You know that kid that seems to dream in color? The one who would rather read National Geographic than Green Eggs and Ham? The kid who actually looks forward to piano lessons, but beats himself up when his stupid left hand won’t do what it’s supposed to do? The one who was advanced developmentally and academically, who corrected his kindergarten teacher that the so-called “rectangle” she had modeled for the class with popsicle sticks and tape was actually a parallelogram, and for that matter, was actually a rhombus, because it had four equal sides, but not four equal angles? And she put him in the corner of the decidedly rectangular classroom, which was fine with him because he snuck a book over there and read it to himself and was content with being alone? And speaking of alone, he realized at an early age that being the best at everything meant being alone, because there was no silver medal in real life when it came to one-on-one competition, and sure, those T-ball games were fun to win, but pointless because he couldn’t control the rest of the team, although he plotted to devise a way to do so? His teacher and his piano instructor and his parents and his little brothers think he’s a genius, that he “has a gift.” But him? Well sure, everything up to this point has been pretty good work, but he can be faster, smarter, cooler, better. The best.
That was me.
On the outside, as far as the rest of my world was concerned, I was a bright kid with high interest in a multitude of subjects. I played fair, took care of my younger brothers, listened to my parents, ate all my vegetables. As days turned to school years, I added activities: Boy Scouts, Little League, saxophone lessons and jazz band, student government. And in each of these, I excelled, I developed leadership skills and asserted myself with the quixotic mix of authority and authoritarianism that only a child can truly master. I was happy, or so it would seem.
But within me, there was a burning darkness, and it fueled a passionate desire to excel, to champion, to beat anyone and anything at everything. I loved learning for the sake of learning, sure (nerd honorifics, notwithstanding), but my elementary taskmaster—ehh, teachers-- found a more extrinsic reward to which they attached my fancy, a mostly arbitrary and myopic assessment tool to which I became horrifically addicted.
Grades.
I loved grades. As, to be specific. A 100%, the mark of perfection, indicative that nothing else remained to be achieved, no other tenet or tidbit could be added to augment the superior masterpiece that was my homework, or my spelling test, or my art, or my report on ladybugs. I loved As so much, that I resolved to earn nothing but them.
So that’s just what I did. I earned As, lots and lots of As. The only time I didn’t earn 100% was when I got more than that, thanks to something amazing called “extra credit.” That was my routine, from first grade through fifth grade—get an A. Sure, the occasional question was missed, and my 100% fell to a paltry 96%, but I quickly identified my errant mistake, and successfully negotiated with my teachers to earn back the needed points to earn my 100%. I was, in short, a Grades Junkie.
And then, something happened in February of 1986 that forever changed me; I still recall it with a disquieting coldness on the back of my neck, a dryness on the roof of my mouth. Mrs. Wheeler, the first teacher I ever had that actually challenged me to learn things I hadn’t known for two years previous elected to give our class a Friday pop quiz.
Pish posh… I’d aced these before. My dad taught me all my English grammar one long night over a chess board in 3rd grade when neither of us could sleep, so that wouldn’t be a problem. Math? Bring it on… my Grampa used a cribbage board to teach me mental arithmetic that would make Archimedes pause. Science? I’d already finished reading the science textbook before Christmas, and considered it a reprehensible assemblage of miscreant part-facts and half-truths about geology, meteorology, and biology.
History, well jeez, I…. history. Not my strong suit.
“Put everything away, and take out a pencil,” barked Mrs. Wheeler. If you think about it, that’s sort of a paradox, to put everything away and take out a pencil, but I don’t remember saying anything about it to her. I was too busy trying to remember the history reading assignment from last night that I had failed to read.
All these years later, I can’t remember for the life of me what that quiz was about. I just remember reading through the questions, each more mysterious than the next. I had never experienced this situation before: Needing to know, and not knowing what was needed. I felt my face getting hot, my eyes watery and burning. My racing heart was in my throat… no wait, that’s vomit! I took off like a shot from my seat in the back of the classroom, out the door, and straight to the bathroom.
Within minutes, I was in the office, reduced to a sick, tearful mess, incapable of continuing for the school day. Mom came and picked me up, took me home. She tried to ask me what had happened, but I couldn’t find the words any easier than I was able to find the answers to those history questions. Instead I just sputtered sentence fragments and tears, shaking in a bewildered state of apoplectic self-loathing. Straight to bed, self-assigned no dinner. Mic drop. Acker out….
In the darkness of the Saturday morning that followed, around 5:00 A.M., Mom shook me awake from what seemed an endless nightmare. Like all moms, she had the ability to demand with great authority while whispering so as not to wake my brothers, asleep in the Hooverville of bunk-beds that was our shared room. With a curling finger, she motioned for me to follow her. I dragged my blanket behind me through the house, following her to the front porch of our Pasadena home.
Mom opened the door, put her hand on my back, and gently pushed me towards the outdoors. “Sit,” she said, and handed me a big, heavy hot mug of coffee. I pulled my knees up under my chin, tucked the blanket around me on that cold February morning, and took a long sip. I felt the warmth move into my chest behind my heavy heart, and I clutched the mug with both hands, trying to keep my fingers warm. And there we sat in the darkness and the silence of a Pasadena morning, broken only by the occasional passing of a big rig on the freeway a few blocks away.
It so happens that my family’s front porch faces east. As time passed, the black of night changed to a deep purple. Then violet, then dark blue. Red, orange, yellow…. And the sun peeked over the sharp edge of the San Gabriel mountains, brilliant and clean in the cloudless sky. My mom, who for the last hour and a half had remained silent and motionless, now stood, and put her arm around my shoulders.
“You see, Ben?” she said, meaningfully, “no matter what, the sun will always rise the next morning.” Then she kissed my tear-stained cheek, and walked back into the house, leaving me on the porch to contemplate the obviousness and the complexity of her words.
Since that day, life has sent me my share of Friday pop quizzes. Luckily, I've remembered to take them all in stride; I’ve managed to remember—often in the darkness of the resultant tearful nights--that a sun will rise on a new day for me, and another opportunity will present itself. I may never fix yesterday, but today gives me another shot to do better… or maybe it just illuminates a new path through the mountains, the direct result of yesterday’s landslide.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Amorous Amphistichus argenteus: Winter Perchin' in Southern California
Love is in the air; or more specifically, in the water. As discarded Christmas trees dry curbside in the Southern California sun, barred surf perch (Amphistichus argenteus) move in to begin their pre-Valentine's Day spawn in the shallow surf along sandy beaches from Santa Barbara to San Diego. These scrappy fish, which range from hand-sized fish (mostly males) to big, beautiful "slabs" (larger females), stack up in the surf zone looking for a mate... and occupying their down time gorging on sand crabs, small fish, bean clams, and anything small enough to fit in their mouths.
When the waves and conditions allow it (which is more often than not in SoCal's mild winter days between storms), fishing for barred surf perch with light tackle provides plenty of sport for these fish, which range from about a half-pound to upwards of three pounds for the larger models. 4 lb. test with a Carolina rig is perfect for flipping a sand crab or a plastic grub to these voracious fish. Fishing is generally best two hours before and two hours after high tide. And you don't have to fire-off a 100 yard cast; these fish can be hooked in ankle-deep water on a slow retrieve with a small plastic grub (Big Hammer™ 1¾" Perch Grubs #28 Motor Oil Red or #92 Motor Oil Green are my favorites).
As the tide falls, sand crab beds often become exposed, betrayed by the small "Vs" in the sand as the small crustaceans dig back in as the wave recedes. Fishing directly in front of these beds, particularly if there is a trough, deep spot, or depression in the bottom, is practically a sure-thing if the fish are home. If they're not, walk down the beach and find the fish. Where there's one, there are almost always more.
When the waves and conditions allow it (which is more often than not in SoCal's mild winter days between storms), fishing for barred surf perch with light tackle provides plenty of sport for these fish, which range from about a half-pound to upwards of three pounds for the larger models. 4 lb. test with a Carolina rig is perfect for flipping a sand crab or a plastic grub to these voracious fish. Fishing is generally best two hours before and two hours after high tide. And you don't have to fire-off a 100 yard cast; these fish can be hooked in ankle-deep water on a slow retrieve with a small plastic grub (Big Hammer™ 1¾" Perch Grubs #28 Motor Oil Red or #92 Motor Oil Green are my favorites).
The author with a fat barred surf perch caught on a Big Hammer Perch Grub, Ventura, CA.
As the tide falls, sand crab beds often become exposed, betrayed by the small "Vs" in the sand as the small crustaceans dig back in as the wave recedes. Fishing directly in front of these beds, particularly if there is a trough, deep spot, or depression in the bottom, is practically a sure-thing if the fish are home. If they're not, walk down the beach and find the fish. Where there's one, there are almost always more.
Ben and brother Dan with a nice double on fat slabs, Ventura, CA.
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