Place Entry 5

Today my fourteen-year-old son and I went to Lake Jovita’s public dock to check out if the cattails were too thick to allow us to launch kayaks. The kayaks were still at home in the shed, but today we only planned. We feel winter ending and sometimes it gets too hot too fast. Kayaking is one thing we’ve got to grab before the summer heat beats down. We saw signs of spring on our way. A large field that used to be filled with rows of orange trees was clear, allowing full view of the lake. Today the browned field was dotted with a red-rusty wildflower; the stalks looked like rose-colored wheat leaning from the slight breeze. The wild magenta phlox is another promise along the roadside that spring is near. After the coldest winter on record in fifty-two years, we’re more excited at these signs than ever.

A small, wooden dock jets out over the lake just over the zone of the shoreline, where animal and plant life hide and provide food. I’ve come to expect the raft of coots that seem to always be partying at this lake. Today they’re hovering at the shoreline, as is a teenage boy fishing on the dock. He casted a line over and again two feet from the brush.

“I’ve been here all mornin’,” he told us with a deep southern twang that told me his folks have lived in this area for awhile. “Nothin’s bitin’.”

The coots aren’t dunking as frequently as they usually do when the wind is stronger. They whine and bark, with an occasional shallow dive. One swam in a complete circle, a 360 degree turn that made the black bird look like a spinning domino as he revealed two large, white markings on his behind.

Overhead, the sky was periwinkle blue. Clouds were barely there, like curtain sheers draped sideways across the sky. A bird flew solo overhead, too high for me to identify—I couldn’t recognize the silhouette of its wings. A slight wind blew the hair off my shoulders. I was reminded of how wind that smells like nothing is also sweet somehow. I was cooled but not chilled, and my skin drank the sun’s rays until I was warmed and quenched.

Aside of the dock, two boys, the same age as my son, hauled a canoe through the opening in the cattails. Their father directed them in Mexican, and they glided into the middle of the lake. The father joined us on the dock with a fishing line and a loaf of white, enriched bread in a plastic bag. The teenager told the father of the canoeing boys how he hadn’t caught a thing on his line all morning. The Mexican gentleman rolled a piece of the soft, white sandwich bread between his forefinger and thumb and stuck it on his hook. He cast the line swiftly, and we heard a whoosh pass our ears before the breaded hook plopped into the water. Within minutes the man pulled up a baby blue gill on the line. Again, he hooked a bread ball, cast the line, swished and plopped. One after the other, the father pulled up gill after gill.

“I’ll start fishin’ like dat,” the teenager said with wide eyes and an impressed smile.

I couldn’t see the father’s sons or the canoe. “I fish in the sea like that,” he told the lonely kid. “I’m fishing for bait.”

I asked him what he’d like to catch in this lake. He told me he catches bass this way – 20 – 25 inches long. He took the line with the baby blue gill hung on the hook. He tossed it over his right shoulder and swung the line like a cowboy in a rodeo. After the fish swung around on the circling line three times, he flung it as if he were lassoing something in the lake. The teenager began rolling the bread and placing it on his own hook: “I’m gonna catch me some bass with you.”

My son and I left the dock and wished the two of them luck. I realized as we walked away that I’d never taken Dominic fishing. I asked my son the last time he went fishing with his Dad. “I was seven or eight, I think,” he said. “I love fishing.”

Along with kayaking, we’ll be trying out fishing here this spring.