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I vividly remember the first
crappies I saw in the flesh - it was the first time I saw and fished
Lake Gregory, that lovely little dot of San Bernardino Mountains' water
that taught me so much, that served as such a salve, for those awful
fucking early teenage years. I was young - 12, maybe 13 - when the old
man took me there after a sojourn to Silverwood. Was late afternoon,
and that cool mountain wind was blowing hard, whipping the water a
deep, dark blue-black. An old man, wrinkled and withered with age,
creases of his years seemingly sculpted by the wind, had a fat catch of
blacks, not big fish by any means - they ranged from six to eight
inches - but certainly adults, and certainly large enough to be worth
killing for food. They sparkled like freckled jewels, gold and obsidian
speckles, hued by a turquoise sheen from tip to tail. Previously, I'd
only known crappies from a dreary fishing book, a poorly written book,
one with banal black typeset on banal white paper. The real fish, the
real, living, breathing and beating crappies that mesmerized me on that
stark day at Gregory, Christ, they exemplified eloquently how
incompletely words on paper represent the real thing.
As I delved more
deeply into Centrarchidae, crappies taught another lesson through their
uniqueness among the sunfish clan. Bluegills and redears and
pumkinseeds epitomize maneuverable veg-pickin' bug-eaters; smallies and
spots and bigs model well the cover-haunting fish-eater; but crappies,
crappies inhabit a netherworld, not quite capable of a bluegill's
dexterous weed-hunting (the big ol' mouth of crappie just can't
pinpoint and extract midges and mayfly/odonate naiads from pondweed
like the bluegill's smaller, toothy mouth can), and not being
streamlined or fast enough to dash out after a crawdad or threadfin
shad like a smallie or spotted bass can. Crappies are the ghost of the
centrarchid world, drifting into cover but then dissolving with ease
into the open-water ether that neither the black basses nor the
lepomids ever truly feel comfortable in, and thereby reveal the possibility, the
beauty, in toeing the line.