhat prosperous because our mother, not a man from the county government, cut our hair. Mom used scissors that resembled sheep shears. They pulled out more hair than they cut. But our cut was unlike the other children's, who had a bowl placed on their heads by a county agent who cut only the hair that protruded. His victims looked like the boy on today's cans of Dutch Boy paints. Our parents took seriously, very seriously, the necessity of working for a living. My dad once hired a neighbor, Arthur Butler, to swing an ax from sunup to sundown, chopping wood. Arthur worked for Dad for years. He was paid four dollar a day, plus a noon meal. Dad retired him when he was seventy-five. "Why did you retire old Arthur?" I asked Dad. "Hell, the old shit got to where he wouldn't work," Dad said. "There I was, a-paying him four dollars a day, and he got to where he'd only work from sunrise until five o'clock." That was the thinking behind the era's work ethic. Out of necessity, we kids learned how to take a mental and emotional recess from our grueling farm tasks, making our own amusement as effectively as we made our own way. For me, the happy times almost always centered around fishing. I remember one of the thousands of school bus rides I took over a bridge that crossed water so clear I could see giant brim from my seat. One time, I got off at our house, got my pole, and ran about five miles back to the bridge, where I popped a real hook in front of the fish. (I had moved past the bent-pin stage.) I let the hook drop into the water as if it were natural bait falling from a tree. Bam! I had won one more round in nature's oldest game--survival of the fittest. That brim and others made up that night's supper. Brim will not chase bait as far as bass. The trick to catching brim is to get the bait right in front of the fish. At night, this can be done with a tiny surface lure, as brim have a very small mouth. During the day, it can often be done by eyesight, since brim like shallow water. Look carefully for them near the bank in shallow weed-beds. If you're using live bait such as worms, drop it an inch from his nose, and he'll usually strike. A bass, on the other hand, isn't as likely to hit something that still, even if it's right before him. He prefers the hyperactivity of bait that a brim often does not. Excerpted from Think Like a Fish: The Lure and Lore of America's Legendary Bass Fisherman by Tom Mann All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
