I almost drowned over a channel cat that weighed maybe six pounds. That is the kind of sentence that sounds like a joke until you are the one standing in it, waist deep in a river that doesn’t care about you, holding a trotline that has gone from a piece of string to a loaded cable, with your breath coming in these short ugly gulps and your boots full of water and your brain finally, finally catching up to the fact that being tough and being safe are not the same thing.
It was my grandad’s trotline trick, and it always worked. Run a line across the river about an hour before dark, bait every hook with a chunk of cut shad or a half-dead bluegill, let it soak overnight, run it again at sunup. Catfish are thieves, he used to say. They come in the dark and they don’t ask. You just have to have your hand in the right place when they reach.
I ran that line for two summers and it fed me more nights than I can count. Flatheads, channel cats, the occasional big blue that about pulled my arm out of the socket. I got cocky about it, which is where every story like this starts. Cocky is the load you carry in before the river hands you the freight.
The Night I Decided Rules Were for Other Men
The rule, the one hard rule grandad had hammered into me, was that you do not run a trotline by yourself in the dark. Not ever. A trotline at night is a thing that fights back, every hook a needle, the line slick as snot, the water black under you. Two men, a headlamp apiece, and a knife you can reach with either hand. That was the rule.
I decided I was too good for the second man. My buddy Tex had backed out that night, his kid was running a fever, and instead of just saying alright, we’ll run it in the morning, I stood there and argued with myself for about forty seconds and then I absolutely went anyway. That is the whole crime, right there, in those forty seconds. I knew better. I went anyway, because I wanted to prove the fish could not wait and neither could I.
I told myself it would be quick. Run the line, haul what was on it, get out. What could happen in twenty minutes? It is a question the river has heard a thousand times, and it has never once bothered to answer out loud.
What the River Did Instead
I tied the boat off to a snag and started hand-over-handing the line. The water was colder than I remembered. My headlamp was an old one that flickered if you looked at it wrong, but I had argued it was fine, because of course I had. Somewhere out in the middle the line went heavy, and I remember grinning to myself, like a fool, because heavy meant fish.
It was not a fish. It was a big old snapping turtle that had found my cut bait, and a snapping turtle on a trotline is not a catch, it is a lawsuit with a shell on it. He was thrashing, churning that muddy water into foam, and the line was sawing across the gunwale of the boat, and in the middle of trying to cut him loose without losing a finger I leaned, and I leaned too far, and the boat I had tied off with a lazy half-hitch came untied off that snag and slid out from under me like it was trying to be somewhere else.
I hit the water before I knew I was falling. The cold took the air right out of my chest. And then the trotline came with me, because it was still wrapped half around my arm and my boot, and every one of those hooks that was not holding a turtle was holding me.
The Part Where You Realize You’re Small
That is the thing nobody tells you about a trotline. Underwater, with your foot tangled in the drop lines and a turtle still pulling on one end, it is not fishing line anymore. It is a snare. I remember trying to stand and finding the bottom was soft, that kind of sucking mud that lets your boot go halfway down and then holds it there like it’s been waiting for you all day. I remember my headlamp dying to a dim orange, then to nothing.
I do not remember being scared so much as I remember being quiet. My whole body went still for a second, treading water with one arm while the other one worked the knife out of my pocket, and my brain said, very clear and very calm, one word: dumb. Not even a sentence. Just the fact of it. Dumb.
I cut myself free. Not clean, and not fast, and I carry the scar on my forearm to prove that a snapping turtle and a panicked man and a knife in the dark do not make for careful work. But I cut free, and I got my foot loose, and I pulled myself up onto that snag I had failed to tie to in the first place, and I sat there in the black until my heart stopped trying to hammer its way out of my ribs. The boat was thirty feet downstream, hung up on a root, still afloat. The turtle had won the argument and taken my line with him.
The Price of a Six-Pound Catfish
Here is the punchline that nobody laughs at. None of it would have happened if I had done the boring thing. If I had waited for morning, if I had swallowed my pride and called it a night, I would have run that line in the daylight with Tex standing beside me, and the turtle would have gone in the boat or been cut loose in thirty seconds, and I would have eaten a channel cat that I did not once think about dying for.
Instead I nearly traded my whole life for the chance to not look like a quitter, and there was not another soul on that river to have seen me quit or not quit. The only audience for my stubbornness was a turtle and the dark, and neither one of them was impressed.
Grandad would have said it with fewer words, the way he said everything. You don’t fight the river at night by yourself, boy. You fight it in the morning, when you got two hands and some light, and if that costs you one fish, then that fish lived to be caught another day, and so did you. He never once had to explain that the second part was the point.
What I Changed, and What I Didn’t
I still run trotlines. I still go when the catfish are thick and the water is moving, because some things you don’t give up just because they bit you once. But I do not run one alone after dark, not for any fish that ever swam. I carry a knife I can open with my teeth if the other hand is busy, and a headlamp that has not bought its own ticket to the junkyard yet. I check my knots twice, and I keep the boat tied off with a proper cleat hitch, not a prayer.
And when the water is cold and the sun is going down and somebody says, let’s just run it real quick, I am no longer the man who hears that and says yes. I am the man who remembers the mud holding his boot, and the line wrapped around his arm, and that one flat word the river left in his head. Dumb.
It is not weakness to wait for daylight. It is the only smart thing a man on a river has ever taught me how to do, and it cost me a six-pound catfish and a scar and the better part of a night that I will never get back. Cheap, honestly, for a lesson the river usually sells for a lot more.