Yes, it’s an old joke. When someone answers with “yes,” you say, “How did it hold the pole?” As a hillbilly kid growing up on Sand Mountain, I loved catfish. I loved those little yellow (mud) cats from the creek, those giant blue channel cats in the river, and every kind in between. I loved catching them, cleaning them, and eating them.
I probably got that from my grandmother, Lela Jackson. Granny loved to fish for catfish, too. She would wrap an entire glob of chicken liver onto her hook and cast away. I guess she figured if she couldn’t catch one, she could at least knock one out cold. More often than not, however, she just ended up feeding them as her hook went in one direction and the liver went in the other.
Once we discovered those catfish ponds where you pay for the fish you catch, Granny was in hog heaven. It wasn’t the paying part; it was that you would catch a large catfish within seconds of casting your line. Every time. Do they still have those around? Those are great places to take kids fishing for the first time.
Catfish actually come in a variety of styles, and I think I’ve seen them all. I’ve caught many a flathead cat. They look pretty much like any catfish, but their head looks like it’s been run over. When I was a scrawny twelve-year-old, I caught a six-pound channel cat on a little Zebco 202 rod-and-real. It took everything I had to get that sucker to the bank.
Once, at the barges at Hollywood Cut, I caught a four-pound catfish the likes of which I had never seen. In fact, until that moment, I didn’t even know they existed. It looked like a normal catfish, but it had scales, a scaly catfish. No, this was years before they started building the nuclear power plant, so it wasn’t like the three-eyed fish Bart Simpson caught. And it was a decade before I drank a drop of alcohol, so it wasn’t that either. It was just a catfish with scales.
But the doggone-est thing I ever saw was a shovel-bill catfish. I was a teenager when this guy pulled his boat up to the boat ramp on the Tennessee River. The bottom of his boat was filled with catfish from a pound to twenty pounds. But laying on top of all those was this behemoth shovel-bill cat that stretched the length of his boat. It was a beautiful blue color and looked more like something from the ocean.
Suddenly, seeing an actual feline holding a fishing pole doesn’t seem so farfetched, does it?
Neal Wooten is a columnist in the Mountain Valley News and North Jackson Press newspapers. He is a published author of more than three dozen books. He can be reached at [email protected].
