Secret Order of Scup

We all have a fish that kicked things off: bullhead, cunner, bluegill, mackerel, snapper blue, hickory shad. Often these are the fish that still hold some weight, a portal back to blue-jean shorts, bicycles and badly organized tackle boxes. For me it was scup, and the goal was the same as every kid’s: to catch as many as possible. There was no thought of food or sport or money. Those are adult concerns. The value of my experience was purely quantitative: “Got another one. Here we go. A good one!”

My father was a sailor, a boater, a lover of small wooden craft. His enjoyment of fishing was much more about the boat than the catching. He didn’t teach my brother or me how to fish, and I think that by soft-peddling the fishing end of things, he taught us more than had he played the high-handed role of teacher, over-explaining and getting technical with facts and jargon. There was rarely, in the early years, an adult present. We biked to the pond, the salt marsh, the pier, all on the endless repeat of boyhood summers. And then on a late summer afternoon in 1979 near Padanaram, Massachusetts, the routine was cast in silver, drilled forever into my memory.