I’m on a plane flying back to San Jose, California from Houston, Texas. My small, blue fishing rod is in the overhead bin. A couple of days ago, on a small boat, I was piercing a hook through the backs of live shrimp and casting them out into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the first time I had ever done that. The shrimp were as big as my hand, so large that when I sent a video of them to my wife, she texted back, “Did you catch all of those fish?!”
“No, that’s just the bait,” I responded.
I was in Texas for a bachelor weekend in Galveston, in a big house with a dock, on a calm canal that opened out into the Gulf. From the dock, we lowered a crab trap, loaded with a bloody fish head, into the darkness, before climbing aboard the boat on which I would learn to fish again. “The last time I fished, I was about nine years old,” I said, as one of my friends loaded the cans of beer into the cooler.
As a kid, I used live maggots for bait. I remember them burrowing into the crevices between my fingers, especially at the sensitive point where my fingers joined my hand. I preferred to keep them in the pot, but I remember a friend who stored some in his mouth. He told me that it kept them warm so that they would wiggle and be attractive to fish.
