Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

I have never been much of a morning person. As I usually am up late into the evening when morning comes it tends to take me an hour or two to get my motor started and get into a groove. When I woke up this Sunday morning, with the warm soft sunlight streaming through the bedroom windows, I was a little unnerved by the fact that I was up early on a sleep in day and really couldn’t fall back asleep. Downstairs past the sleeping cats I wandered and put on a pot of coffee and made a couple of pieces of toast and sat down at the dining room table and stared out the window looking at the ice that is still left on the pond.

In a matter of weeks the pond has gone from rock solid on the surface to small patches of open water and finally this weekend the ice pack has begun to shift around as it melts away. Although the dog isn’t pleased with this change as he can no longer go from one side of the pond to the other by just cutting across the ice shelf, the geese and ducks certainly are enjoying the open water once again.

What excited me the most about this slow change was the realization that soon it will be warm enough to walk down to the pond in the evenings after work or on that lazy Sunday afternoon and drop a line in the water and do a little fishing.

I tried to think back on some of my earliest memories of fishing. I remember a time or two with Grandpa Countryman when I’d get to hold onto the old cane pole and wait for a bullhead or the occasional perch to take the bait. I think in retrospect that fishing with a cane pole is the best way to learn. Today we buy our kids little bitty rod and reel sets and spend most of our time fishing ducking the lures that go winging past our heads, or throwing out their lines again and again. Anyone with kids can tell you that if you give a kid a reel, there is no way that they’ll leave that line in the water for long. And for most of my young life, the rare times I went fishing with Grandpa, or Mom and Dad was with a cane pole.

We used to go every once in a while with Dad across the road and through the field to Walker’s Pond which was built during the plowing match. I remember it as a bullhead pond and also full of snapping turtles. I recall that Dad spent a lot of time taking the bullheads off of our lines as we boys wouldn’t touch them. It’s been years since I’ve been to that pond, but the memory of it still remains with me.

As we got a little older and started camping we boys would graduate up to a rod and reel combo. Usually a Zebco 202 or 404, and we fished a lot at the Conservation Park between Dexter and Stuart. We would catch bluegill after bluegill until our arms were tired. We went a few other places as well, a couple of ponds on ground Allen Atherton farmed, a pond south of Stuart and a few times south of Minburn at the farm my uncle managed. It was with each of these trips that we got to go out and get some real life lessons on fishing. But our favorite place to fish was across the gravel road in the ditch. It didn’t require Mom or Dad taking us, and we could fish until we were tired. Granted there weren’t any fish in the ditch, but it really didn’t matter much to us.

After Dad moved to the farm on Bear Creek that became our fishing home. Overstocked and never really properly fished, you could throw a bare hook in the water and the fish would almost come jumping up on shore at you. And we fished it. We learned the rules of good pond management and it wasn’t very often that at least one of us boys was down on the pond. The rules were simple. Don’t leave a bunch of trash laying around, throw the bass back and keep everything else and if you fall in, don’t drown.

Soon that pond gave us three and four pound bass and crappies as big as your hand. It’s become a quiet place to reflect, a place to hang out with friends, and as always gives us a place just to spend the afternoon sitting with a line in the water. Spring will move forward, the days will get warmer and soon the fish will start popping the top of the water. I had better dig out the pole and get some new line on it, it’ll be time to go fishing soon.

See you next week...Remember, we're all in this together.