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My Favorite Dad Story
By Matt
Nonetheless, one Dad memory in particular does stand out, dating back to a hot summer in 1991.
I remember growing up, how Dad would often tell us stories from his own childhood in Dowelltown. He'd reminisce about winters packed with gigantic snow forts and mile-long sled runs--concepts foreign and magical to kids who spent most of their adolescent lives in the year-round heat of an Atlanta suburb. Likewise, he regaled us of summers passed tinkering on motorcycles and catching more fish in the creek with his bare hands than he could carry home. Again, these ideas were unheard of to us, as growing up in Georgia we weren't allowed to go past the end of our own street, let alone spend hours traipsing miles through creeks unattended.
It was this latter recollection of his, though--the bare-handed fish finagling--that always drew my raised eyebrow. I mean... come on.
Certainly over time, we as children go from believing without doubt or question all that our father tells us, to later immediately inserting a fair dose of cynicism when such paternal recollections are shared. This certainly was the case with me whenever Dad would tell his story of pulling fish hand-over-fist from Dry Creek. Surely, I thought, this was just another example of an adult liberally embellishing the halcyon memories of his youth.
Yet during this particular summer, following our move from Georgia back to Tennessee, my faith in Dad's recollective clarity was to be fully restored.
One hot, hazy day--a day hosting the kind of heat that you know is going to make a mockery of any productive notions you might attempt to entertain--on such a day, Dad drove my younger brother Josh and I to the bridge off the highway near the outside edge of town. The bridge crossed Dry Creek, although calling it a creek at that point was a generous fallacy. Mostly gravel and mud by this point in the year, the shriveled waterway had certainly earned its moniker for the season. Still, many stagnant, shallow pools dotted the path of the creek for as far down the way as we could see.
With Dad leading the way, we hiked over to the first large puddle. Upon our approach, the puddle suddenly began to shake and stir as if the earth were moving. Stepping right down into the muddy water, Dad reached in and, to my amazement, pulled out fish after glistening fish from the murky pool. Josh and I were eager, if not a bit hesitant, to emulate his success, so we tentatively joined our father in the harvest.
It was little to no time before we were graveling ("graveling" being the term for catching fish with your hands) without peer. Red-eye, suckers, bream, bass, catfish, drum, stripe, trout, perch—every fish imaginable was in those waters, and we left nary a fugitive behind. From puddle to puddle we wandered, scooping out the fish and populating our cooler ever higher with the bounty.
With one cooler filled, we drove back to the house to get a second. Having filled a second with all of the fish worth having, we finally called it a day some 3 or 4 hours later.
So as it turns out, just because your dad tells you an amazing story doesn't necessarily make it little more than the product of his wistful exaggerations. For, at least in this one instance, my brother and I were able to verify first-hand a tale that we're now able to pass on to our own children who will no doubt raise a skeptical eyebrow when we tell them about the time we went to the creek and caught, with our bare hands, more fish than we could carry home.
