The following excerpt is from An Outdoor Journal: Adventures and Reflections by Jimmy Carter. Copyright © 1994 by The University of Arkansas Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, www.uapress.com.
About once a year my daddy took me on a fishing trip to a more distant place, usually farther south in Georgia. We made a couple of such visits to the Okefenokee Swamp in the southeastern corner of our state, near the Florida line and not far from the Atlantic Ocean but cut off from the east coast by sand hills. The swamp is a shallow dish of six hundred square miles of water and thousands of islands, mostly of floating peat, on which thick stands of cypress and other trees grow. These peat islands are the “trembling earth” from which the area got its Indian name. Stained with tannin, the water has a reddish-brown color, but was considered by all the fishermen to be pure enough to drink.
We stayed at the only fish camp around the western edge of the swamp, owned by a man named Lem Griffis. His simple pineboard bunkhouses, with screens instead of windowpanes, could accommodate about twenty guests. As we sat around an open fire at night, Lem was always eager to regale us with wild tales about the biggest bear, the prettiest woman, or a catch of so many fish they had to haul in water to fill up the hole left in the lake. His stories were honed by repetition so that the buildup and punch line equaled those of any professional entertainer. We listened and laughed for hours even when we were hearing the same yarn for the second or third time. His regular guests would urge, “Tell us about the city lady who thought her son might drown.”
Lem would wait awhile until enough others joined in the request, and then describe in vivid and heart-rending tones the anguish of a mother who was afraid to let her only child near the swamp. “I finally said, ‘Ma’am, I can guarantee you the boy won’t drown. I’ve been here all my life and never heerd of anybody drowning in this here swamp.’ The lady was quite relieved. There was always a long pause, until Lem finally added, “The gators always get them first.”
The camp was located near the shore of Billy’s Lake, out of which flows the Suwannee River, a beautiful stream that eventually wanders out of Georgia and across the entire Florida peninsula into the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes we cast or trolled in the lake among the numerous alligators, whose heads would surface quite near us and then submerge quietly as the alligators moved on without a ripple underneath the water. When we inadvertently hooked a small one—two or three feet long—we hastily cut our line, trying to save as much of it as possible. We did catch largemouth bass and jack, and quite often had an especially fierce struggle with a mudfish, or bowfin. After such a good fight, we were always disappointed to see what it was, but at Lem’s request we would keep some of the largest ones for him to trade off with his neighbors, who liked to eat them.
To me, the most fearsome creature was the alligator gar, a vicious-looking fish with savage teeth. Since we were not fishing with steel leaders, the gar frequently severed our lines. I was almost willing to sacrifice a spoon or other lure in order to avoid having to remove the creatures from my hook and risk losing a finger. They seemed to cruise just under the surface; when one approached the boat we always slapped a paddle in the water to force it to leave. Lem told some frightful stories about the gar fish, and I was inclined to believe him. Later, I checked the fishing encyclopedia and found that the largest alligator gar ever caught was more than ten feet long and weighed 302 pounds. For once, Lem hadn’t embellished his descriptions.
We also had good luck still-fishing in Billy’s Lake with cane poles for warmouth perch or bream, using pond worms, crawfish tails, or catalpa worms for bait. Most of the time, however, we preferred to go into the more remote wilderness areas of the Okefenokee. Lem’s sons were our guides as we moved deep into the swamp each day. Our boats were long and narrow, specially built to squeeze between the snags and cypress roots along the water trails that had been chopped out to connect the numerous small open places among the trees. Because a very slow but steady current moved throughout the swamp toward Billy’s Lake, there was no stagnant water there. Fish were plentiful and we caught a lot of them, but one of the attractions of the trip was to see Lem’s sons use a casting rod. Whenever we stopped on one of the floating islands for lunch, they would take the boat a short distance from shore and, on each cast, place the lures within an inch or two of their chosen target point, underneath an overhanging bush, between the roots, or among the lily pads. They knew just what kind of lure action would appeal to a fish, and it was amazing to see how quickly they caught enough bass for all of us to eat.
As we moved along these waterways we saw many kinds of birds, including ducks, terns, herons, egrets, ibises, kingfishers, hawks, pileated woodpeckers, and on rare occasions, a bald eagle. The reflection on the surface of the still, dark water was practically perfect, and in some of our photographs it was later impossible to tell which side was up or down. When we were still, the silence would at first seem absolute, but then we would begin to hear a myriad of sounds coming from the surrounding swamp. The Griffis boys could identify the cry of each bird and animal. I remember particularly the bellow of the bull alligators and the deathly silence that for a few moments always followed.
Late one afternoon, one of the other guest fishermen shot an enormous snapping turtle and brought it back to camp. Lem and his boys hung it up on a tree limb and dressed it, easily removing the edible portions by running a sharp knife around the inside edge of the ridged shell. After cutting up the choice-looking meat into small pieces, we set a large washpot half-filled with water on the campfire and added the turtle, two or three chickens, some onions, and later a few vegetables and seasoning. In a couple of hours we all ate several bowlfuls of the turtle soup, a supper few of us would ever forget.
We returned home from the Okefenokee with enough cleaned and iced fish to supply all our kinfolks and neighbors. Sometimes Daddy would take a portion of our catch to the freezer locker in Plains to be kept for a future party and fish fry for his friends. One of my favorite aspects of each trip was telling Mama and my sisters about my part for a few days in a man’s world. I proudly described our experiences, most of them not needing much enhancing to make them interesting.
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A few miles north of the Okefenokee was the small village of Hortense, not far from where the Little Satilla River joins the Big Satilla. This was one of my father’s favorite fishing spots; he tried to go there every year with some of his associates in the farming, peanut, and fertilizer business. On two occasions he took me with him, when I was about ten or twelve years old. We stayed in a big and somewhat dilapidated wood-frame house on a small farm near the banks of the Little Satilla. The house had been built to accommodate at least three generations of a family, but now there were just a man named Joe Strickland, his wife, Shug, and two daughters, one a pretty girl in her teens named Jessie. Joe was the guide for our group of about six people. The women cooked our meals and plowed mules in the small fields during the day while we were fishing. It was the first time I had seen women plowing, which I found quite surprising, but they all seemed to take it as a matter of course.
The Little Satilla is a serpentine stream in the flattest part of Georgia’s coastal plain, weaving back and forth from one bend to another. A number of oxbow lakes had been left behind when the river changed its course. We fished in the area of what was called Ludie’s Lake. On the outside of almost every bend of the stream there was a deep hole, often cut into a steep bank, and on the opposite side of the river was usually a sandbar. There were not as many bushes and snags in the water as we had around Plains, and the bottom was sandy and firm.
I had never done this kind of fishing before. We spent our time in the stream, wading halfway across it to fish in the deep water under the overhanging banks, using the longest cane poles we could handle. I wore cutoff overall pants with no shirt, and tied my fish stringer to one of the belt loops. Joe and I were the only ones barefoot; all the other men had on old tennis shoes or brogans to protect their tender feet. We fished with large pond worms and caught mostly “copperheads,” which were very large bluegill bream whose heads, when mature, assumed a bronze color, perhaps from the tannin stain in the water.
The group of us would string out along the river, my daddy and I usually fishing within sight of each other. We always had a fairly good idea of what luck each fisherman was having. For some reason I have never understood, the men would shout “Billy McKay!” when they had on a nice fish. The words would roll through the woods as all of us smiled; the enthusiasm of the voices was contagious. Each night after supper I went to bed early, but the men stayed up to play poker and to have a few drinks. Sometimes they made enough noise to wake me up, but I didn’t mind. It seemed to make me more a member of the party if they weren’t trying to stay quiet just for me. Most often I was tired enough to go right back to sleep.
While we were in the river Joe moved quietly from one of us to another, just to make sure we were properly spaced and to give advice about the water and some of the bypasses we had to take around obstacles. He tried—successfully—to build up a reputation as something of a character and always gave the group something to talk about during the months between our visits to Hortense.
Once we were walking single file along a path toward the river and Joe called, “Watch out for the barbed wire!”
One of the men said, “Joe, you didn’t look down. How do you know wire’s there?”
Joe said, “My feet will flatten briers or thorns, but I can feel barbed wire when I step on it.”
Another time, when we had to cross the river, Joe walked down the bank, entered the water with his pole and lunch over his head, and moved smoothly across toward the other side with the water never higher than his armpits. The next man, whom I called Mr. Charlie, was the oldest in the group, and he stepped off in the water and immediately went down out of sight. He came up sputtering, and shouted, “Joe, how deep is it here?”
Joe replied, “Oh, I reckon it’s about fifteen foot.” Joe could tread water like a duck and just wanted to demonstrate his prowess so that none of us would forget.
Then came my most memorable day. Late one afternoon, after a good day of fishing, Daddy called me over and asked me to keep his string of fish while he went up the river to talk to one of his friends. I tied it on with mine on the downstream side of me while I kept fishing, enjoying the steady pull of the current on our day’s catch. It wasn’t long before I watched my cork begin to move slowly and steadily up under a snag and knew I had hooked a big one. After a few minutes I had a large copperhead bream in my hands, but as I struggled with it and wondered how I was going to hold the fish while untying the stringer, a cold chill went down my spine. I realized that the tugging of the current on the stringers was gone, as were all our fish! My belt loop had broken.
I threw my pole up on the nearest sandbar and began to dive madly into the river below where I had been standing.
Then I heard Daddy’s voice calling my nickname, “Hot,” he said, “what’s wrong?”
“I’ve lost the fish, Daddy.”
“All of them? Mine too?”
“Yes, sir.” I began to cry, and the tears and water ran down my face together each time I came up for breath.
Daddy was rarely patient with foolishness or mistakes. But after a long silence, he said, “Let them go.” I stumbled out on the bank, and he put his arms around me.
It seems foolish now, but at that time it was a great tragedy for me. We stood there for a while, and he said, “There are a lot more fish in the river. We’ll get them tomorrow.” He knew how I felt and was especially nice to me for the next couple of days. I worshiped him.
At Joe’s home we ate fish and whatever was in season. Both times I went, our breakfasts consisted of biscuits, grits, green beans, and fried fish. It was the first time I had eaten green beans early in the morning, but soon it seemed like a normal thing to do. With plenty of butter and sugar-cane syrup to go with the piles of hot biscuits, we never got up from the table hungry.
When I left Joe’s place to come home, his daughter Jessie told me that she had brought me a going-away present. She then handed me a baby alligator about a foot long, whom I immediately named Mickey Mouse. When I returned to our house I installed him inside a large truck tire, partially buried in the ground and covered with boards. For a number of weeks I fed him earthworms, crickets, wasp larvae, and anything else he would eat. My friends were quite envious of my new pet. Unfortunately, the cats and dogs around the farm were also interested. One morning I went out to feed Mickey and found the boards pushed aside and the little alligator missing. Daddy was very considerate and said he was sure the gator had escaped into the nearest swamp. I was not quite naïve enough to believe him, but from then on I stayed on the lookout for my gator whenever I was fishing or exploring along the neighborhood creeks.
Almost fifty years later, after I left the White House, I stopped by Hortense, Georgia, to try to find the place we used to visit. I couldn’t remember the roads or even Joe’s last name when I inquired of some folks in the service station. I did recall the pretty daughter, but one of the men told me: “We had a lot of pretty daughters around here.” At least I remembered the bare feet, barbed wire, good catches, lost fish, Mickey Mouse, and green beans for breakfast. When I described some of these things to the postmistress, she said, “You must mean Joe Strickland. Miss Jessie still lives at the same place, but in a new house.” I followed her directions and found the cottage in what had been the large yard of the old house, just a few steps from the Little Satilla River.
Miss Jessie responded to our knock on her door, saying, “Won’t y’all come in!” even before she knew who we were. We had a good time reminiscing about old times. Both her parents had died long ago, and she was intrigued that I remembered so much about them. She said she remembered my visits: “I told a lot of people while you were in the White House that the President had fished with my daddy.”
To which I replied, “When I was in the White House, I told several people the same thing about yours. Many of the most highly publicized events of my presidency are not nearly as memorable or significant in my life as fishing with my daddy and yours when I was a boy. Certainly, almost none of them was as enjoyable!”