The River’s Edge

The River’s Edge

I love to explore the river, when I feel the pull of society becoming too strong I will pull my fishing pole and tackle box from the storage room and with a sandwich and extra water I make my way to the river’s edge. The river welcomes me with her usual scent and shimmering ripples. I began to love the river as a very young child. In the summertime we would spend weeks or even months at the river’s edge fishing, gathering firewood and bait.

The first day on the river was always spent setting up camp. We did not have a tent so what is called a lean-to would be built for our parents and the babies. We got to sleep under the stars. This shelter was made up of a piece of heavy gauged plastic used in the coal mines as a curtain to separate sections, some nylon rope and a couple of heavy six-foot limbs we would always cut from and innocent tree. The plastic would be driven into the ground with a couple of makeshift stakes on the two back corners while the front would rest on the six foot limbs tied at the top and then the rope staked into the ground.

Gathering bait and building a trotline would consume the better part of our first day. As we the children would set off on our first adventure we would gather bait along the way, and our parents would build the trotline. The trotline took the longest and was our greatest source of food in the summertime. First, one hundred large hooks would each be tied to a two foot piece of nylon twine, and then each would be tied an exact distance of three arm lengths apart on another three hundred yard piece of twine. This large fishing line would be tied to the bank of the river and then slowly and carefully stretched across the river with each hook baited and dropped into the water as we went along. The opposite end of the trotline would be anchored with the heaviest rock available and dropped to the bottom of the river.

With no stone left unturned we would slowly make our way up the river’s edge looking for anything alive that might fit onto a hook. With suntanned backs we would happily fill our soup cans with bait while skipping rocks and squeezing the sand between our toes. We would climb trees and swing on grapevines along the river’s edge never once afraid of life or anything in it. The age of innocence took us many miles along the river during