In God We Trust by Jean Shepherd

am, in the dark, in a rowboat with The Men. I am half-blind with sleepiness. I am used to going to bed at nine-thirty or ten o’clock, and here it is two, three o’clock in the morning. I’m squatting in the back end of the boat, with 87,000,000 mosquitoes swarming over me, but I am
fishing!
I am out of my skull with fantastic excitement, hanging onto my pole.
    In those days, in Indiana, they fished with gigantic cane poles. They knew not from Spinning. A cane pole is a long bamboo pole that’s maybe twelve or fifteen feet in length; it weighs a ton, and tied to the end of it is about thirty feet of thick green line, roughly half the weight of the average clothesline, three big lead sinkers, a couple of crappie hooks, and a bobber.
    One of Sport’s most exciting moments is when 7 Indianafishermen in the same boat simultaneously and without consulting one another decide to pull their lines out of the water and recast. In total darkness. First the pole, rising like a huge whip:
    “Whoooooooooooooop!”
    Then the lines, whirling overhead: “heeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooo!”
    And then:
    “OH! FOR CHRISSAKE! WHAT THE HELL?”
    Clunk! CLONK !
    Sound of cane poles banging together, and lead weights landing in the boat. And such brilliant swearing as you have never heard. Yelling, hollering, with somebody always getting a hook stuck in the back of his ear. And, of course, all in complete darkness, the Coleman lamp at the other end of the rowboat barely penetrating the darkness in a circle of three or four feet.
    “Hey, for God’s sake, Gertz, will ya tell me when you’re gonna pull your pole up!? Oh, Jesus Christ, look at this mess!”
    There is nothing worse than trying to untangle seven cane poles, 200 feet of soggy green line, just as they are starting to hit in the other boats. Sound carries over water:
    “Shhhhh! I got a bite!”
    The fishermen with the tangled lines become frenzied. Fingernails are torn, hooks dig deeper into thumbs, and kids huddle terrified out of range in the darkness.
    You have been sitting for twenty hours, and nothing. A bobber just barely visible in the dark water is one of the most beautiful sights known to man. It’s not doing anything, but there’s always the feeling that at any instant it might. It just lays out there in the darkness. A luminous bobber, a beautiful thing, with a long, thin quill and a tiny red-and-white float, with just the suggestion of a line reaching into the black water. These are special bobbers for
very
tiny fish.
    I have been watching my bobber so hard and so long in the darkness that I am almost hypnotized. I have not had a bite—ever—but the excitement of being there is enough for me, a kind of delirious joy that has nothing to do with sex or any of themore obvious pleasures. To this day, when I hear some guy singing in that special drummer’s voice, it comes over me. It’s two o’clock in the morning again. I’m a kid. I’m tired. I’m excited. I’m having the time of my life.
    And at the other end of the lake:
    “Raaahhhhhd sails in the sawwwwnnnnsehhhht.…” The Roller Rink drones on, and the mosquitoes are humming. The Coleman lamp sputters, and we’re all sitting together in our little boat.
    Not really together, since I am a kid, and they are Men, but at least I’m there. Gertz is stewed to the ears. He is down at the other end. He has this fantastic collection of rotten stories, and early in the evening my Old Man keeps saying:
    “There’s a kid with us, you know.”
    But by two in the morning all of them have had enough so that it doesn’t matter. They’re telling stories, and I don’t care. I’m just sitting there, clinging to my cane pole when, by God, I get a nibble!
    I don’t believe it. The bobber straightens up, jiggles, dips, and comes to rest in the gloom. I whisper:
    “I got a bite!”
    The storytellers look up from their beer cans in the darkness.
    “What …? Hey, whazzat?”
    “Shhhhh! Be quiet!”
    We sit in silence,