Things Change

Many of us purchasing our first RV make one of our primary destinations a trip back to visit our roots. We load the grandkids in the back, and take off to show them where we grew up, the source of all those stories we have regaled them with over the years. It’s a bit of a chance for us to go full circle with our lives.

Knowing that the young ones will need something more interesting to do than take a tour through Aunt Millie’s parlor, or look at that old hill where we used to hunt for bugs, it’s a great idea to take a look on the Internet and see what activities are available. It just could be that the old town has added some attractions in the fifty years since you left! You can hope anyway.

Just to give my hypothesis a run, I went on line to look at the source of many of my oldest memories. The mid-sized town of Modesto is located in central California, between Sacramento and Fresno. It was best known in my boyhood as the home of Gallo wines, at least that’s what my Mom, a big consumer of the product, used to tell me.

Her parents lived in the town most of their lives, in a tiny house with a big yard full of fruit trees and vegetable gardens and a shed full of chickens. I’m sure that the chickens were outlawed by code a long time back, but Googling the site showed a tree-filled lot that was mostly intact, even hosting the fruit trees that brought in the birds I loved to plunk with my BB gun (long ago banned by local ordinance and a concern for ecology!).

But the highlight of my visits with my Grandpa, as I’ve written in several columns, was the fishing trips we used to take to local rivers. Assuming that things may have changed a bit in the last fifty years, I took a look on the Internet and was nothing less than amazed.

Unknown Lake
I got loads of hits on my “Fishing in Modesto” inquiry. Not only did I find lots of places to get bait and tackle—even the antique stuff we used to use—but also there was a lot more to the area than I had ever realized.

First I found a Web site extolling the virtues of Modesto Lake, or reservoir as it was called in some of the articles. I didn’t even know there was such a place, and we certainly never fished there. The lake is full of smallmouth bass, a species that Grandpa never talked about, and supports lots of other fish and a good yearly planting of rainbow trout. We used to drive for hours to get to trout lakes. I’ve got inquiries out to see if the lake, which supposedly has been around since 1915, just got fishable or whether Grandpa just missed it!

My grandfather was a meat fisherman if ever there was one, so I really doubt we would have passed on any hot fishing close by! But the next really big surprise came when I saw an article that gave an account of a monster catfish landed right in the area where we always used to fish. We loved to fish for catfish and our favorite hole was on the stretch of the San Joaquin River winding though a little huddle of old buildings called The Old Fisherman’s Club. It was a social group, featuring bingo nights and mulligan stew, but also had a tiny marina and a lot of good banks for fishing. The river was slow and murky, and we spent hundreds of days fishing for catfish and small striped bass. We never, however, caught any whiskered wonders that had any size to them.

Fish Stories
I can remember Grandpa telling me about a five-pound cat that was landed in a lake several miles away, and how big that fish must have been, but the report I read gave an account of a state record fish tipping the scales at over 70 pounds! Not only that, on the same night the lucky angler caught two other huge cats and a couple of 10-pound stripers! Something must have happened over that last five decades!

I looked through my fishing album and there I was with my little brother, hoisting a couple of limits of chunky catfish, but they were chunky one-pound fish. They wouldn’t be big enough to use for bait for those big monsters nearly a hundred times bigger than our average fish!

Looking through the articles on the fisherman’s club brought back memories of people and a very different era. I found a piece on an election of officers where our barber, one of Grandpa’s buddies, was elected president, and another piece that really brought back the problems of the ‘50s. One sweet old lady, a recent widow whose husband had been a member, was trying to get support for her cause. Since only men could join, the club had refused to continue her membership. The writer in the local paper commented that she should stay in the kitchen. Not all memories are all that positive!

But if I can talk my kids into going back to visit my roots, I’ll have to find some good nightclubs and paint-ball ranges as well as lakes and big catfish. And if we take along our tackle, I’ll be sure and bring some heavier gear. The catfish currently in residence would tear apart the stuff we used back in the day!

Bob Ellsberg’s column, Fishin’, appears monthly in RV Life and rvlife.com.