The Canal in the Forties— Something Fishy

The Canal in the Forties— Something Fishy

Lift Bridge and Back Creek with area that is now Pell Gardens at left center 

Aerial View of old canal and Back Creek, 1929

Although Junior Digirolamo and I did just about everything together when we were kids, it was my father who introduced me to the terrific sport of fishing. When I was about seven, after a good bit of begging, he agreed to take me to the Burnt House, a popular fishing spot along Back Creek on the South Side of town. After digging the worms in a shady area beside the corn crib, we got our gear together and made the trek through town, through the rancid smoke and pot holes of the town dump, and stopped in the sand next to the Burnt House. Then we walked down the eroded bank, stood in the sand, and watched the broad expanse of water flow slowly towards Chesapeake City.

After rigging our bamboo pole with string, float, hook, and sinker, he helped me get the squirming, alarmed worm on the hook. I flung off my sneakers and walked out about three feet into the water. Then he stood behind me to help me cast the rig into the water. “Watch the float, Boy,” he said; “watch the float and when it bobs under you have a bite and can pull in the fish.” And, one thing I know: I’ll remember this till the day I pass on to the Happy Isles. When the float bobbed, I snatched the pole as hard as I could and whacked Pop—who, as you recall, was standing directly behind me—squarely on the forehead.

It made a loud crack and must have hurt something awful, and it made me feel terrible. My, but he was mad at me. He held his head and yelled some interesting words I had never heard before, words that I’ve been able to put to good use ever since. But, do you know, the thing I remember most, besides feeling miserable for what I had done, was that Pop tried not to act as mad as he was. Despite the obvious pain, he held back his anger to save my feelings and to save, for me, the rest of the fishing day. Now, why do you suppose that this event, an incident from so many, many years ago, is still so vivid in my mind that it could have happened yesterday?

I guess it was the following summer that Junior became my main sidekick during those slow-moving summer months, when swimming, fishing, crabbing, frogging, and maybe gigging a snapping turtle or two was our primary recreation. Back then, Junior used to tie his small rowboat at Borger’s wharf (now The Chesapeake Inn), and we would paddle out, tie her off, and climb aboard the broad, rust-covered deck of a barge. In those days there was always a large, black barge moored in the basin. We’d laugh when we thought of the poor saps—our schoolmates—sitting in class on such a beautiful day. And yet, we were always a little afraid of being caught by old man Barnes, the dreaded truant officer.

Every year I would rush the season, starting on the first warm day in March. Later in the spring I would catch some nice pan-sized white perch, sunnies, and catfish, but in the cold waters of early March I usually caught shiners or eels. The shiners would nibble ever so gently, and when I managed to hook one and reel him in, I enjoyed it as much as if he had been a two-foot rock. Pulling one in was magical, because he would flash out of the water, silver in the sun, and I would reel him to my hand and close my fingers on a three-inch living creature, vigorously flipping, spinning, and fluttering, showing just how much he wanted to live and return to his familiar life. Carefully extracting the hook from the fragile, gasping mouth, I noticed that I could see right through his body as his gills opened and closed, seeking oxygen. Darting out of my hand to freedom, and flitting back and forth almost subliminally before diving to dark comfort below, he left part of himself with me—a few silver scales and the (not unpleasant) ripe odor of fish.

The eels, though, were something else—disgusting, slimy tanglers of lines that left my hands so encrusted with slime that water and rags wouldn’t ever remove. Angrily, I would swing those eels overhead several times, smashing them on the steel deck, sometimes losing my hook and sinker in the process. But fishing and crabbing was a Godsend for me during those unbearably slow-moving days of summer. A certain morning, when I was about thirteen, stands out clearly in my mind. Junior and I rode our bikes down Chestnut Spring Road to an area he knew about along a wider section of Back Creek.

We rode through a fairly extensive wooded area, navigated around the stumps and fallen branches, laid our bikes in the grass at the edge of the woods, and stood looking out across the long shore at the shimmering, motionless river. A small, rickety wharf stood high in the distance, a ghostly silhouette in the eerie silence. Except for low, jagged stumps punctuating the shore at low tide, the wharf has long since disintegrated. But in my mind it's still erected there, a black outline against the hushed morning river.

It was very early, just at dawn, and as we walked through the murky sand and sloshed up to the wharf, I felt as if I had just entered an enchanted land. Everything was dead-still all around. The dim gleam of daybreak, a gentle nightlight, was on the water, so unlike the floodlight that soon would glare. I looked back at the shore where we had been; it seemed a long way off. I looked again across the water to the other side of the river . . .  not the slightest current. It was dead-low tide.

I reached over and felt the piling where it met the water and part of it crumbled wet in my hand. I reached down and washed it off but its odor of decaying, saturated wood lingered. A muted echo sounded from across the water . . . and then again, silence. But soon, standing motionless, I heard the murmurings of tiny shore creatures, uttering evidence of their existence in the new day. Strange, that the scene—that moment of glory before sunrise—is still mysteriously powerful, just as it was when it stunned a gangly boy in 1949.

The water around the wharf was only a foot deep, but we threw in our crabbing lines and waded out chest-deep to cast out our fishing lines. Later, when the sun came out and the tide started coming in, the spell was broken, but we fished, crabbed, and swam till suppertime just the same.

          I wonder, contented reader, if you remember certain events crystal-clear like that? What makes our minds seize certain seemingly unimportant happenings and implant them into prominent areas of our brains, allowing us to re-experience those events as though they had just occurred? But, anyway, that’s how Junior and I made it through those steamy summer days, and it never crossed our minds that those seemingly commonplace activities would be part of us for the rest of our lives.