Matthew Dickerson, Reprinted from the Addison Independent, February 10, 2000.
Every five years or so, my father and his siblings have a big family reunion. Though the family patriarch and matriarch have passed away, most of their grandchildren (i.e., my cousins and I) now have kids of our own, so there are three generations getting together. This year the reunion is being held in western Michigan, and my friends will not be surprised to hear that I plan on fishing while there.
My relatives, on the other hand, may warn against such an endeavor. At the last reunion--1995 in southwest Colorado--I ended up with a fish hook in my lip. Now in all my years of fishing I've never once hooked my own flesh. (I've hooked my own clothing on several occasions, but never my own flesh.) The blame for this particular injury rests with my older brother Ted. Along with a younger brother Thanh, we were fishing in a cove where a stream flowed into a lake. Ted and I were standing on opposite pontoons of a my aunt's boat casting for rising cutthroat trout. It was a beauty of a caddis hatch, and we had already caught several fat fish. Ted was mid-cast when he saw a rise off to his side. With all his line out on his backcast, he attempted to redirect his forward cast. The result was that his fly line whipped around my face. My warning shout was too late as the line came zipping past my lip carrying with it the dreaded hook at the end. (My second shout was even louder, but as this is a family newspaper I won't repeat the particular words.)
The hook now imbedded in my lip was a #14 elk hair caddis. Of particular interest to me at the time was the fact that it was barbed. We fished a few more minutes--long enough for me to catch one last fish. Then we headed back to the camp to show off my newly pierced lip and the first ornament I'd chosen to hang there. My relatives, especially my wife and kids, were greatly impressed. After several futile efforts to extract the hook, we gave up and drove to the Durango hospital where (after a two hour wait) it was removed with much fanfare.
In my big brother's defense, I must say that he wasn't picking on me in particular. I know this because he's hooked himself twice. So I gave him his fly back.
Sorry to say, but that's not my only such story. Just last summer I was fishing in Maine with my young friend Jonathon Wilkinson who managed to snag his Mepps spinner in a branch on the far side of a deep pool. So I gave him advice I've given countless others in similar circumstances: "No sense in wasting time; just grab the line and pull. If you're lucky, the line won't break and you'll get the lure back."
Well the line didn't break, and he did get the lure back though not in the most desirable of fashions. On the first hard pull, the lure (with its barbed treble hook) exploded out of the tree, and came in low over the water like a guided missile straight toward its owner where it impaled itself in his leg just above the knee. (We were wet wading at the time, so our legs were bare.) We fished a bit more and then we went home where I yanked it out with pliers. To his credit, Jonathon didn't scream, cry, or even groan, though I did notice his hands were shaking a bit just before I made to pull.
As I yanked the hook, I comforted Jonathon with yet another story of a self-hooking, this one from a female doctor friend working in the emergency room in a rural Pennsylvania hospital. (Men are warned to stop reading right now.) One evening a man came in and proclaimed that he had a fish hook in his ----s. "What?" Beth asked. "I got a fish hook in my ----s," the man repeated. He pulled up his shirt--he wasn't wearing any pants at the time--and sure enough, he had a fish hook there. Being the good doctor she is, Beth removed it for him. To do so, she had to push the end of the hook all the way through, flatten out the barb, and then pull it back. To this day, she regrets not asking him how it got there. As for me, I'd rather not know.