Keep on Noodling: A Salute to America’s Handfishers

Give a man a fish, goes the Chinese proverb, and you feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish, and he will bore you to tears on summer Mondays with an account of how he and his wife Marjene caught over 170 crappie at the Lake of the Ozarks over the weekend.

Crappie:  As a meal, about as bad as the name.

 

Teach a man to hand-fish, on the other hand, and he will regale you with tales of how he wrestled a fish that was bigger than a dog but smaller than a cow out of the water and into the bed of his truck; now that’s worth hanging around the water cooler for.

“Did I wash my hands before returning to work?  Uh, no.”

 

It can fairly be said that sports–that great male time-waster–has been at the vanguard of social change in America.  Think of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play major league baseball.  Consider Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon.  Or how about Manny Ramirez, the first Dominican outfielder to take a leak behind a manually-operated scoreboard during a pitching change in an American League game.  Truly, as a nation, we have much to be proud of.

But many are surprised to hear that there are still obstacles to full participation in the athletic endeavors that make this country great.  One such barrier is laws such as those in force in Missouri, where I grew up, and an overwhelming majority of the other states that make it illegal to “noodle,” or fish with one’s hands.

As a teenage boy in a small town, I often worked with country people who spoke of noodling.  Not having much interest in fishing, I never accompanied them on their clandestine trips to muddy creek banks, where they told me they would stick their arms into hollow logs, risking bites by snakes or snapping turtles, to catch fish by hand.  As a result, I have wrongly assumed all these years that what they caught would fit on a dinner plate.

It turns out these men were diving under water, holding their breath and sticking their arms into catfish “holes” where they would grab fresh-water behemoths, smaller than a jet ski but not by much, and wrestle them into submission.  Where noodling is permitted, a fish must typically be as much as two feet long in order to be a legal catch.  Catfish are bottom feeders that remain stationary for long periods of time, eating anything that floats by–smaller fish, dead dogs, outboard motors–and as a result can grow to be enormous.

In 2007 Missouri dipped a cautious toe into the waters of hand-fishing–also known as “hogging”–but primly withdrew it five years later and now forbids man and fish to fight it out fair and square.  The Show-Me State’s scruples in this area stems not from fear for fisherman’s safety, but from a solicitous regard for the fishes’ sex life.  Hand-fishing, according to fish and game officials, depletes the number of sexually mature fish.  Well, what do you want noodlers to do–knock before entering?

A curious twist on hand-fishing/sex connection was revealed to me one day at a summer job when a man–older than me by probably a decade–approached me during an idle moment.  “You go to college, right?” he asked discreetly.

“Sure do,” I said, sensing a rare opportunity to share my views on David Hume and William Faulkner.

“I’m havin’ problems . . . diddlin’ lately.”  I took him to mean that his performance in bed was falling below U.S. Department of Health and Human Services standards for his age cohort.

“So far that hasn’t been a problem for me,” I replied as modestly as I could, sensing his embarrassment.

“Do you think,” he began, then looked around to see if anyone was within earshot, “do you think it has anything to do with my noodlin’?”

At the time I wasn’t aware of the Missouri Department of Conservation’s Freud-like inquiry into the effect of hand-fishing on the sex lives of our gill-breathing brethren.  I offer up the foregoing anecdote as a possible subject for their further research; imagine the amount of money men could save if, instead of buying drugs for erectile dysfunction, their family doctor could simply write them a prescription that said “Stop hand-fishing.”

Since moving to the east coast nearly half a century ago, I’ve gone deep-sea fishing a number of times and had naively formed the opinion that it was more challenging than fresh-water fishing.  Having conducted further research into hand-fishing, I now believe that the only way ocean fishing could measure up to the challenge of noodling is for the beer-sodden men who pay hundreds of dollars to fish off Florida or Cape Cod to crawl overboard, find a bluefish or a marlin and subdue their prey using nothing but wrestling holds learned on WWE Royal Rumble.

So here’s to America’s hand-fishers, true sportsmen who eschew fish-finders and other high tech doo-dads that unfairly tilt the pond in favor of humans.  I salute you, but I have one request.

If you don’t mind, I’d rather not shake your hand.