2012 Fishing Goals Aren't really mine at all...

     The beauty of saltwater fishing, whether from the beach, the rocks, a pier, a boat, or a kayak, is that there is always something new to try.  Despite a lifetime of plying the waters off California for over a 100 different species, most catches are not "firsts," and seldom are they "personal bests."  Certainly, there are several California species that I have yet to capture at all, and with a little luck, time, and effort, I may enter my first sturgeon, striped bass, or salmon on my 2012 fish logs. 
     What is more likely this year, and perhaps just as satisfying, is the prospect of fishing with my son, who will be turning four in April of the coming year.  Although he has caught several different species of fresh and saltwater fish, he has been expressing a new interest in accompanying his dad on fishing trips a lot more lately.  I'm looking forward to showing him things that my own dad showed me at some point, though I really can't remember specifically when-- how to find sand crabs in the wavewash, or sandworms where the "wet sand" and the "dry sand" meet; how to reel S-L-O-W-L-Y when grubbing, and QUICKLY when trying to get a rig up off the bottom in a hurry to avoid drifting kelp; how to hook a sheephead, despite their bony mouths; how to measure a crab or a lobster, and not lose a finger in the process.
     Like I said, I don't really remember when I learned these things, and I have the skunks and scars to prove that several lessons were required.  What I do know is that these were things my father showed me with patience and persistence, time spent on the water together with my brothers and me.
     2012 promises to be a year of firsts and personal bests... for my son.  I can't think of any better fishing goal for me in the coming 12 months than to foster in my son a love of ethical angling and an understanding of the unique marine ecosystems we enjoy in California.  It's a goal I know will pay dividends well past our next trip around the sun.
    

Hog's Heaven, Pig Pen, Slab Central... Barred Surf Perch in December

Eleven has always been a lucky number for me, a fitting analogy for various things like synergy, teamwork, and even love (all represented by two Ones who, standing together in proximity and partnership, achieve more than they would alone, more even than the sum of their parts).  Ironically for me, 2011 has been a year of modest ups and incredible downs.  Not unlike the tides that follow a similar pattern, such ebbs and flows of existence have the potential to wreak havoc and destroy, just as they have the ability to cleanse, to refresh, to purify, and to prepare a new canvas upon which to paint tomorrow's masterpiece.
Such was our most recent fishing excursion to Hog's Heaven, a stretch of sandy shore in south Santa Barbara county that has been a place of extremes--incredible fishing, or a ghost town serving as little more than a place to practice one's casting ability.
My brother Dan, cousin Bryan, and I arrived about 90 minutes before the top of a considerable tide, and found a beach that was telling its usual tale: a glance down the beach in either direction betrayed holes and rips in an S pattern between hills and valleys.  So pronounced were the dunes today that as water ran back to the ocean, it flowed in miniature rivers, pushing huge plumes of chocolate-colored sand out into the sea. 
The first cast immediately loaded-up... with eel grass, bits of kelp, and other assorted junk that immediately covered my quarter-ounce egg sinker in one bunch, and four feet below, another clump of detritus engulfing my size 8 Gamakatsu hook and BH MORF grub.  Subsequent casts produced a similar result, and hiking up and down the beach a half mile in each direction from our starting point didn't change the outcome much.  Sandcrabs were nowhere to be found, so bait fishing wasn't an option.  Only a couple of small male barred surf perch that managed to find our offerings before the weeds, and some near-shore acrobatics by a family of porpoise were our rewards for fishing in tough conditions.
After an hour of picking slop off the setups, and pushing my 4 lb. outfit to its limits, we made a decision to head south a bit and try a few other spots.  Travelling light and mobile, we left our rods rigged, tossed backpacks in the bed of the truck, and were south on the 101 in short order. 
Bypassing a 7-Eleven stop for coffee in an effort to fish the backside of the high tide, we found a stretch of beach about 8 miles down the coast with what appeared to be excellent conditions:  cleaner water, good rips, a pronounced trough, and wave patterns that demonstrated a very fishy beach.
As I stepped into the water, I felt the tell-tale movement of sandcrabs underfoot.  I pulled the grub off my hook, placed it in my pocket, and pinned a "Taster's Choice" sandcrab (not too big...not too small) on the hook.  The first cast splashed down behind the trough, and before I could take up the slack in the line, a chunky barred surf perch had inhaled the bait.  The fish made a run to the north, providing a spirited, drag-pulling fight on 4 lb. test.  She taped out at 12 inches, posed for a quick photo (on my cousin's camera, unfortunately for this report), and back into the ocean she went.
As the tide fell over the next three hours, we caught and released dozens of perch, the largest being a whopping 15 inches.  These fish had shoulders!  Even the low tide didn't seem to turn off the bite, as the fish were practically beaching themselves to eat sandcrabs at our feet.  We left them biting, satisfied with an outstanding bite for barred surf perch of a quality and quantity that we hadn't enjoyed since childhood trips to San Quintin in Baja California.  True to the memory, I even found (and released) a legal Pismo clam kicking my feet in search of bait.
2011 is nearly over; to paraphrase the Good Book, "Sufficient for a year is its own evil."  Heck, a little numerology demonstrates that the sum of 12/26 is eleven...and maybe there's something to that. 
The next year is full of promise--both good and bad, ups and downs, ebbs and flows.  It's an analogy that is not lost on me, particularly with regard to fishing the beaches of Southern California.  Tide is king, here; local lakes lay flat and lifeless for the most part, their surfaces only rippled by wind or a wading bird.  But the surf--with her crashing waves, her ups and downs of tides, and the ever-shifting sands, are a dynamic example of a life well-lived. 
Pulling a few slabs from the foam from time to time is just a bonus.

Miracles

There were few times that my brothers and I moved faster than when we were changing from our church clothes to our beach clothes.  With holy water still splashed on our foreheads and the recessional song fresh in our ears, we promised to hang-up our collective Sunday Best “later”, piled high on the unluckiest brother’s bunk bed (he would get stuck with the job that night after sleeping boys were carried in from a long day in the sun).  An eclectic collection of towels, fishing rods, and beach toys was dragged to the van, everyone took his favorite seat, Mom counted 6 noses in the rearview mirror, and we were southbound on the I-5…

…except on this particular trip, we had a few stops along the way.  Before we trod upon the sand that day, we added a few more noses to the car--friends and cousins who would fill the Ackermobile to capacity, and become unwilling witnesses to one of our family’s great near-misses, and perhaps, one of our greatest miracles.

Our destination for a balmy summer Sunday was as it always had been on many post-church beach days:  San Onofre State Beach.  Fully 80 miles from our house in Pasadena, Mom and Dad preferred the wide-open sandy stretch of coastline, devoid of the urbanization, crowds, and riff-raff (as Dad called it) that could be found at beaches like Santa Monica and Venice.  I think Mom liked it because she could look out across the seaside expanse of sand, do a headcount, and know that all was well with her kids.  Cleaner water and fewer people—save for the ever-present longboarders—made surf fishing much easier at San-O, too.

After a particularly painful round of Slug-Bug on the Five (there must have been a Volkswagen convention in San Diego that day), dad pulled into the dirt lot right on the beach, and the doors exploded with a storm of boys, toys, and beach gear.  Dad waited for the dust to settle, then carefully pulled out his rods and sand spikes from beneath the van seats.

Fishing that day was great.  I don’t recall the tides, but they must have been a strong evening incoming, as the usually good fishing in sight of the power plant domes continued to improve throughout the afternoon.  By the time our shadows stretched out behind us on the sand and the ocean glowed orange in eyes squinted against the sundowner winds, we had caught several nice corbina, spotfin croaker, and a four foot leopard shark…all destined for our family table.    

      

The sun set on a perfect day together as a family, and the fiery hues of the sunset cooled to violet, then blue.  Dad was having trouble seeing his surf rig to re-bait. Eager to get his bait back into the darkness of the surf—and whatever hungry denizens of the deep might still be lurking in the waves—he set the rod in the sand spike, lit the lantern, and pulled his hooks down towards the light, just a foot from the sand.

About the same time, my youngest brother Jonny, about two years old, came running up to Dad. As toddlers running in sand (or anywhere, for that matter) are apt to do, Jonny fell forward at my dad's feet.  Instantly, the rod took a heavy load and bent well, as if a leopard shark or a 10 lb. spotfin had taken the bait and turned towards Catalina…only problem was, the twin baitholder hooks and three ounce pyramid sinker were not in the water.

Mom turned pale—no—it was more than that.  I watched her soul age just a bit in that moment—something flashed across her face in the darkness of the night, a strange light in her eyes that appeared with great urgency and disappeared just as quickly, as if her guardian angel had snapped a Polaroid at that exact moment so that he could forever capture the instant when he failed her.

When Jonny had fallen, one of the 1/0 barbed baitholder hooks had caught him in the corner of his left eye.  He immediately started pulling at the line and clawing with sandy hands at his face.  Dad acted quickly and instinctively, cutting the line and holding Jonny’s arms down at his sides.  I remember seeing the shank of the hook sticking out of my baby brother's eye, and I feared the worst. 

How Mom and Dad collected everyone up in the van in such a short amount of time is still a mystery to me to this day, but leaving our fishing rods, gear, and beach equipment on that dark, desolate stretch of beach probably helped their cause.  Dad put a cloud of dust in the air as he sped from bonfire to bonfire along the beach, frantically pleading with people for directions to the nearest hospital.  After some questionable information from a rather inebriated group of beach partiers (my parents still half-laugh that we really must have been a buzz kill for them—their directions were flawless) we were northbound on the I-5, lighter for the lack of our belongings laden heavily with stowaway sand, and quiet not from the satisfied fatigue of a day in the sun, but in solemn vigil for our youngest brother.  I was convinced he would lose his eye, and remember wondering how many pirate jokes he would have to endure in school wearing an eye patch for the rest of his life.

Within minutes, our family arrived at San Clemente State hospital...Jonny had fallen asleep on the way, and that seemed to worry my parents just a little more.  As we boys had that morning, my parents exploded from the van, and called over their shoulders to me—the eldest—to keep my brothers in the car as they ran towards the ominous EMERGENCY sign with their youngest son cradled in their arms.

My brothers, their friends, and I just sat there quietly. Really, what could we say?  It wasn’t the first time our youngest brother had been taken from us, and I think each of us held the same memory there in the parking lot. 

As the eldest of six sons, I remembered several of my brothers being brought home from the hospital.  The drill was the same:  the van would pull up in front of the house, and my brothers and I would wait on the porch while Dad helped Mom out of the car, a new brother cradled in her arms. (We were born long before car seat laws!)

Tommy, the third.  Then a fourth, Matt.  Zachary, the fifth. And then, Jonny… but there was no baby.  No baby at all.  No Jonny.  Just Mom and Dad, their arms around each other, heavy-hearted and with an emptiness in their eyes, as if there were no more tears to be cried.  They walked up on the porch, fell to their knees, and wrapped their arms around their five sons.  Tragically, it would not be the last time we embraced on the porch as a family missing one of our own, but it was the first.

I gathered my brothers together in our room, and instructed all of them not to ask Mom and Dad about the baby.  I didn’t quite know how to tell them what I knew must be the truth; that Jonny had died in the hospital.  Why else would Mom and Dad come home without our brother?

After a sullen week being babysat by aunts and uncles, Mom and Dad showed up that weekend with our youngest brother, who had needed a few extra days in the Neonatal Intensive Care unit.  Shocked, delighted, amazed… our little brother was home!  Jonny was our miracle brother, back from the dead.  He is, unanimously, our “favorite brother.”  It wasn’t for several years that I told my parents about our meeting in our bedroom. 

And now, in an instant, he had been whisked away from us by fate and circumstance…and I think each of us that remembered his homecoming said a silent prayer that somehow, he would be OK.

Inside the hospital, the ER staff took one look at my brother’s eye, and decided to call a specialist. Incredibly, the hook point was turned away from the eyeball when he fell—instead of impaling the eye itself, the hook had lodged in the bone of his eye socket.  If the hook had been turned the other way, tied the other way in the snell, hit by a gust of wind at the wrong moment…things might have been very different for Jonny; maybe not better, maybe not worse. 

Just different.

The ophthalmologist—who showed up an hour after being called, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and explaining that he had been at a luau—carefully anesthetized the area around Jonny’s eye, pushed the pointed barb back out through his eyelid, snipped off the barb, and then pulled the hook free.  The only signs that anything had happened were two small pinholes in the corner of Jonny’s eye, and the dried tears on his rosy, cherub cheeks.  “He was lucky,” said the doctor.  “It’s a miracle.”

Equally miraculous was our return to the beach, to find that our rods, reels, shoes, clothes, and beach toys were still there, being carefully “guarded” by the nice folks that had given us directions to the hospital.  We hugged and high-fived these complete strangers, thanking them for their help.  One of them (who was officially drunk upon our return to the beach) was having the time of his life fighting a huge fish on Dad’s fishing rod.  None of us had the heart to tell him the hooks and sinker were hopelessly tangled in a huge ball of kelp, 20 feet up the beach from the water.

And to this day, we still call Jonny “Hook-Eye.”

I’ve long believed that our Southern California beaches—places where you can stand with your toes in water that stretches thousands of miles in front of you, and your heels on land that stretches thousands of miles behind you—are a place of miracles.  It’s a boundary of sorts between what we can know through our senses, and what we can know with our hearts.  It’s the border between the ordinary and the fantastic, where mortal blends with miraculous, the way waves stir the sands along the coast, the way time stirs our collective memories of growing up with the sun on our shoulders and sand between our toes.

Our family witnessed miracles that day, but they had little to do with a fish hook in the eye.

Our miracle was Jonny himself.  Our miracle was the magic of summers spent in the company of family and friends. Our miracle was that years later, Mom managed to enjoy fishing again…slowly.  Our miracle continues every time a few of us get together along some fishy stretch of beach, wet a line, and celebrate how miraculous it is to be brothers.

Piscatorial Favoritism?

All right... the weather is ominous, my cough is still deep in my chest, and I haven't found enough motivation to load my gear and head out into the Victory-At-Sea conditions. So instead, I submit the following question and missive to the general readership:

What did calico bass ever do for you?

Let me quickly state that I consider myself an omnivorous conservationist, which is to say that I am a strong supporter of releasing fish, but I am not averse to keeping and eating anything if the mood catches me right and the law of the land provides for it. I have read topics such as selective catch and release and self-imposed sturgeon limits with much interest lately, and it seems to me that at its core, the notion of releasing fish is rife with caveats such as survival rate, the type and location of the hook, the size of the tackle utilized, and the ever-present ethical dilemma of let 'em breed, let 'em bleed, or let me feed.

But it seems to me that calico bass enjoy a higher release rate than just about any other fish in our local waters.

Why? Has the "Slow to grow, so let 'em go" campaign become a part of our collective subconscious decision-making process? Have years of watching freshwater bassers releasing pot-bellied green beasts made us apply the same process to their salt-water brethren? Or is there something more, something almost magical, that makes us see those scrappy checkerboards as more worthy of another swim amongst the kelp strands from whence they came?

Yeah, I "suffer" from it, too. I look deeply into those flashing yellow eyes, rolled-down in an angry glare as if to say, "How dare you hide a hook in my lunch!" and my heartstrings are tugged like so much spider wire pulling against a buttoned-down drag. A solemn, almost apologetic aura encompasses me, and I slide the creature back into the water, hoping simultaneously that I hook--and don't hook--another.

Oh sure, I've kept calicos...I'll bag more as the years go by, inviting them to dinner with great zeal. But unlike even larger white sea bass or yellowtail, I feel some kind of brotherhood with the calico. Eating a calico fish taco is a religious experience, each bite filled with flavor, and a not-quite guilt, not-quite-accomplishment, not-quite unhappiness sense about it.

So what have calicos done for me? They have provided great sport, they have fostered excellent memories fishing with family and friends, they have been the guests of honor at delectable meals. They have pulled drag, pulled kayaks, pulled rods clear of the Palos Verdes rocks and down to a watery grave. My most memorable time with those dear calicos was fishing with my brothers and dad in PV on July 4th, casting swimbaits from the rocks in the dark. If your lure sank through the huge school of barracuda that had pushed up on the beach, an 8 to 10 lb. calico would be happy to take your offering. And all the while, we watched fireworks in Long Beach, and a simultaneous show in Avalon! We released each and every one of those fish, not out of any implied ethics, not from any conservationist standpoint, and not because we couldn't have used the food for our large family.

It was out of RESPECT. And besides, I just didn't like the way they were looking at me.

"The Rock" (and Other Fishing Spots You Never Heard Of...)

     Over the weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to drive up the Southern California coast. While the destination was my brother’s wedding in Malibu, the journey gave me the chance to drive past–and reflect upon with a variety of emotions–dozens of fishing spots I haven’t visited for a long time. A few of them had for so long faded into the past that I had forgotten about them. Yet that “muscle memory” (or is it mussel memory?) kicked in as PCH twisted and turned, the shape of the landscape triggered a long-buried mind file, and my brained whirred with the thoughts of family excursions, solo trips, and great fish stories. To protect the innocent, this record only contains the names my family assigned to these secret spots years ago, although no doubt our paths have crossed in the sand and stone at these locations over the past three decades.
     Perhaps closest to family lore was “The Rock” (pictured), where my family fished weekly throughout my childhood. Hidden in plain sight along the Palos Verdes peninsula, The Rock provided consistent fishing for opaleye, calicos, perch, cabezon, and a dozen other species. A few times, schools of barracuda pushed shoals of anchovies right up on the beach, and hit anything shiny that was cast in their general direction. On one particularly special July 4th evening, my dad, brothers, and I caught and released limits of calicos to 7 lbs. from the kelp, all while watching simultaneous fireworks shows in Avalon, Santa Monica, and Long Beach.
     Continuing north, I drove past “Cookie Beach,” a section of beach around Torrance that made catching legal halibut from the surf a near-sure thing. The stretch of beach was marked by a certain configuration of houses above the iceplant covered hillsides, but if you fished it just right…during the right tides…at the right time of year… with a big “cookie” on your hook (a “cookie” is three or four anchovies wrapped with cotton thread around a 2/0 baitholder hook, so that it looks like a big blob of fish)… well, you just had to make sure the fish you caught were at least 22 inches. Most were at least twenty-six, and that wasn’t accounting for the huge spotfin croaker that would sometimes beat the halibut to the bait.
Every few minutes, another fishing spot from yesteryear. The Bubble Hole. Upside-Downs. Don’t Falls. Tommy’s Cabezon-Spot. Jonny Carson’s (a turnout a few miles north of Wylie’s that was awesome for white seabass in the surf.) Passersby on PCH would have thought me a fool, as I drove up the road smiling, laughing, crying, remembering.
     I pulled into the beachfront hotel in Malibu, just south of the pier, checked in, and went to my room. The breeze on the ocean view balcony felt particularly wonderful, as my toddler, my mortgage, my new job, any number of additional “mys” have kept me from my beloved Pacific for some time. My eyes gazed down the beach at house after house after house….
     And that’s when it hit me.
     My spots are mostly gone now. Sure they’re still there, I guess, but they are shadows of what they once were. The Rock is now virtually inaccessible, blocked by a billion dollar hilltop hotel that was recently featured on the cover of Westways Magazine. Cookie Beach has faded into memory, as the landmarks–and the halibut population betrayed by them–have simply disappeared. Jonny Carson’s is completely blocked off with K-rail and CalTrans vehicles.
     I don’t know if these spots are on the MLPA chopping block or not, but really… it doesn’t matter. Whether or not we’re allowed to fish at many of the locations we enjoyed as children plays second chair to a more direct issues like beach access, parking, and the ever-changing coastal landscape. I can only hope that someday, many years from now, that big hotel will close, those CalTrans trucks will drive away for good, and my grandkids will amble down small, unmarked coastal trails and nondescript roadside turnouts to find hungry fish.
     Yesterday’s history. I’m setting my hopes on tomorrow.

Deep Sea Pier Fishing?

     When I was about seven or eight, my dad took me on my first “Deep-sea fishing trip,” aboard the First String. Being on a boat–the First String was one of the finest of the day–was a wonderful experience for me. As I remember it, we chased barracuda all morning, and ended the day dropper-looping for rockfish. It was the first time I saw a yellowtail, a blue shark (that ate half of a starry on it’s way to my gunny sack), or a deckhand. It was a great trip, and one that was to be the first of countless trips on things of all sizes that float.
Up until that day, going fishing had meant doing so with sand, rocks, or pier-boards underfoot. But there was a certain mystique to the concept of “deep-sea.” Granted, we did a lot of fishing in 20 to 60 feet of water, certainly not “deep” by comparison with most of the ocean’s depths. But for a young boy, miles from shore, catching fish alongside his dad, it was deep enough. The barries were a lot bigger than the perch we had caught at San Onofre or Huntington, and thus, “deep-sea” became synonymous with “big fish.”
     It seems that, often times, pier anglers have that same mindset. The relatively deeper water at the ends of piers seems to beckon most pier anglers the the farthest railing, perhaps with the possibility of one of those big fish that have existed in tale and imagination. Instead, what many anglers find at the ends of piers are crowded conditions and small mackerel or other baitfish. Most piers are not deep enough, it seems, to bring in large fish with regularity.
     That’s not always true, of course. Anyone who has pulled on big sharks and rays from the ends of piers like Gaviota, Goleta, Seal Beach, Balboa, or Oceanside knows there are some big ones out there. The occasional yellowtail will chance a trip through the pilings of Newport, bonito runs can be frenetic and exciting, and many of us have heard stories of bluefin tuna caught from piers in Santa Monica bay a century ago.
     The next time you’re heading for the end, remember that with every step along the pier, if there’s water underneath you, there are fishing opportunities, too. Perch, corbina, and croakers will take pier-fished baits in the skinniest foam. Mid-pier areas beyond the breakers are often the most productive for halibut and other gamefish, and in some cases, these fish see the lightest fishing pressure… there’s simply fewer people targeting them in these areas. And even though they’re probably not supposed to be there, watch out for surfers, waders, swimmers, and other folks who are within casting range, particularly in that skinny water close to shore.
     Also remember that every trip doesn’t have to be about “big fish.” Scale down to a trout rod or an ultralight rig, and target perch with a hi-lo rig baited with ghost shrimp or razor clams. Just don’t forget to bring your landing net to bring your catch safely to your side of the rail, so the decision to retain or release the fish is yours, and not the unfortunate result of light gear.
     If mackerel is your thing, then by all means, head to the end and bring your bucket. If you’re trolley-rigging one of those mackerel for threshers or yellowtail, the end might be just the place for you. But if you want to try something a little different, find a nice spot along the rail a few steps closer to the beach, and see what’s biting in the shallows. You might just be surprised what’s swimming around beneath the kids on boogie boards.

Remember your first time?

     In the summer of 2009, on a nondescript pier in northern Wisconsin, my two year old son caught his first fish. The prized creature was a smallmouth bass, caught on a leech that must have been given exceptional action as it was “jigged” along the bottom by my toddler’s efforts to turn the handle on the spinning reel. For an hour previous, that same leech had been soaking–motionless–along the edge of a weed bed that I had placed with a well-practiced cast… for nothing. It wasn’t until my son walked out to the end of the pier, announced “I want to catch a fish, Daddy,” and proceeded to show his old man how to get it done. I’ve never been more proud.
     Perhaps sharing this seems gratuitous or self-serving (most Internet fishing posts are, aren’t they?) Maybe it’s a stretch to recount the piscatorial happenstance of a toddler on the shores of a shallow northern Wisconsin lake in this forum. But for me–for a Dad–it brought back wonderful memories of my own first fish, and the joy that came in watching my brothers, friends, my wife, and even total strangers catch their respective “first fish.”
     For many folks in California, that initial nibble on the end of the line comes with one’s feet on a pier. With no license requirement, easy access, and a relatively higher chance for a novice to catch something, piers are a natural entry point for new anglers. Many times while conversing with passersby on a pier, I’ve handed off my rod to someone who wanted to “pull one in.” For some, it’s no big deal; they continue on down the pier. But for others, it’s nothing short of a magical moment–it’s the first fish they’ve ever caught, and it implants an immediate need to ensure that it is not the last fish they’ll ever catch. Even the most humble smelt can be a lifelong memory. Such moments have also given me the opportunity to share a few thoughts on important ideas like catch and release, conservation, fishing regulations, or simply to help dispel the unfair perceptions and stereotypes some have about “everyone” fishing on piers.
     My dad once shared with me that, as a boy, he left the carnival booths and roller coasters of the Pacific Ocean Park Pier complex, and approached a man fishing in the surf line. That nameless fellow showed my dad how to dig for sandcrabs, how to hook them through the tail so they couldn’t dig in, and even let my dad pull in a barred perch… his first fish. That moment set my dad on a lifetime of joy, fishing with his friends throughout high school, and later with his six sons. He stood right behind me when I caught my first fish– a small sheephead caught at Abalone Cove some 30 years ago.
     And while my son might be a bit young yet to remember his smallish smallmouth, I’ll never forget it.

Time and Patience

“With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes the silk gown.”  -Asian proverb

The Saturday after my eleventh birthday was warm for late October.  Though my brothers and I were several weeks into the new school year, Autumn weekends had always remained available for fishing—at least until the first early storm arrived or first quarter report cards were mailed home.  Either way, being at the beach was a welcomed birthday present for me.  There were gifts still to come, and changes afoot.  Unknown to us at the time, the coming winter of 86-87 would bring a strong El Nino event that would erode the Newport Beach sand beneath our feet and damage several piers along the coastline.

            But sufficient for a day was its own evil, and ours was nothing of the kind. June gloom fog was a distant and fading memory of the summer passed, and the sun, plotting a lower path across the cloudless cerulean sky worked in vain against our summer tans.  Dan and I waded in waist-deep water, lifting our fishing rods overhead with each passing wave wash, and braving the eventuality of getting poked in the foot by a rock that had drifted away from the nearby jetty—or by a stingray hiding in the lee of it.  Tommy, Matt, and Zach busied themselves with “digging to China” near the water’s edge, groaning every ten minutes that a large set would flood their excavation site.  Jonny lay on a blanket under Mom’s red beach umbrella and more to the point, her watchful eye…his own eyelid barely betrayed the twin-pinhole scars of his run-in with a low-dangling hook a few months before.  Needless to say, Jonny wouldn’t be anywhere near a fishhook for several more years.  

Dad stood high on the beach, as he always did, to avoid soaking his shoes and jeans.  I don’t recall whether or not he owned a pair of shorts; he always wore jeans and a solid-color polo shirt to the beach.  His yellow Eagle Claw rod (one of two prized possessions, the other being a Martin D28 guitar he bought with paper route and dish-washing money in 1962) held attentively in his left hand, and the handle of the Penn spinning reel gripped lightly between the thumb and index finger on the right, Dad relaxed in the sun as we did, but for his own quiet reasons. 

Bill Acker was the second of four children, and the only son of an accountant and a housewife transplanted from Pottsville, PA to Pasadena, CA, who started a family in their forties.  When Dad was 15 years old, his father suffered a debilitating stroke, and much of the burden of supporting aging parents and three sisters partially fell to him.  He worked several jobs throughout high school and junior college, foregoing his interest in astronomy that might have taken him to some distant university or universe, to stay in Pasadena, and hand-over his paychecks to his parents.  Dad traded his home-made telescopes—complete with hand-ground lenses-- for two years of lithography and printing classes at Pasadena City College that blued his collar, but not his spirits.  For as long as I’ve known him, Dad has always been defined by his tireless work; and that, in turn, was marked by his selflessness and sacrifice.  One of his only recreations was fishing, and then, only when his sons could join him. 

Yet all of that was prologue for this day, it seemed.  I watched my dad standing there far from the water, a slight bend in the tip of his rod that flexed and gave with each wave that washed over his line.  There was an air of jocularity around his otherwise stoic frame; a long summer as a Cub Scout Master and Little League President had come to a quiet end, and this bonus weekend was savored like a fine meal.  Despite the slow bite for a few hand-sized barred surf perch and a small corbina, Dad loved fishing with his family, and it showed in his posture:  A proud, magnanimous man, regarding Creation on a fine Indian summer day, as well as his six contributions to it.

The slow fishing failed to keep my interest, however, and I wound-in my line and trudged out of the surf.  As I walked towards my Dad to put my rod in the sand-spike and go help my brothers with their international tunnel project, I saw my dad silently mouth, “I love you” to Mom, sitting several feet away in her beach chair.  They smiled at each other for a brief moment, and I felt an interestingly bashful shame (the shame eleven year old boys experience right about the time they demystify the girls-have-cooties notion) for having witnessed their amorous exchange.

Instead of running over to the considerable hole my brothers had now dug in the sand, something drew me to my dad’s side that afternoon, some new question that up until that moment, I didn’t know I had in my brain, or maybe my heart.

“Dad,” I asked, “How do you know who to marry?”  His eyes didn’t move from his rod-tip, as it seems I had posed my important query at the same time as one of the few perch in the waves was tapping at his razor clam bait offering, but his wide smile informed me that he had heard me.

“Why, you gotta girlfriend?” he asked through his smile.

“No!” I barked, half-embarrassed, and half-proud that my dad would think me so worthy…and at eleven years old! “No, I mean, I’m not getting married ever, but, how do you know who you should marry?” 

The pitch of my not-yet-changed voice—and the fact that no more twitches in his rod tip meant whatever was eating his bait had finished and moved-on—caused him to look down at my face, this time with a knowing smile, his lips pressed together beneath his moustache in a wry but understanding grin. 

It was in that moment—one of my father's more tender—that Dad gave me an answer his father had probably given him. "You'll meet a lot of women, Ben. Some you'll love, some you'll hate.  And there will be a lot of things about each of them that you love, and some things you won’t. Find a girl whose loveables outnumber her hateables, and hold-on to her. Respect her. Protect her. Celebrate her.  Honor her.  Cherish her.  Just  love her. She's the one that will make your dreams come true.”

“But how do you find a girl like that?” I asked, feeling not-quite as embarrassed as a moment before.

“It takes time.  You have to be patient.  And when it happens, you’ll just know.  The way I just knew with Mom,” he said simply, looking at his rod tip again.  “But you gotta work at it once you find her,” Dad cautioned.  And then, in demonstration of a trait he would eventually pass on to me, my dad synthesized his comments by pulling a random quotation from the complex recesses of his mind:  “With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes the silk gown.”

“What’s a gown?” I asked.  After all, I had five brothers, and mom was never really the gown-wearing type.

“It’s like a fancy dress,” he answered unimportantly, realizing the moment had passed.  “Remember the silk worms in Mrs. Wheeler’s class?”

I remembered them:  In just a few weeks, their collective insatiable appetite had practically denuded the mulberry tree outside my fifth grade classroom.  Quivering, pallid gray caterpillars whose life story written for them by Nature, it seemed, was to eat, change into flightless moths, and make baby silkworms.  And I remembered the cocoons they spun were made into silk.  Whatever that was.  The closest thing I had to silk was the smooth nylon trim sewn around the edge of the blanket on my bunk bed.

“Oh yeah,” I said, with unimportance to match my dad’s, looking over at Tommy and Matt, who had given up on digging, and had Zach buried up to his neck precariously close to the surf line.  I glanced at my dad’s face without saying anything, and without looking away from his rod tip, nudged his head towards Zach.  “Go dig your brother out before they drown him.”

For an eleven year old boy, Dad’s answer was sufficient, but full of questions.  Girls need to have more good stuff than bad stuff, I remember thinking as I knelt in the sand, digging frantically as Zach coughed and sputtered, taking another wave in the face.  Although dating was still a few years away, I mulled Dad’s words over and over in my head, considering each of his directives on its own merit. 

Respect her. Protect her. Celebrate her.  Honor her.  Cherish her.  In other words, Love her.  It wouldn’t be for many years that I came to a more complete understanding of the profound wisdom Dad had shared with me that day.  It was a birthday gift unlike any other I had received from my parents.  It was the first present I got from my Dad that signaled he realized I was growing up, he didn’t see me as a little kid all of the time, he didn’t think that I was incapable of comprehending some of life’s deeper truths (even though at eleven years old, I had no idea how to “celebrate” a person, or even what “cherish” meant.)    

When I think about what Dad meant that day on the beach, when I think about what love really is, I sometimes like to think of those slow, steady, and purposeful silkworms systematically devouring their leafy meal.  Their fate is inevitable—after a life of incessant eating and growing, each caterpillar spins a cocoon that will never open to reveal the moth inside.  Instead, most of the cocoons are boiled to kill the pupae within, unwound into long thin strands of silk, and woven into luxurious, delicate fabric.  Only a fraction of each generation is allowed to crawl from their cocoons as moths, breed, lay eggs, and die within a few days.  And whether they go out in the hot bath or in the throes of post-reproductive bliss, each of their lives is sacrificed to create something beautiful, something that is celebrated and cherished, something that is protected and honored, something that is respected and loved—long after the changing seasons bring new leaves to the mulberry tree, and new caterpillars to their ultimate destinies. 

Like them, we are called to sacrifice our work, our effort, our time, our energy, to grow something greater than ourselves, to search for loveables in another person.  We are called to love another by giving of ourselves, by sharing freely without reservation.  Our hopeful reward for such efforts is that our selfless giving is reciprocated, that we might reap what we sow…so long as we are careful in our selection, cognizant of the grand design, and patient for the results of our love. 

Unlike silk worms, we like to believe we have a choice in the matter.  There is no pot of boiling water in most of our futures, but there is always the possibility that our sacrifice, our gift to another, will not be returned to us.  The hateables strike again, and it is in that patience that we will come to understand that.

As for me, I think I finally understand what my dad was talking about all those years ago on the beach.  For a man whose life had largely been sacrifice, that day—that glorious autumn day with the sand beneath his shoes and the sun on his face, with his loving wife and six sons—was his silk gown.  Granted, that is a laughable visual image in the literal sense. But figuratively speaking, that day, like so many others since, was his achievement for having the patience to see the greater purpose of his actions, and to have the foresight to accept the possibility that two seemingly independent examples of selfless love could connect in a powerful way.  So many years ago, Dad fell into the truth that by giving of himself and his time to his sisters and parents, he would ultimately achieve his goal of having a family of his own.  By being patient, he would meet the woman who would give back what she had been given, and when he met her, he would “just know it.”  Together, nothing could stop them from fulfilling their purpose: creating their own personal Heaven to share with a family.  He lost nothing.  He gained everything.

No selfless act of love is ever wasted; it holds the potential to make our dreams come true.