Reflections: The Grandfather Clause

I remember him sitting at the kitchen table after Sunday church, worrying a faded deck of cards through the paces of solitaire, wreathed in the smoke that would eventually contribute to his demise. Any later in the day and he would be slumped in his weathered recliner, loyally snoozing through another lackluster performance from his beloved Cubs, their World Series run still more than a decade away. He played fairly at first, dispensing the cards from the deck in the relegated groups of three, but as the fate of the game became clear, he adopted a new regimen, exploring what might have happened if the deck had been stacked slightly differently. We talked as he played, I often visiting from some distant place.

Grandpa Owen had been an angler and bird hunter most of his life, full of colorful tales that transpired when shotgun shells were made of cardboard and flushing a covey of bobwhites was still a common occurrence in the farm country of central Illinois. Many of his stories were repeats, a collection of yarns I had already committed to memory. Float trips down the White River in Arkansas for trout, pesky bird dogs, and busted camping trips to the Wisconsin northwoods that were cast with younger versions of my mother and her siblings, ventures that usually included biblical bouts of inclement weather and few, if any fish. And before those seemingly mundane adventures, he had piloted B-24s over the Pacific during that great cataclysm that defined the lives and deaths of so many young men of his generation.

We were lucky enough to fish together many times, mostly on summer trips to the lake country of Wisconsin or Minnesota. He would never let me forget the giant pike that we had encountered along a bulrush point of a Minnesota lake. Gramps had a preference for drifting, unimpressed by the emergence of electric trolling motors, content with our aluminum rental boat and his ancient 10-hp Johnson that had been coughing, sputtering, and unerringly reliable since the day he bought it back in the 1960s.

We found the perfect stretch of water, positioned just right for the wind at hand. I cut the motor, waved off the cloud of blue smoke, and began tossing my red and white Dardevle to the edge of the rushes and letting it wobble seductively over the aquatic forest below. From somewhere deep in the bowels of his Plano, he produced a crusty lump of desiccated rubber and rust, the petrified remains of a spinnerbait that could not possibly be functional. But within minutes, the wreckage was making determined runs back to the boat, blades sputtering and dying, the congealed rubber skirt a lifeless blob.

Approaching the end of our drift, he was already plotting our next move, looking about the lake as he cranked said blob back to the boat. It was but a moment in time, the tail of a pike that seemed a foot wide, a great roiling of water followed by the flicker of severed monofilament dancing on the breeze. The tail of that pike has achieved an immortality of sorts, although I admit the details are getting fuzzy.

We were farmers on my father’s side and I would spend a better part of my youth alongside my paternal grandfather, learning the lower rungs of a family business that stretched back over a century. As a boy I can remember bucking along, perched on the seat arm of a John Deere tractor next to my Grandpa Dick as we turned over the dirt each spring, the sweet smell of loam and diesel exhaust flooding the cab. Many an autumn day I spent at his side watching rows of corn disappear into the head of the combine, or riding high in the cab of his garishly clad brown-and-orange Peterbilt as we hauled grain to the terminals along the Illinois River.

He had not finished high school yet was one of the craftiest men I will ever know, a consummate inventor who insisted on having the proper tool for the job before the work commenced.

Sadly, these men, my grandfathers, are gone now, succumbing to those maladies that so often find us in the twilight of life. Remembering them provides a steady comfort, and their legacy endures as I tell my kids about the great grandfathers they never met. And I can point them to a photograph adorning the wall of my mother’s living room, an image of a man crowned with a goofy fishing hat and surrounded by a gaggle of waist-high kids. His audience watches intently as he wields a rod and reel while lecturing his pupils on the elementary mechanics of fishing. The entire crew is fixated on a red and white bobber, willing it to disappear. This is a grandfather, my grandfather, serving as mentor and patriarch, passing on more than just a time-­honored family tradition.

I think of all the hows and whys of life that were answered by these two men and I count myself lucky to have known them so well. Reality dictates that the rules of life are not always clear and fair. But I propose an amendment to the unwritten statutes, an airtight clause, dictating that all kids get to know their grandfathers, at least for a time. 

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Daniel Isermann is a fishery research scientist and frequent contributor to In-Fisherman publications.

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