[Photo by Tom Quandt on Unsplash]
When my parents first told us we were moving to Turtletown, Tennessee, my brother and I were pretty skeptical as you might imagine. “Turtletown! What is that!” was our first response. In the end, seventh grade in Turtletown was my favorite school year ever.
I always remember the great times I had, and most importantly, how accepted I felt from the broad population of kids there. The most important of those relationships were the ones I developed with the Kimsey boys. They offered friendship from the day I arrived and while I was unsure of the new school and town, I did not look a gift horse in the mouth. I responded to their friendship and I was the one most favored by it.
Like so many great things, the relationships had to be discovered first. My mom had been talking up the creek that was near our new house. She knew I liked to fish and was telling me how this creek had a reputation for great trout fishing. Then, we drove by it. It looked like a tiny stream that would struggle to water a few cattle as we drove by on the way to the new house.
This is very much what it looked like when driving by.
“That’s the creek you’ve been touting!” I exclaimed to my mom.
“I’m sure it’s bigger when you get down to the banks. We were just driving by, Tim. You can’t see it accurately from the road,” said my mom.
She was right, but I was not yet convinced. A few days later, I went down to a guy’s house I’d met at school. They lived right next to the creek. He’d invited me to come by and I took him up on it. I didn’t have my dirt bike yet, so I bicycled over and met him and his brothers. I think our moms had met at school and encouraged each of us to meet which helped open up the window to connect.
The family was ultra-friendly and welcoming. There was a brother a year older than me, a brother my age, a brother a year younger and one that was my little brother’s age as well (about 3 to 4 years younger). I spent some time tossing a football with them and discussing fishing and motorcycles. Then they asked me if I wanted to see some of the trout they’d caught out of the little creek. “Sure,” I said. I was expecting to see some 10 to 12 inch pan sized little brook trout.
They kept
certain of their trophy fish in grandma’s stand-alone horizontal freezer in her
detached garage. So, we went to the garage to take a look. When they opened the
freezer door and I saw the prized fish they had in there, my eyes popped out of
my head.
“What?!!!” I exclaimed in disbelief.
“Those fish came from that little brook??!!” They had about six to eight
trout in the freezer that ranged from 22 to 36 inches in length. These were the kind of fish you saw in
outdoor magazines coming from the great lakes.
“I don’t understand… that stream is tiny….”
The boys grinned and responded. First one with, “It’s much deeper than it looks and wider too when you get down to the edge of it.” Then another responded with, “The banks are lined with tall grass and small shrubs so you can’t tell its size from the road.”
It really did look more like this when you got down to the banks to see it.
They were right and so was mom. I went fishing with them several times over the year there. I went motorcycling and hunting with them a lot more. They were great friends. I’ll never forget their quick acceptance of me as a friend even when I wasn’t so sure about moving to Turtletown. There were other kids there I had to work a little harder to connect with, but not the Kimsey boys.
I never caught a trout out of that stream that was the size of those trophies, but I did have one on the hook of course! On the last day before we moved again, I was there at the creek, when one of the giant trout showed up on the surface of the stream following a hook with corn that I was reeling up. I was reeling to re-cast, but I was too inexperienced at dealing with trout to know how to set the hook. When I saw him, I slowed down my reel and he took the bait and turned to swim away with the hook in his mouth. I didn’t set the hook. As I reeled up, the hook and corn just popped out of his mouth and he swam away. “Aaghh… frustrating!”
The Kimsey boys heard me hooting and hollering about it and came down to see what happened. After I told them what I’d seen, of course, several of them went back and got rods and started working the stream. The funny thing was Kevin, the one who was the third youngest, stayed right with me to go over and over how to set the hook and make sure I got one. I did catch a nice trout that day (probably about 16 inches) and took it home. In fact, when I hooked the keeper, Kevin jumped down the side of the banks and almost fell in to help me grab it and make sure it wasn’t missed.
I had learned how to set a hook on a trout. I wasn’t going to miss another of those trophy fish. I also learned not to trust my eyes on first glance. I learned to be a friend from many of the actions and the kindness of the Kimsey boys, and I paid it forward many times over the years. A lesson I would learn several times over in my life: Don’t look a gift friendship in the mouth.
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Click here for: Tales from Turtletown #4: Hooked!
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