First and foremost, with deep respect Team Chi Wulff salutes all veterans who have nobly served their country as well as those serving today. Your helping hand and sacrifice is an inspiration.
A few times before I’ve written about my grandfather, now long deceased. My grandfather served in WWI, on the ground in France if I’m remembering my history correctly.
He was called Pa-Pa (paw-paw) by his legion of grandchildren and he loved to fish his little corner of the Texas gulf coast, right at the mouth of the Colorado river south of Matagorda. He was a jack of all trades, under-educated by today’s book-learning standards though damned savvy and successful in terms of life experience.
But most of us remember him as a fisherman.
In later years he was a bookkeeper-cum-accountant, working a decade and more past ‘retirement age’, though his true overriding passion was fishing.
For decades he owned a ‘fishing camp’ at the mouth of the Colorado River near the gulf; the structure was wiped out again and again by large Gulf storms, more than once down to a clean slab. It wasn’t fancy – in fact it was really just a frame shell of a building, though Pa-Pa always repainted it a deep barn red and called it the Mason Rouge.
My family spent the bulk of our summer vacations ensconced in the Mason Rouge, sweltering in the summer heat, fishing, eating seafood and spending afternoons at the beach.
I was too young and lived 720 long Texas miles away during his most vibrant senior years, though I still remember the day (I must have been 8 or 10) when we unearthed his WWI helmet in one of the old garages on his home property in Bay City.
He yelled at us for digging it out and playing with it, and then stood on the oyster shell driveway and did something I’d never seen – he turned the helmet over in his hands, his eyes moistened and a tear rolled down his cheek.
He said something along the lines of we could never understand what he’d seen and he hoped we never would.
That memory of him is one that I’ll never forget and suspect that legions of families have had similar experiences at one point or another with a loved-one who’s served in wartime.
What I remember most about Pa-Pa is his love of being on the water. He was a genuine gear-head bait fisherman, favoring Ambassador open-faced bait reels, huge glass surf-casting rods and a dilapidated fleet of small boats that always needed some form of major repair to get back on the water. Every single piece of fishing or boating gear he owned was decorated with some variant or another of rust.
He reveled in the fact that many of his buddies and family fueled the rumor that he looked a bit like John Wayne; Pa-Pa did always wear a long billed cap just like Wayne wore in Hatari and long sleeve safari shirts.
Today still when I picture him in my minds eye I see him standing at the tiller with a cold Lonestar (when it was still brewed in downtown San Antonio), wearing that hat and a faded red kerchief cowboy style, squinting over West Matagorda Bay searching for channel markers as we ground once again on yet another mud flat. (We learned early to pray for that incoming tide and how to ooch a boat off the mud without getting out to drag it off…).
He was impatient with greenhorn grandkids as all great curmudgeonly fishers are, though he worked hard to put those that wanted to fish on the water, and he reveled in both catching fish and seeing others in his boat do so (as long as he had his first).
I’ll grant a man who spent time in the trenches and tunnels of France (or Vietnam or Afghanistan) the right to the first fish and prime water any day.
Thank you, veterans.
