by John Jefferson
A young kid once accompanied his father in a rowboat up a small creek or slough off a big river. He was scared he might fall out of the boat — and he couldn’t swim, yet. His father assured him he wasn’t going to fall out of the boat.
Later, his father, an oil company engineer, was called back into the army. The family accompanied him to an army fort far away in West Texas. They spent a night traveling in a place called Balmorhea. It had a swimming pool on a clear-water creek. The little guy saw catfish and turtles deep in the creek. His father, a strong swimmer, swam across the clear creek with the lad on his back.
Those two experiences introduced him to small streams and started a lifelong love of flowing water. He caught his first two fish – small perch – shortly afterwards.
Texas had very few lakes then. Even after he got a bicycle, the lakes and places to fish were too far away to peddle to.
The ever-changing landscape of stream fishing is one of the reasons people like fishing them. The attached photograph of the San Marcos River as it winds through the city of San Marcos and the river below it are prime examples. The sights along the way add a restful quality to the trip. (Photo by John Jefferson)
Occasionally, a family friend took him into the Big Thicket to fish in Beech Creek. He loved that. He’d fish for hours without seeing another person. Their gate was at the end of a red-clay, dead end road.
During some summers he stayed at his grandmother’s little house overlooking a big river.
He had a free run of about 50-acres of riverfront and marshy, swamp-like shallow water with reeds where big perch, frogs, and snakes lived.
He later marveled over never being snake bit traipsing there and in fields of shoulder-high grass to catch grasshoppers for bait.
He attended a summer camp on the clear-running upper Nueces River. For a dark- water kid, seeing the clear river did something to him.
That and his Beech Creek and Balmorhea experiences had imprinted him. He never got over his fascination with flowing water … and what lived in it.
The first time he saw the Colorado River at the edge of the Hill Country, he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life near water that was clear … and moving.
Texas is blessed with flowing waters. Some are clear; some aren’t. But all are precious to people living near them. The Neches, Sabine, Trinity, Angelina, Brazos, and others — they all hold that fascination for river and stream boys like him.
Whether it’s setting lines on the river in the evening for catfish or casting a hair jig into a flowing stream carrying white bass to traditional breeding grounds upstream, all have their appeal to people like him who first fished streams. It’s something some can’t get over.
Sure, most of them have fished large lakes. Some still prefer big, open waters that shelter trophy bass. Most can tell you when, where, and how they caught their personal best bass.
But those like the young’un mentioned above still remember their first fish … and where they caught it.
One might even say they were Stream Bit!
JJ
