“Oh, no!” I stammered, horrified that my germinal “change of voice” had chosen that very moment to change. In addition to eliciting a couple of guffaws from the crew, I managed to momentarily rattle the two seminarians, or whatever they were, which allotted me a few precious moments to calm down. “Actually, the priest who runs this place is a friend of my dad’s and he invited me to fish here with some of my friends, I replied, greatly relieved that my voice stayed within bounds. And who might that be?” one asked, while the other made a great show of rolling his eyes.

Jesuit Retreat House at Milford, Ohio

“You mean the priest who runs this place or my dad?” I asked.

The smirker replied, “We would assume, nay, expect you to be able offer up the name of our fearless leader, But bestowing upon us your father’s name? Why, that would be worth bonus points.”

I was drawing a blank. What a time for brain freeze! But then I remember my dad remeniscing about the days when dad and the priest whose name escaped me were teammates on Xavier University’s basketball team, the Musketeers. My dad acquired the nickname, “Twisty,” in homage not to his prowess on the court, but by virtue of his curly black hair.

“Tell him that Twisty’s son is down here fishing with some friends,” I said.

Excepting Ron, who was sitting morosely at the site of his second fall, arms around his knees, all eyes were on the two men and myself. Everyone tried to act nonchalant, but only Tom and Gary were pulling it off. Indeed, RC and Steve  looked poised to bolt at the slightest pretext.

“Twisty, Huh?” the smug seminarian finally said, directing his querry more tp his partner than to us. But rather than waiting for my response, he shifted his gaze to Ronny, who actually waved at them, and then asked, “What’s the deal with that kid.”

What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, not that it necessarily  matters to you guys, but he appears to be bleeding rather profusely out his nose.”

Sure enough, upon closer examination, Ronny did appear to have a red mustache, the perfect compliment to the little red bib he seemed to be wearing over his dinghy white T-shirt.

“Hey, kid, come over here, if you’re able to,” Smug’s partner summoned.

This time all eyes truly were on Ronny as he hobbled toward the two men, who, for all he knew, were some manner of church cops.

Ronny, with his bloody nose, mud-smeared T-shirt, and missing one shoe,  came face to face with the two seminarians.

Regarding for a moment, Smug said, “Two things, son. First, enlighten us as to what just happened to you, because it’s looking like, whatever it was, you came in a distant second.”
With nary a moment’s hesitatuin, Ronny said, “I tripped and fell, fathers.”

Smug snorted, “Hey, pardner, we’re Jesuit brothers. We work for a living.”

“Seems like you might need to visit a hospital,” Smug’s partner, the “good cop,” said.

“No, I’m fine, sirs,” Ronny stammered. ” I’m sort of clumsy. I’m used to bloody noses.

The two men we now understood were brothers moved a few feet away from us and quietly conferred.

I noticed RC and the two Tims also were whispering to each other. I was certain they were still on The Beach only because they knew they couldn’t mount their expensive bikes and skeedaddle quickly enough to elude the brothers, both of whom appeared to be on the muscular side.

After what seemed like an eternity, Smug called over to us, saying, “Oh, by the way, the second thing I wanted to say to our misbegotten lad, but which I can say to all of you, given the public nature of this impromptu forum, is that you boys are knowingly trespassing, and that we do prosecute trespassers.”

I had been on the verge of chiming in, but Smug’s partner had already pulled him aside for another private conference.The session was brief; moments later, Smug walked over to me and said, “My esteemed brother in arms is intrigued by the Twisty component of your improbable equation. While hasten back to run it by the big boss man, you boys might want to take advantage of what I would say is a rare, unexpected, but brief, window of opportunity and clear out. And make sure  this serene, contemplative site is as serene as it was before you all showed up.”

With that, thy departed. Even after they disappeared around the bend, we could clearly hear them crunching the numerous pieces of loose gravel on the road. The moment we could no longer hear them them, Rick and the two Tims were busily re-tying their rigs to their bikes. “Gotta go,” RC announced. “Me to!” Steve added.

I was relieved and heartened to see that Tom, Gary and Ronny seemed to be staying put. Apparently, they trusted me.

We sort of stood around for a couple of minutes feeling awkward (at least I did). I stole a glance at Ronny; he had cut the line  on the dead carp and was now fumbling with his reel, obviously attempting to fix it. I had decided that Ronny hadn’t acted differently than any of the rest of us would had acted under the circumstances. Not only that, Ronny had played it cool when the two brothers were interrogating him. I’m not sure what he would have gained from snitching on us; the brother were basically jerks — Smug, because he truly was a jerk whose self-regard for his wit bordered on the delusional, and his partner,  for never once stepping up and telling Smug to just put a sock in it, for the love of God. Nonetheless, I sort of admired Ronny for his ability to seemingly shrug off the cruel prank just played on him and shift his focus to trying to fix his reel. I also sort  wished all of us, or at least one of us, could could boost his morale, commend the stand-up way he dealt with the Jerk Brothers.

I sauntered over to Ronny and said, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that kind of Zebco reel start coming apart  when some poor sucker’s trying to land a fish. Here let me show you what happened.” He handed me his rig. “See that little nut rattling around in the reel case?” I asked him. “All you do is position the spool so the reel handle can click back in place, and then you just screw the nut back on tight enough to keep the reel jiggling. Then you just screw the front of the reel and rod section back on, tight, but not too tight!”

Ron took his rig back, gave it a quick inspection and said, “Thanks, man.”  He then asked, “You weren’t just shiiting us when you said,your dad’s friends with whoever runs this place, and that we were allowed to fish here. were you?”

“Hell no!” I shot back, feeling a little indignant. ” I wouldn’t fart around with my friends like that!”

“Hey it’s cool,” Ronny responded. “I know you’re good people. It’s just there’s a lot of bad people out there. Bad people that can really trick you, well, not me, per say, but, you know, people.”

Ronnie was reaching out to me. It was obvious. I tried to think of the right way to respond, but I suddenly started feeling incredibly awkward. “Tell me about it,” was the best I could come up with, and I knew that was weak.

Then Tom shouted, “I got one!” And sure enough, he landed a spotted bass, maybe eight inches long. “I got it on a gold Mepps spinner!” he exclaimed. And so the bite was back on. Tom lent Gary one of his gold Mepps spinners, and I Ronny one of mine. “With a reel that finally worked like it was supposed to, Ronny was able to get a cast out at least to the near edge of the main channel, where all the action was, so he ended up catching a spotted bass, along with a rock bass, and even a nine-inch walleye. Between Tom, Gary and myself, we caught three smallies, several spotted bass, and a couple of nice crappies. Oh, and a channel cat that had to go at least five pounds, and that Tom held onto for what seemed like days (Trust me fishing can seriously mess with time!) until it finally rolled, no doubt exhausted, under a submerged ledge.  Tom waded out to where the water was waist-high and moving briskly in an attempted to somehow dislodge the cat, but he finally came to his senses after the three of us insisted he was an idiot who was on the verge of getting sucked under, at which point  he slowly back-stepped to more more manageable water and then did what every fisherman hates to do more than anything else: force the line to the breaking point, thereby intentionally losing a trophy fish because there simply was not another option. it was almost like a brand new day, that additional two hours that we caught the Little Miami River in a generous mood. And we were undisturbed for the duration.

Freshwater Drum (Aplodinotus grunniens)

We all know the old saying, “If you fall off the horse,  climb right back on it.” Well, having just lost what looked like a four-pound smallie  (estimate arrived at by applying  the “You-Should-Have-Seen-The-One-That-Got-Away” filter to what I recall observing those many years ago), it was more a case of, “If you fall off the horse, go find a donkey to climb back on,” because few things in life are more ignoble than hooking a big fish an immediately losing it.

And here’s another old adage, the classic admonition by the veteran running back to the rookie who excessively celebrates his first NFL rushing touchdown: “Act like you’ve been there before.” It shames me to say that in contrast to your typical Bassmaster tournament circuit pro, who would simply shrug off such a heartbreaking event, my response was peppered with epitaphs such as “Shit!” “Crap!” and “F@#k!”But you really can’t knock a kid whose response to misfortune is (as we say in the teaching profession) “age appropriate,” can you? So, let’s move on.

Turns out, my big smallmouth was just the precursor to a feeding spree up and down The Beach. At one point, each of us, including myself, either had a fish on or was unhooking one. The majority of these fish were what we called “perch” (with apologies to yellow perch everywhere), but which were actually freshwater drum. In common with their saltwater counterparts, freshwater drum emit audible “grunts” when handled. A typical Little Miami River drum will give you a respectable fight, boring toward the bottom in carp-like fashion, but its endurance is such that after one decent run, it will suddenly go torpid, at which point you’ll tow in a fish that appears already resigned to whatever fate awaits it. Sadly, it was the fate of the drum caught on that particular August morning to have the metal spike of a cheap stringer rammed through its gill flaps, to have its mouth pierced with the same spike, and then, through the force of gravity, to descend the six-foot length of frayed plastic line, halted finally by the metal ring at the end of the stringer.

spotted bass (Micropterus punctulatus)

Between the eight of us, we hauled in at least 20 drum, along with several rock bass ( a river-dwelling sunfish with a disproportionately large mouth) and a couple of what we called “red eyes,” ( actually spotted bass, a smaller, equally scrappy relative of the small mouth bass).

But after maybe an hour during which nearly every cast along a twenty-yard stretch of the The Beach produced a bite, the action abruptly shut down. We threw out our lines, waited, waited, and waited. Nada. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Nothing but the sound of running water and the occasional epithet.  Then I heard splashing, followed by whoops. RC and the two Tims had stripped off their shirts and shoes and were waist deep in the  water. were waist-deep in the water. “Accidentally-on-purpose,” as the expression goes, they beginning to encroach on Tom and Steve’s casting lanes. Steve made a big production of reeling in his line and then freezing in mid cast as if the approaching commotion would simply pass and move downstream with the current. Tom also reeled in his line, only to cast it back out over the three boys’ head. He then briskly reeled it in. Was Tom attempting to hook one of the swimmers? I wondered.

It would serve them right.

Punctuating Tom’s second cast was a shrill “Yeow!” emanating from RC. Apparently, in response to the velocity of the cast, Tom’s nightcrawler and Tom’s hook parted company. Tom’s baitless hook and sinker traveled to the lip of the channel, while the newly liberated nightcrawler  detoured briskly to the left and splatted on the back of RC’s neck. “What is it?” RC shrieked, swiping furiously at the point of contact. For his part, Tom feigned an expression of total befuddlement, but RC wasn’t buying it. “Whadda fuck! RC croaked, splashing toward Tom. Two benevolent forces intervened to defuse what could have been an explosive sequence of events: The two Tim’s broke out in spasms of laughter just as Gary, who was running toward the scene of all the excitement, lost his footing on a slick rock and executed a textbook “Ass-Over-Elbow.”

Now we were all laughing, even Gary, who had the good fortune of landing in a flat of mud. That is, we were all laughing except Ronnie, who was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Croaker?” someone finally thought to ask. We scanned the surrounding environs.

“He could have drowned,” I volunteered. “This river is mostly shallow, but it has undertows that can suck you right down to the bottom.” This pronouncement was greeted with an interval of grave contemplation. As “Tweeners,” as it were, we retained our boyish fascination for phenomena of Things That Can Suck You Under, including, but not necessarily limited to: fast-moving trains, quicksand, and seemingly benign pockets of river water with treacherous undertows. And in fact, the Little Miami River did and still does claim a disproportionate number of drowning victims each year. But the river was merciful that day; Ronny was in fact the source of what we initially thought was a wild boar or some related feral beast. We finally discovered him, partially concealed by a rock ledge, fast asleep and snoring, as they say, to beat the band.

Need I remark upon the perils faced by a 12-year-old boy who suffers the misfortune of falling asleep amidst his peers? Our first impulse was to attempt the discrete removal of his clothes, but RC vetoed that proposition, arguing that Croaker, simply by virtue of being Croaker, would certainly have a generous allotment of underwear “skid marks.”  And that’s when Tim Molloy spotted the bloated corpse of a sizable carp.

I must confess that Tim’s proposal that we reel in Ronny’s line, hook the dead carp on it and then play the line back out, struck me as both hilarious and relatively benign (as opposed, for instance, to drawing penises all over his body, or removing and then hiding his pants. Plus, I was relieved that it was Steve and not myself that Tim and RC appointed to fetch said carp and secure it to Ronny’s hook. Given the foul odor emanating from the carp, Steve’s strategy of grasping it by its lips and hefting it at arm’s length struck me as well-reasoned and sound, except that, moments later, Steve discovered that the better part of the fish, excepting the lips and part of a gill flap, was right back on the ground. Steve’s s revised strategy, (guaranteed to delight those of us who quest after nausea-inducing experiences) was to grip the carp by its sides, transport it (again, at arm’s length) and then hook it through an eye and then out through the skull. He then opened the bail of Ronny’s dime-store Zebco reel, set the corpse out in the current, let about ten yards of line play out, and then reclosed the bail.

On the count of three, we all started yelling, “Fish on, Croaker! Fish on!”

Ronny’s eyes shot open, and after enduring that interval of disorientation typical of anyone who’s been abruptly awakened,  he focused in on his rod, cradled by a Y-shaped branch, and clearly bowing under the weight of something substantial.

“Oh God, don’t lose it!” RC cried as Ronny scuttled to his rod, clutched it, and then vigorously and repeatedly set the hook. (I think we were all amazed that he managed not to tear off the unfortunate carp’s head.)

He’s putting up a hell of a fight,” Ronnie grunted, as he struggled against the current to haul seven or eight pounds of dead weight with a reel seemingly designed to malfunction right out of the package. But all the vital components — the Zebco reel, its spool of  ancient, 20-lb.-test braided line,  the one-piece True Temper steel rod, the 1.5-oz. pyramid sinker, the treble hook specially designed to accommodate “stink bait” — performed flawlessly.

“It feels like  a bass,” Ronny said matter of factly, which floored, RC and the two Tims, and I mean, literally, in that they both staggered about, seized by paroxysms of laughter, before dropping face-first on the ground.

“Whatever you do, don’t let it jump!” Steve shouted, apparently having opted to join in on the fun.

“Why?” Ronny grunted in response. Noticing that the carp corpse seemed to be drifting downstream, I glanced at Ronny’s reel and quickly deduced that the screw holding the spool in Ronny’s reel had come loose, rendering the reel useless. (I suspect that many anglers of a certain age remember their love/hate relationship with what was, in many cases, their first fishing rig — the Zebco 77 spincast rod-and-reel combo, in which the rod handle and back half of the reel could be unscrewed from the front half of the reel and the actual rod.)

Steve and I addressed Ronny in unison:  “Because he’ll break your line!” (Steve). “You’re reel’s busted! (me). Needless to say, this put Ronny in a state of utter confusion, so I stepped into the water, grabbed Ronny’s line and began pulling it in, hand over hand. My better angel hoped Ronny’s line would snap, leaving him hugely disappointed, but with the consolation of having a whopping good fish story in his repertoire. The not-so-good angel was curious to see how Ronny would react when he gets his “trophy” close enough to shore to figure out what he had actually caught. And that moment of reckoning was imminent because already could see the carp’s pale mass. A couple feet closer and I could make out its grotesquely mutilated head with half the left jaw missing and the right eyeball, somehow squeezed out of its socket, but still connected by a filamentous gob of tissue.

“I see it!” Ronny whooped. He waded in front of a me and grabbed the line, at which point I gladly released my grip. Ronny began backing up, moving toward the shore. Suddenly, he froze. “What the hell?” he said, almost with a sigh.

“It’s a zombie fish!” Steve shrieked theatrically.

Had I not been in on the joke, I could easily imagine being appalled  by the sight of that leering, cadavorous creature

Two things then happened in quick succession: Ronnie began chanting, “Sorry, sorry sorry,” as Steve reached into the water, hefted the carp, and proclaimed, “Touch it and you die.”

At which point, Ronny flung his rod at Steve and ran, panic stricken, about eight or so yards until he tripped over an exposed root. Ennervated by the laughter of RC and the two Tims (Tom and Gary did not seem that amused ), Steve advanced toward Ronny, intoning, “He wants your soul. He wants your soul,” as Ronnie struggled to his feet, only to stumble and fall yet again.

Spmeone tapped me on my back. It scared the shit out of me. I turned and confronted two men, both looking to be in their mid-twenties and, despite the heat, both dressed in black cassocks that fell a little higher than ankle-length.

“You boys are trespassing on private property, as I’m sure you already know,” one of them said smugly, while his partner was softly chanting, “Naughty, naughty. Tsk, tsk.”

small-mouthed bass

Eight boys  biked up Montgomery Road. Five were aged thirteen, and three aged twelve. RC was at the fore with Tim Jellicas, a fellow jock, and Tim Molloy, one of his Greaser buddies. They appeared to be racing each other, pedaling furiously for a block and then  sitting astride their Huffy bikes, tricked out with banana seats, sissy bars and chopper handlebars, while the rest of us caught up.

Tom DiPuccio, Steve Slattery and myself, who considered ourselves the “real fishermen,” comprised the second group of riders. Our bikes were garden-variety Schwinn ten-speeds, not by choice, but because we lacked both the mechanical expertise and the disposable income to build and accessorize bikes from the frames up.

Bringing up the rear and threatening to drop out of sight  altogether were Gary Jackson, my former best friend, and Ronny Kirk. I cannot recall the bikes pedaled by Gary or Ronny, but I can assume they were “one speeds,” which would explain why they were hard pressed to keep up with us. I can picture Gary, red-faced, sweat dripping off his face and down his arms, huffing mightily on the long ascent up Montgomery Road toward Pleasant Ridge.  Gary had always been on the heavy side, but in the two months since I had last seen him,  he must had put on at least 20 pounds. This was because our school football coach had urged Gary to “beef up” over the summer to secure his status as a starting lineman on the eighth-grade varsity football team. (It’s testimony to how far we had drifted apart as friends that I didn’t even realize he was on the football team until I had a chance to talk with him  after we arrived at the river.)

As for Ronny,  my relationship to him dated back to the fifth grade, when we were teammates on the Norwood Lions, the Pony League baseball team Ronny’s father coached. Pony League was good to me —  I developed prowess as a first baseman, as well as a power hitter (before harder-throwing Little League pitchers put me soundly in my place). Plus, my dad was the assistant coach — bring on the father-son bonding moments! But,  Although I hadn’t hung out much with Ronny (who had acquired the nickname “Croaker” by virtue of screaming, “You coulda croaked me!”  at some bully on the aftermath of a beat-down) since our Pony League days, he always struck me as a fairly “normal” guy. I hadn’t known it at the time, but The Beach would be the arena where I would first bear witness to a boy whose behavior would prove a precursor to eventual devastating mental illness, at which point I would be forced to confront the heartlessly cruel, almost casual, way in which some members of our fishing party responded to that behavior.

Meanwhile, there I was, peddling through Pleasant Ridge, feeling about as good as I had ever felt. I was in the company of seven other boys who had sought me out because I alone could offer them access to the storied Beach. I had even put aside the weird episode of the previous night in which RC had relentlessly kicked my feet. He couldn’t have been “queer,” (to use the parlance prevalent at the time) because he was rumored to “like” the buxom Sharon Hart. Plus, he certainly had to have been asleep, no doubt in the throes of a nightmare in which he was forced to fend off intruders grabbing at his own feet.

Remington Road

At about the one-hour point of our journey — after peddling uphill to Pleasant Ridge, downhill to Kennedy Heights, back uphill to Silverton, and then  a little more uphill to Kenwood — we hit Remington Rd.

Then and now, that simple act of turning off one road to another marks about as abrupt a transition from  city to country as I’ve ever seen. Originating in Cincinnati’s Uptown District, Montgomery Road runs through Norwood, out to suburban Kenwood and beyond, dragging the city right along with it. You make the turn at the intersection of Remington and Montgomery and the exurban sprawl — mega car dealerships, motels, fast food joints — is suddenly at your back .  Instead, you are descending down a winding, two-lane highway at a speed in which a constant, light pressure on the brakes of your bike seems prudent. You’ll see a few houses, set far back from the road and widely spaced apart, but these stately houses soon give way to what have recently become known as “hobby farms,” Most featured horses, along with small lots of  grazing pasture enclosed by white, wooden, two-rail fences, but I once observed a peacock bobbing and strutting with his tail fanned out in full display in a yard adjacent an immaculately detailed miniature red barn  

Further down the still-descending road you encounter real farms, with stands of corn and grazing dairy cows, alternating with wood lots and pasture gone wild. A couple of miles further down  and just after you pass Lake Isabella, a”pay” lake that’s still going strong, you notice that the road is no longer descending. You are in the Little Miami River Valley. The heat and humidity down here, now that you’re peddling instead of gliding downhill,  brings on eye-stinging sweat, until you turn of on the dirt road with the “No Trespassing” sign, and, once again, you are descending, feeling a refreshing, cool breeze, and hearing the deep, steady murmuring of moving water.

Upon arrival at The Beach, we parked our bikes and, given that this was the pre-Velcro era, we untied our rods from our backpacks. (Those without backpacks had pedaled to The Beach with one hand on the handlebar and one hand on a fishing rod). As the boy in possession of the outing’s most precious commodity — the four-dozen nightcrawlers purchased by me the day before from Norwood-based Lefty’s Bait Shop with pooled money — it then became my job to dole out the bait under the following provisions:

a) Each angler is responsible for affixing the nightcrawler to his own damn’ hook.

b) To botch any more than two or three hook-up attempts is to risk being mercilessly castigated, as well as being called a “pussy.”

c) The same goes for the liberation of poorly-hooked night crawlers, either through the execution of “Bozo casts,” or through the inability to prevent “Fucker-stole-my-bait!” incidents.

After what seemed like hours of trying to settle disputes over the comparable size, or lack thereof, of each angler’s nightcrawler, I was finally able to present my own offering — one plump, securely hooked crawler on a size-6 Snell hook weighted with a 5/8-ounce sinker. Most of the anglers in our crew were laboriously tying sticks, torn balloon pieces or other “strike indicators” onto their lines and then propping their rods on the bank in keeping with the deeply ingrained “throw-it-out-and-wait-for-something-to-happen” tradition of river fishing. Conversely, I was taking the proactive approach — hands on rod, vigilantly alert for any tapping or movement of the line, occasionally  giving the reel a quarter-turn to ensure the bait wasn’t “snagged-up.”

After a couple of minutes, I reeled in my line. The nightcrawler still looked lively, so I tossed it back out, this time a little closer to the far bank. I felt an immediate tug on the line. My impulse was to yank back and set the hook, but my experience with nightcrawlers has been that fish often will react somewhat warily to a food item that seems to scream out, “Look at how succulent and protein-rich I am! I’m a helpless, enticing wriggler! I’m just too good to be true!”

What I did instead was to fall back on a formula arrived at by trial and error that almost always works: Let the fish run with the crawler until it stops; when it runs again, count to three and then slam the hook home.

I did just that and immediately felt resistance. Oh shit, a snag, I thought. Whatever I was pulling on wasn’t moving. Then, a moment later, a hefty smallmouth bass sailed over the water porpoise style. “Whoa!” I shouted. ” I got a big one!”

My fellow anglers dropped their rods and crowded around me, because this type of event — the actual hooking of a big game fish — rarely happened in our crowd.  Now the onus was on me to draw upon the vast reservoir of knowledge accumulated through countless battles with trophy fish. Of course I lost it!  The bass literally spit out my hook in what I could only conclude was a gesture of contempt.

There I was, one muggy August evening in 1965, sitting with Robbie Corval (RC, to his friends) munching Fritos and watching “Hogan’s Heroes.”  RC’s mom had not yet ordered us to bed, so I was still in a state of pubescent bliss simply being in close proximity to  the most popular soon-to-be eighth-grader at St. Peter & Paul Elementary School. :

Anyone who knew RC (I have changed his name, but if you attended St. Peter & Paul School  the same time I did, you will know who I’m talking about.) can truly appreciate why a sleepover with RC was such a big deal, At a shade over six feet tall, which in elementary school was a very big deal (except. of course, if you were a girl). RC was a triple threat: star halfback and forward for the St. Pete’s football and basketball teams, respectively; and home-run-hitting center fielder for the Morris Funeral Home Tigers of the Norwood Little League.

My school had its cliques, of course, I wanted to think of myself as a “Jock,” because I was a passably good first baseman on my little league team.  In truth, I was a “brain,”  a designation earned by any student who could make it through the academic year without flunking anything. In order to avoid being bullied, or worse, “ganged up on,” by members of the more elite cliques, Brains had to learn the art of negotiation; to wit, “How can I write your ‘Five Virtues of a True Christian Citizen’ essay if both my arms are in casts?”

You could do worse than being tagged a “Brain.” You could be a “Hillbilly” or “Retard,” (both sexes), a “Slut,” (female) or a “Homo,” (male). Needless to say, “Jocks” were the elite clique, and by all rights, RC was king of the Jocks. Yet, although RC associated with Jocks on the playing field or on the court, and generally sat at the Jock table during lunch hour, RC often hung out with Keith Shankhouse, Joey Fiorito and Steve Molloy. These kids were “Greasers,”  a clique that didn’t lend itself to easy categorization. Greasers were the kids who lived in apartments or two-flats; the kids with dads who closed down bars — on weekdays; the kids who boasted, “One day I’m going to punch my mom back!”

By the same token, Greasers cultivated a “Cool”  that the rest of us could only marvel at. You had nothing to gain by offering your skills as an essay writer to a Greaser — he could care less about grades.  Only a bona-fide Greaser earned the right to don the greaser uniform– pegged black chinos, white Converse sneakers  with black socks, Banlon shirt with an empty box of Marlboros rolled up in the right sleeve; topped with a Brylcreem-enhanced duck-tail ‘do. And man could Greasers fight! In fact, a grade-school Greaser’s true mission in life was to ride his bike down to the Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant just outside Norwood on Friday and Saturday nights to participate with their high-school Greaser brethren in “rumbles.”

As a guy who moved easily between Jocks and Greasers, RC obviously did not go out of his way to seek out my company. He occasionally showed up at the pick-up games initiated by what you could call “The Second Tier” — the couple of dozen boys, including myself, who merited a degree of status by virtue of being class clowns, of having high-status older brothers, of having somewhat affluent parents, or of having a father who was vice mayor of Norwood (me).

The sight of RC sauntering toward the ball diamond would charge us up, as though his presence instantly validated that day’s game. At bat, he would hit line drives to all three corners of the outfield on the first pitch. In center field, where he liked to play, he would casually lope toward fly balls and snag them one-handed, or he would scoop up shallow line drives and rifle the ball back to some hapless infielder, who, more often than not, was too inept to tag out the base runner.

When these games were over and we all headed to Gribble’s Cafe for twelve-cent sodas, RC hardly ever spoke to me. So, why was I RC’s sole guest at a sleepover? The most logical explanation was because over the past week. I had been talking up my invitation to fish a prime stretch of the Little Miami River, a scenic tributary of the Great Miami River (which, in turn, flowed into the Ohio River).   “The Beach (as this stretch is still known) marks the point where a broad, silty pool enters a small canyon. Suddenly constricted, the river now flows briskly over a bed of smooth, round “river rocks.”  The river broadens a couple-hundred yards downstream, just beyond the “No Trespassing” sign, gauging a deep channel in a bed now composed primarily of sand and clay.  This is the “honey hole,” about thirty yards of clay-tinted green water featuring numerous deep holes and wide eddies.

The Beach was the on the property of a Catholic men’s retreat house, which meant that even though most of us were well aware of its existence, and had, at one time or another, made the one-and-half bike ride to fish its productive waters, we would be lucky to get in 15 minutes of fishing before being chased off by the Franciscan brothers who resided at the house.  My dad, who was friends with the Jesuit priest who ran the retreat house, had wrangled the invitation. Consequently, RC was quick to realize that I was in possession of a valuable asset — permission to fish The Beach without fear of harassment.

Back to the previous night: RC and I lay on the living room floor, he in his old Cub Scout sleeping bag, me in my dad’s canvas surplus Army sleeping bag.  Our only real conversation occurred while playing”First Base-Second -Base-Third-Base” challenge, in which one of us would name a female classmate  and then ask the other whether he thought she’d let him get to first base, second base or home plate.  As I remember, we both were under the erroneous assumption that if a girl, having already welcomed you to second base, decides to wave you on,  you need only make a beeline straight to home plate to claim the goodies. Let me put it in Freudian terms: Picture the realm of third base, in all its earthy glory, as a steam roller; now, picture the infantile ids of RC and myself as a couple cartons of eggs.

When RC started snoring, I recall thinking,”What a lucky dog. On top of everything else, he goes right to sleep.” I sensed a long night ahead. Couldn’t quite figure out why RC invited only me to his sleepover. His company would have been welcome on any outing by pretty much anyone in the school. And yet he asked me .RC’s mom was nice, though. RC’s father had died a long time ago, I wasn’t sure how he died, but the few people with whom I felt comfortable enough to ask (my parents, my sister, my longtime friend Gary, who lived less than a half-block from RC but didn’t know him much better than I did), either didn’t know or wouldn’t tell me This meant RC’s mom had to raise RC, along with RC’s older brothers, Jimmy  and Greg, RC’s older brothers.

I was finally drifting off. A dream image of The Beach materialized in my mind, the blue- tinted water flowing languidly over the smooth river rocks.Something was pulling me back to the waking world. Something was kicking my feet,not particularly hard, but with command, rhythmically — one, two, kick; three, four, kick.

RC was kicking my feet. “RC!” I hissed. No response. “RC!” I repeated, considerably louder. The kicking did not cease. I scooted  away from him. After a brief respite, I again felt RC kicking me on my feet. I endured this weird, inexplicable pummeling for maybe a few more minutes or maybe for another hour. What really sticks in my mind, though,is that I thought RC might never stop. And never once did he  appear to be awake.

I must have finally fallen asleep because I briefly did not know where I was when the voice of RC’s mom intruded upon whatever murky dream I was lost in.

“Can you make us breakfast? ” RC asked his mom, who was dressed in the signature red-and-white-checked uniform of an Early Bird Cafe waitress.

“Honey, I have to be at work in 20 minutes, she pleaded.

“My mom makes the best scrambled eggs in the world,” RC informed me with a wink.

While RC’s mom was trying to  start  the ’57 Impala formerly driven by RC’s dad, he and I were digging into a bowl of his mom’s renowned scrambled eggs. After a long, strange night, I felt re-invigorated, fortified. It was a new day. We were less than 20 minutes away from teaming up with the other six members of our fishing party and making the trek to the Little Miami River.

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If you would characterize yourself as someone who “likes to fish,” then I feel confident that some other generalizations also hold true for you.

1. In any given week between the months of April and November (maybe a little earlier or a little later, depending upon how far north or south you live), you will contemplate the weather and gauge how good the fishing might be on at least four out of seven days.

2.  If you travel to any place within sight of a lake, stream, river, ocean or canal (especially a canal), you will wish you could fish it, except you are actually there for a family reunion, or for a wedding or because there is an adjacent B&B that’s charming the pants off your spouse. Depending upon your level of audacity, aka shamelessness, you might even drop a few bucks on a cheap rig, “Just to toss something out there, honest to God, honey.”

3. You are a nature nut.

Given that fishing is exclusively an outdoor activity (as far as I know), an outing at the ol’ fishing hole assures that you will be up to your ears in nature in all her wet, cold, sweltering (and yes) magnificent glory.

As you well know, our pursuit of piscine quarry generally features intervals that can best be defined as “between bites.”  In a given fishing outing, these intervals can range anywhere from five minutes to the entire outing.  Whether your wading in the water,  sitting in a boat or working the shore, you will be in the very heart of our planet’s richest ecosystem — the convergence of land and water.

Have you ever fruitlessly pounded the water to the point that you just want to put your rod aside and take a seat?t one step further:  Assuming the ground is dry, have you ever been tempted to actually lay down, close your eyes and lose yourself to the burbling of water over rocks, the rustling of leaves in the trees, the rusty-hinge music of a red wing blackbird? Have you ever felt so at peace?

In my younger years, I consumed huge chunks of time sitting on the bank of a lake or river eyeing a red-and-white float bobbing in the current. On those occasions when”the bite was off,” so to speak, the lengthy, uninterrupted surveillance of an apathetic float could lead to weird trains of thought, like, “This is the world in entropy. Brown water. Empty sky. The last, feeble cry of humanity can be symbolized by the dead worm dangling limply on a hook, submerged in the infinite, algae-coated void.”

What inevitably nipped those bleak musings in the bud was my dawning realization that by virtue of having sat still and kept quiet for an extended period of  time, nature had ceased regarding me as an intruder and was now operating at full throttle. I have watched a pair of muskrats repairing their lodge while their children romped and wrestled with each other. I have watched a kingfisher crash dive into the water and emerge with a six-inch bullhead squirming in its beak. I can’t tell you how many times I have observed great blue herons moving with excruciating stealth among the lily pads, or how many times I’ve tried to get visual sightings of songbirds singing in surrounding trees, or spot woodpeckers drumming overhead.

In my early teen years, blissfully unaware that undiagnosed ADHD was at the controls, I would devise “outside-the-box” techniques for catching critters. For instance, I would tie a plastic worm to the end of my line and flip it in the direction of a bullfrog chuggling sonorously a couple feet off the bank. All a bullfrog needs to trigger its predator reflex is to see something in motion that will fit roughly in its mouth. I would reel in and even hoist bullfrogs, their jaws clamped like vices over plastic worms. There was no need for a hook.

Likewise,I would gently lift rocks half-submerged in the shallows, wait for the silt to clear and then induce newts or crayfish to scoot into a plastic cup slowly and carefully lowered unto the water. To catch a newt, you tap his tail. To catch a crayfish, you position the cup behind it and tap one of its antennae because crayfish scoot backwards when alarmed.

One way I would try to catch turtles at Camp Marydale (see my third post) was to requisition a canoe, and then drift inconspicuously toward a group of turtles sunning themselves on a half-submerged tree, hoping to get close enough to snag one of them with a landing net when the whole crew drops into the water.

Every now and then while lifting rocks in search of newts and crayfish, I would expose a water snake tightly coiled in the muck. The northern water snake closely resembles the venomous water moccasin (or cottonmouth) down to the viper-like shape of its head. Indeed, herpatologists would strongly recommend not getting bit by a northern water snake because, notwithstanding the bacterial load of its saliva, the northern water snake,, along with the widely abundant garter snake,  may be in the early evolutionary stages of developing a functional envenomating delivery system. In other words, they may be half-assed venomous! Plus, the northern water snake secretes a foul-smelling musk when alarmed. Is it any wonder that I was almost unbearably intrigued with trying to catch water snakes?Incidentally, the method I employed in the capture of these and other large snakes was the classic “pin-the-head-and-secure-by-the-neck” technique. Speaking as someone who’s been bitten at least twice by northern water snakes, I would urge you not to put too much faith in the “pin-the-head-and-secure-by-the-neck” technique.

I can report that with advancing age (and declining reflexes) I have become less a player and more a spectator in nature’s grand pageant. What I wish I could also report is that I’ve become adept at identifying the various flies that constitute important parts of the trout’s diet. Unfortunately, no matter how voraciously trout are rising to a hatch, I hardly ever see anything flying near the water or off the water, for that matter. I’ve watched videos of anglers plucking flies from rocks or picking them out of mesh nets. Yet they elude my eyes. If I have to restrict my nature watching to things chickadee-sized or larger, so be it.

I’m not going to lie to you, though. The hardest thing for me to come to terms with, as you might have guessed, is reconciling the kid who seemed able to go anywhere and do anything he willed, to the man who would gladly trade an abundance of time to reflect for the ability to slip on a pair of waders and get knee-deep in the water.

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