Born between two wars, he was the elder son of Dutch immigrants. Although my Grandpa Floyd seldom went hungry, growing up during the Depression meant he didn’t enjoy many luxuries either. His was a generation that required “all hands on deck,” and folks were expected to sacrifice and chip in. The family dairy farm was no exception. Waking to the impatient lowing of cattle before dawn, he toiled through the day and collapsed into bed well after dark, moving to the predictable and sometimes monotonous rhythms of a farmer’s life.
Then in 1943, just when things seemed they’d never change, patriotic duty called and Floyd was drafted. For the next 15 months he and the crew of the USS Venus played a risky game of hide-and-seek with Japanese submarines and kamikaze planes in the Pacific. Though Grandpa might have enjoyed a break from the rigors of farming, the Navy wasn’t necessarily what he’d had in mind.
When the Axis powers finally surrendered to Allied Forces in ’45, Grandpa was relieved of military duty. But back home, farm work again required nearly all his energy, leaving little time for leisure activities like fishing.
“He was always in the barn or out in the field,” my mother remembers. “The only day he rested was Sunday, and even then, the cows needed milking before church.”
In spite of his demanding schedule, Grandpa rarely complained. In fact, he was quick to offer his trademark smile and cheerful response when someone asked how he was doing:
“Fine and dandy, slick and handy, can’t be beat.”
A positive attitude can take a man a long way down the rocky road of life, but there will always be speed bumps. That was the case in ’68 when two government officials rapped on the front door of the whitewashed farmhouse.
“The State of Michigan needs your back-forty for the new highway that’s going in,” they announced. “Interstate 196 will cut right through your pasture.”
This marked the second time that Uncle Sam had altered Grandpa’s plans. Without the farm, he reasoned, there wasn’t much use for cattle or combines, tractors or hay rakes, so he and Grandma sold everything for a song and bought a vacation home on Monterey Lake. There it became obvious that Grandpa’s love of bluegills rivaled his intensity for Detroit Tigers baseball—two passions trumped only by his commitment to God.
An ancient pontoon boat, bristling with rods and tackle, was tied up along the dock, but he rarely fired-up the weathered Johnson outboard, no matter how much us grandkids pestered him. Come to think of it, I’m not sure it even ran.
“No reason to go anywhere else on the lake,” he’d explain. “Right out there,” he’d gesture with a work-worn hand, “is my honey hole. Those fish are just waiting for an invite to dinner.” Normally Grandpa fished with nightcrawlers, but he wasn’t too high-hat for wax worms or crickets. He’d set up shop in a faded plastic chair, balancing a Zebco rod and reel in one hand and a steaming cup of coffee with cream in the other. In the waning evening light he’d wait in heron-like repose for his red and white “dobber” to dive for the bottom.
Observing this idyllic scene undoubtedly fostered my love for fishing. To this day I grow fidgety when the water warms to that magical 68-degree-mark and plate-sized ’gills spawn in the shallows.
While Grandpa was a live-bait angler through and through, I somehow gravitated toward bamboo rods and flies. Watching whopper ’gills wallop the floating foam spiders never got old. Nevertheless, our respective methods reminded me that we were born of different eras. Though he never voiced it out loud, I suspect Grandpa viewed fly rods as fancy affectations rather than effective tools for putting food on the table.
“Catch as catch-can” was his motto, and that applied to game and fish alike. For example: In Grandpa’s day, “riding shotgun” had a completely different meaning. Come harvest time he cradled a full-choke 20 gauge across his lap as he rumbled across the cornfield atop a pumpkin-orange Case tractor. During those travels, plenty of pheasants met an untimely demise, and they weren’t taken on the wing either. Fair chase or fowl play, those gaudy roosters were dinner, plain and simple.
Grandpa’s fishing followed a similar approach. At a time when catch-and-release was unheard of, he would happily fill a wire fish basket until it bulged with pumpkinseeds and perch, bullheads and black bass. Although bluegills were best in his mind, meat was meat in the end.
Only the lowly, red-eyed rock bass were spared from the fryer. “Mud bass,” he’d mutter disgustedly as he pitched them over the gunwale, insisting they tasted like the silty bottom.
“Have you ever tried one?” I asked once.
“Never needed to. Everyone knows those buggers taste like mud,” he replied, matter-of-factly.
One day while fishing alone, I creeled some red-eyes and decided to test his theory. That evening, when no one was watching, I disguised the “mud bass” fillets beneath a generous coating of seasoned cornmeal and flour, and fried them alongside the bluegills for dinner.
“Great meal,” I prompted, casually grabbing a second helping of golden-brown fish. I maintained a decent poker face, but was chuckling inside at my trickery.
“Deeee-licious!” Grandpa agreed enthusiastically. “You can’t beat bluegill, can you?”
“No sir,” I agreed with a crooked grin. When I eventually came clean, he eyed me suspiciously from the corner of his eye, like a puppy that’d gnawed through a strand of Christmas lights and wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.
Among our most memorable meals together was a supper we shared at his house just months before he died. By then he’d grown frail and hadn’t fished in several years, so it had been up to me to procure “the meat.” Beaming at the platter of crispy fillets that evening, his blue eyes lit up as he flipped through a mental rolodex of fishing memories; recollections of countless fish caught and creeled, hooked and lost.
I know he enjoyed every bite because it was written all over his face.
“No mud bass in this batch,” he winked.
Tonight is a muggy, mosquitoey evening in early June; a sure bet for good fishing, according to Grandpa’s wisdom. The humid air smells of “summer lake” and Deep Woods OFF, two seasonal perfumes I’ve grown to love. Rings widen over the glassy surface of the lake, proof that hungry bluegills are on the prowl. Aside from the occasional thhhuk! of feeding fish, all is silent, save the subtle swish-swish of fly line as my rubber-legged spider flies back and out.
As the western sky softens from orange to pink to lavender, I feel like I could linger out here forever.
But time is fleeting; I know that, and Grandpa knew it too.
When the darkness finally arrives, I’ll ascend the steps toward the softly lit cottage on the hill. For now, though, memories of my Grandpa and the solid tug of a bluegill on the end of my line are just what I need.
This article originally appeared in the 2016 September/October issue of Sporting Classics magazine.