Bass Fishing in America

By Peter White

We fish down in the creek about half mile from my tiny hovel in Cheatham County, Tennessee. I actually like my little house. There’s less to keep clean.

The bass hang out under the rocks in a hole just downstream from a concrete bridge a farmer built over Turnbull Creek years ago. It’s posted but he lets locals pass through his gate and fish off the bridge and in this he is very neighborly.

He knows I’m a Yankee but since I live just down the road, he lets me pass. He always wants to know if we’re fishing or hunting snakes. We do both. The creek has a snaky reputation and so locals don’t fish it much. Osprey and bald eagles sometimes fly down the winding creek to the Harpeth River about a mile away.

But here’s the bad news: used to be you could pull over just about anywhere and get down to any one of Tennessee’s many streams and rivers. Most folks hereabouts made their money, bought land alongside waterways, and fenced them off. No public access anymore. It’s getting to be just like Malibu or Palos Verdes and there isn’t even any surf.

Nowadays you can only put in kayaks at designated spots. And the fishing has gone to hell because the places you can get to legally are all fished out or so crowded up with anglers it just puts you off.

Same thing with hunting. Tennessee used to be Davy Crockett country. Not anymore. Like spawning gar roiling the water below the bridge, builders thrash about with bulldozers tearing up old farms like nobody’s business but unlike the gar they don’t disappear after a couple days. Where bear and elk once roamed they build subdivisions that go on and on and on.

There is one big wildlife management area in Cheatham County but except for deer there is no more big game. No more doves either, or ducks, or bobcats. Turkey, coyotes, and armadillos are all that remain in those desiccated areas that were once part of a vast wilderness that stretched northward to the Ohio and westward to the Mississippi.

Forest bison and black bears once inhabited this country and quail once lived in the grasslands that have been turned into commercial timber operations growing two by fours for the housing industry. Ground-nesting birds, quail have all but disappeared here, and nobody hunts them anymore because there aren’t any to hunt. Like global warming we humans are to blame.

Related posts:

We should know by now the importance of organisational culture in supporting digital transformation and change (it’s the people, stupid!) but what exactly do we mean by digital culture? This new…

At the end of last year, we decided with my wife to get back to Toulouse (France) after 5 years in London. As an Android developer at Deliveroo, I had a very exciting job that I didn’t really want to…

Did you know that the month of January was named after a Roman God, Janus? Janus is the Roman god of doors, doorways, arches, openings, closings, and the like. He is known for having two faces: one…