Bread Crumbs

It's funny when you look back on your life and wonder how in the world you got where you are. It's like a trail of bread crumbs, each one leading you a little farther down the path and in directions you might not have thought you would go. Your family, friends, jobs, homes everything connected and guided along by a winding trail of small but significant events.

My trail took an early turn at the end of a burnt orange boat dock on Lake Austin in the late 70's. As I plinked with a Zebco 202 and daydreamed, my Uncle Sandy and his brother in law Jim Andrus pulled up to the dock in their 14 foot fiberglass flatbottom boat. I had spotted their empty boat stall earlier that morning and wondered what sort of adventure they were on.

From the floor of the boat they lifted a wire mesh basket that was writhing with big sunfish. They set the bulging basket on the dock next to their fly rods- Fiberglass Garcia 5 weight rods rigged with little chartreuse poppers. I asked Uncle Sandy how the rods worked, and he held up his clinched pointer finger and let it slowly uncurl at the tip of my nose. "You want the fly line to unroll just like that, Casey." It was my first lesson in fly fishing. I could not have possibly known how much those few fleeting moments at the end of the boat dock that morning would influence my life. I only knew I had to figure out a way to get one of those fly rods like Sandy and Jim, and I did.

A few years later, in junior high, I struck up a conversation on the first day of school with a classmate who was wearing a fishing shirt. His name was Shawn Vickers and it turned out he fly fished too. "Impossible luck," I thought. It was the beginning of a great friendship that lasts to this day.

Back then, Shawn and I spent countless weekends crawling through barbed wire fences with our fly rods and chasing fish in the lakes and streams on the outskirts of Austin. Fly fishing was still sort of a "Michigan-trout-thing" and some of the semi-redneck kids we grew up with never could quite figure out why anyone in Texas would want own a fly rod, much less catch a bass on one. A few of them were awkwardly caught between wanting to learn to fly cast and wanting to lob BB's at us from the cedar breaks. They never had the nerve to follow through with either, and we all just kept on fishing.

When I eventually got my driver's license it broadened our scope of destinations, and potential for mischief, considerably. Choosing to go fishing rather than take care of more important (but way less fun) commitments consistently got Shawn and I both in trouble (and still does).

A decade later, I bumped along in a university van with an entomology class headed toward the Guadalupe River to collect some sort of benthic bugs. All I could think about was how it was a crime to go to a river with a kick net and no fly rod. I casually mentioned something about fly fishing to the class professor. "Have you met Bill?" was his response. He turned and introduced me to a skinny guy with a farm boy haircut. His name was Bill Gammel and he claimed to be a pretty good fly caster.

It wasn't long before old Bill and I went fishing and it turns out he was a good caster. In fact, he brought fly casting to a level I had not previously thought possible. Bill and I became pretty good friends after that. We would go fishing, Bill would out-cast me, I would out-fish him, and both of us would do our best to rub it in.

But most of our time was spent on the bow of a university-owned electro shocking boat netting stunned fish for Bill's thesis project. I recall loading the boat back on the trailer one evening next to an old oxbow lake down on the San Marcos River near Martindale. It was a really neat piece of property and Bill had somehow procured access to it. As we finished strapping down the boat, Bill looked up at the moon and said, "You know Casey, this is one of those spots where you'd like to bring a lady friend, let down the tailgate, turn on the radio, and ease back with an Igloo full of ice-cold Dr. Peppers." "Bill," I said, "Dude Dr. Pepper?" "Yeah... Dr. Pepper. What's wrong with that? I like Dr. Pepper." Bill never failed to stun me with his honesty or his naivety. We kept in touch after college, and in the summer of 2003 Bill introduced me to Everett and Pam Johnson, and Gulf Coast Connections magazine, which has lead me in directions I never would have dreamed.

And so today I find myself driving down an endless stretch of sand with Billy Sandifer, drinking coffee and searching for jackfish. At least, that's what we both claim to be doing. Our fly rods bump and jiggle on the hood as we rattle across the sand in his blue suburban, solving the world's problems. "Hey check out those birds there Billy" I point across the hood toward some circling gulls. "Nope just birds being birds, Casey birds being birds." "Yeah, I guess so." The birds squawk and then scatter as we approach. "Maybe they're looking for bread crumbs," I think, and we push on down the beach.