July 30, 2000

Grandpa's image clear in photo of his favorite fishing hole

By Matt Markey
A.T. outdoors columnist

Sometimes a photo can tell a million stories, even without the aid of a caption, an explanation, a date, or a location. Sometimes a single image can capture a lifetime in its shadows, textures and colors.

I received just such a picture recently, tucked away in a ramshackle collection of newspaper clippings, family correspondence, investment advice and bits and pieces of genealogy that came under a plain brown wrapper from my Uncle Leo. This is what is affectionately referred to in our family as the Box Letter &endash; too much for an envelope to contain.

The box letter from Uncle Leo often comes a couple of times per year, replete with fishing stories clipped from the Tampa and St. Petersburg newspapers, updates on the Church of Scientology trying to take over his retirement community near Clearwater, Leo's own unique insider investment tips, copies of letters and emails that bring us up to date on our cousins and their families, and a collection of the flotsam and jetsam of his efforts to assemble a detailed history on my Mom's side of the family.

Usually there are a couple dozen notes about people I never heard of from places I've never seen. Once in a while there will be a name or a location that rings a bell. That bell went off in a big way when I flipped through the most recent box letter from Uncle Leo, an eccentric retired engineer who gave General Motors most of his life.

Leo's mailing included a color laser copy of a photo he found while searching the hills of Western Pennsylvania for traces of the Matthews family. Leo always finds something, but this time it was a real treasure.

My grandpa Matthews taught his nine grandsons how to fish a stream &endash; only he never called it a stream &endash; it was a crick &endash; not a creek but a crick. There were dozens of them threading around and through the knobby hills near his West Virginia home, and Pa always made sure we learned the water and knew it well before we fished it.

He would walk us down the trail through the woods while all around us fox squirrels rattled over the carpet of leaves while feasting on a rain of English walnuts. Pa knew every oak and sycamore and chestnut and walnut near that trail, and where he had seen deer the year before, and the year before that. When we reached the top of the trail above the stream, he made us stop.

Instead of charging down the hill, across the narrow floodplain, and onto the rocky shoreline, we followed Pa's lead and got down on our haunches so we could see under the sassafras trees. And we watched the water first. We looked for a dimple here, a swirl there, or a splash up under the willows along the bank &endash; anything that would tip us off where one of Fish Creek's mighty bass might be roaming.

Pa taught us to creep down the hill, so as not to create vibrations in the ground that would give the fish plenty of advance warning of our arrival. He taught us to keep our voices down, and never to let our shadows cast on the water before we did.

And Pa always picked places where there were plenty of fish. He said to look for the stretch of stream where a big, lazy pool squeezes into a bubbly riffle, washing the water over the rocks for a ways before the flow broke up again into a series of swirling mini-pools. He said to drift a worm or minnow through the slack water, then let it tumble through the rocks and drop into the lower pools.

Every one of those places produced fish &endash; bass, sunfish, rock bass, crappie and an occasional catfish. I always thought Grandpa Matthews was the smartest fishermen I had ever known. I never actually fished with him, because by the time I was old enough &endash; well, he was too old to wade those slippery rocks. But he was a great teacher up to the time of his death.

Pa has been gone for more than 25 years now, and I always wondered how he got so smart, how he always knew where the fish would be, how he developed his love of stream fishing in the coal-rich hills of Appalachia.

Part of the answer was in that box letter from Uncle Leo. The photo he copied and sent to me was a view from atop a steep bank, looking down at a nondescript creek wandering its way through a tree-lined pasture. Scribbled in the margin was a description, telling me that creek was right across the road from Grandpa's childhood home. The note said a relative, still living in the area, had told Leo this was Grandpa's favorite fishing hole.

I would have known that without him telling me, because this creek flattened out into a wide, lazy pool, its edges wrapped in willows &endash; the same trees Pa always told us held lots of bugs. And those bugs fall off and land in the water, so there was always fish under these trees. And he was right.

At the downstream end of the pool the water squeezed into a crush of rocks about 15 feet wide. It swirled and twisted and reversed its course before droppiing into a series of smaller pools, each with its own bit of torment and boil. Below that run the stream regained its composure and twisted on across the valley, repeating the sequence every few hundred yards.

This creek lies northeast of Butler, near a place called Frogtown. This green-brown braid of water probably drains into the Allegheny, but that doesn't matter. This was my Grandpa's favorite fishing hole, and I've seen it a thousand times over the years.

I've seen it on television, I've seen it in magazines, and I've seen it while flying down the highway in dozens of different places. And I've seen it in my mind. He could not have described it more precisely.

I never saw him fish, but I knew he was a great fishermen. I think he chose the location of his West Virginia home because it was so close to a stream like the one he knew as a kid. He studied the stream, he learned the stream, he respected the stream.

By looking into the photo of this treasured fishing hole, I can imagine the stubborn smallmouth bass that must haunt its shaded shore. I think I should go there sometime soon, and creep down that bank, and flip a minnow out in that pool without making a sound or letting my shadow hit the surface.

Grandpa hasn't fished there in more than 50 years, but the rules never change. I just hope the descendants of the fish Pa used to catch learned their lessons, too.