Five Stick Friday

I just prepped another whole chicken for the grill tonight. And in the process I ended up with a fresh chicken liver on my cutting board. It’s so weird how just seeing it caused a transport back in time.

When I was 12 years old, I hiked about a half mile from our home in Rocky Face to a neighborhood pond to fish almost every afternoon after school. No one in my family really enjoyed fishing as much as I did… so I spent many hours alone at that pond catching bream and bass… until one day I discovered there were catfish in there. Big catfish.

Armed with this new knowledge, I obviously set out to catch one. I bought catfish baits in a jar, crickets that I would weigh down to the bottom, etc. and caught a few small and medium ones . But never the big ones I had bumped into … I was determined.

A man at the bait shop told me… “Ehh… you want that monster? Chicken livers. But not just any chicken livers. Buy them at the store, then set the container out doors in the Sun for 2-3 days”.

“Won’t they smell horrible…?”

“They will… that’s the point “.

So that’s exactly what I did. And on a summer evening in 1975, I took my malodorous morsels down to that pond on a Friday night at dusk. I wretched horribly getting a liver on the hook and the big green pickle flies were everywhere…disgusting.

But 45 minutes later, I landed an 11-pound catfish on light spinning gear… and was ready for my cover photo on Field & Stream.

And all that, the smell of those rancid livers, the sound of those buzzing flies, the thrill of that bent rod and tight line, and finally the biggest freshwater fish I’d ever caught.… all of it.. just revisited me again almost 50 years later… from my effort to clean the chicken I’m cooking for dinner tonight.

What a welcome trip back to a much, much simpler time.