My Southern Journey (33 page)

I learned to fish with a cane pole in baby-size hands, staring at the red-and-white plastic bobber. I graduated to a Zebco 202 closed-face reel by the time I was old enough to read. On any given Saturday, my people caught enough crappie from the Coosa backwater to fill a washtub, and I can still see my Aunt Edna mixing cornmeal with diced green onion and commodity cheese, then dropping them into iron skillets for the best hush puppies I have ever had.

Fishing was our birthright. My grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a folkloric figure, hunted for the giant catfish below the Guntersville dam with a massive snag hook screwed into the end of a pool cue. He simply stood on the rocks, waiting for the turbines to churn to life, bringing the big cats to the surface. And then he would swing the cue down, hard, and sink the barbs into the fish’s head. There wasn’t a whole lot of sport in it, maybe. But you could feed a lot of people with a fish as long as a love seat. His boat was made from two car hoods welded together, and he never wet a line sober. But when he came from the river and took a nap, his wife, Ava, would find fish in his coat pockets. My own gentle Mama, with a cane pole and a snuff can full of cow manure and red wigglers, is a bream-catching machine.

There was not a bad fisherman in the whole damn bloodline, male or female, until me. I could cast beautifully into open water, but if there was a tree to snap up in, I would find it. And once I cast, I cranked too fast and jerked the rod tip too high, and made the fish work to catch the lure.

A patient man named Joe Romeo took me fishing for trout on the flats of Tampa Bay, and I caught a cormorant. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to remove a hook from a live bird. I don’t drink much, hardly at all, but on a trip to Destin, Florida, as a young
man, I got knee-walking drunk and waded out into the bay with a saltwater rig and a bowl of boiled shrimp. The Coast Guard was not amused.

Once, fishing a small lake with my brother, I hung my crankbait up on power lines that crossed the water.

“Just reel it up to about a foot shy of the line,” Sam told me, “and flip it over.”

I did as I was told and flipped it too hard—and into the high branches of a live oak tree.

Sam just stared.

“I do believe,” he said, “that’s the first time I ever seen that happen.”

It is still up there, shining in the sun.

The path to my redemption—or what I hope will be so—can be traced back to the fall of 2002, when I used the money from a book contract to buy my mother 40 acres of pasture and mountain land on the ridge where my grandfather, the expert fisherman Charlie Bundrum, had made whiskey 75 years before. Near the blacktop, just inside the cow pasture, is the pond, and the one fish.

It is a beautiful place, sandwiched between two ridges of hardwoods, alive with deer and wild turkey and rumors of bears. The pond is shallow and clear on one end, where the bream form a moonscape of round beds in the spring of the year, and deep and green on the other, where the big bass hang suspended in the murk. A snapping turtle the size of a 14-inch tire lurks here, and I have my orders from my Mama to shoot it if I can, because she is afraid it will eat her ducklings. There ain’t much glory in shooting a turtle, so I hope it stays hid until one of us dies of natural causes. Her mature ducks dodge my casts, and her two miniature donkeys, just pets, come down to drink and snort. They have never seen a real donkey, and believe they are normal size.

The place is so green it looks painted on. The live oaks dip their limbs into the water, and the grass is waist high except where Sam has used the tractor to cut a trail for my mother to walk. The path blossomed with tiny yellow flowers. “Ever’where Mama walks is flowers,” he said, and it struck me, for the thousandth time, how beautiful the language of my people can be.

It is paradise, this country, give or take a few billion ticks and red wasps and fire ants, but the pond is all I really see anymore.

I have fished it since the day we bought it, and, almost from that day, I have known she was here. It happened when my mother and I walked the rim of the pond, checking to see if her duck was on its nest. In the deep end, the fish hovered.

“What is that?” Mama said.

“Bass,” I said.

“It ain’t,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “what is it?”

“Sea monster,” she said, and walked to the house.

We got our first good look at her when she was on the bed. She had laid her eggs on the gravel bottom, then floated above, watching. I teased topwater baits across the very end of her nose and trickled worms past her lower lip—being careful not to drag the bait through the bed itself—and she either ignored them or followed them for a few feet before circling back to the bed.

I hooked her, I am sure, in the late spring.

I never really believed in the science of fishing—I always thought there was more luck in it than most people allowed—but I always paid attention when Sam lectured me on the mechanics. When a fish hits, he said, don’t worry about popping the line in two or snatching the bait out of the fish’s mouth.

“Break ’er jaw,” he said. Set the hook hard and quick. Not only will it hold, but it will also keep the fish from taking that second gulp that will often pull the hook deeper into her guts.

When I felt the tug on the tip of the rod, I broke ’er jaw.

The fish—it had to be her—broke water, well and truly caught, but as I began to reel, I felt the line go slack and my stomach go sick.

It was her.

It had to be her.

I am 45 years old. I guess I must face the fact that catching one fish would not truly cure me, would not alter my legacy as the worst fisherman in my bloodline. It is too late, I suppose. I would just be the bad fisherman who got lucky, once.

Still, as the dusk creeps over the ridgeline, I carry my rods and tackle to the edge of the pond. The day, another day, will end in disappointment.

But sometimes it also ends in fireflies.

NICK OF TIME

Sports Illustrated
, August 2007

T
hey say college football is religion in the Deep South, but it’s not. Only religion is religion. Anyone who has seen an old man rise from his baptism, his soul all on fire, knows as much, though it is easy to see how people might get confused. But if football were a faith anywhere, it would be here on the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And now has come a great revival.

The stadium strained with expectation. The people who could not find a seat stood on the ramps or squatted in the aisles, as if it were Auburn down there, or Tennessee, and when the crowd roared, the sound really did roll like thunder across the sky. A few blocks away 73-year-old Ken Fowler climbed to his second-story terrace so he could hear it better and stood in the sunlight as that lovely roar fell all around him. He believes in the goodness and rightness of the Crimson Tide the way people who handle snakes believe in the power of God, but in his long lifetime of unconditional love, of Rose Bowl trains, Bobby Marlow up the middle and the Goal Line Stand, he never heard anything like this. His Alabama was playing before the largest football crowd in state history, and playing only itself. “We had 92,000,” he said, “for a scrimmage.” It felt good. It felt like it used to feel.

They came from Sand Mountain, the Wiregrass, the Black Belt, the Gulf Coast, and just wide places in the road. They came in motor homes, private jets, $30,000 pickup trucks, $400 cars, and dime-store flip-flops to see Nick Saban walk the sideline of Bryant-Denny Stadium in April.

They have welcomed him as Caesar, as pharaoh, and paid him enough money to burn a wet dog. Now he will take them forward by taking them back to the glory of their past—the 21 Southeastern Conference championships, the 12 national championships, the Team of the 20th Century (as
The Wall Street Journa
l called the Crimson Tide in 2000).

Saban has not promised them so much—“I don’t believe in predictions,” he says—but they believe. It may take two years, three, more, to be in the discussion again when people talk about the best teams in college football. But they know he will take them home.

“I’ve been on this roller coaster for a long time,” says Fowler, a self-made businessman who could live a lot of places but settled on a house so close to the campus that he can all but see his reflection in the go-go boots of the Crimsonettes as they strut down University Boulevard before the homecoming game. “In the ’50s, under coach J.B. (Ears) Whitworth, we went 14 games without a win, and I watched grown men cry. People said then there would never be another coach here as good as Wallace Wade [who won national championships in 1925, ’26 and ’30] or Frank Thomas [1934, ’41]. They said it was over.

“Then in ’58 we hired a coach who could do the things we needed to put us in a position to win SEC championships again and national championships again. People used to stare at him as he stood on the sideline, too, like he was about to turn a stick into a snake.”

His name was Paul Bryant, and he was popular here. They named an animal after him.

How people loved that man. But it is time, past time, to love again.

“There is never anything wrong with remembering the past, but you can’t live in it,” says Mal Moore, the Alabama athletic director who was all but dragged through saw briars when it appeared that Saban and other marquee names—most notably West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez—were passing Alabama by. Then on Jan. 3 he brought Saban home with him on the school jet from Miami, where Saban had been coaching the Dolphins. People
who had been calling for Moore’s resignation praised his leadership.

There is no nice way to say it: The Alabama faithful are done with waiting, with mediocrity, and with disappointment. They are sick of Auburn, which has beaten them five years in a row; bone weary of NCAA investigations and probations reaching back to 1993; and finished with coaches who cannot gut out the expectations here, or who might have done well, someday, with more time or a railroad car full of luck.

“We wanted a man who had won a championship, and Nick Saban is that and more,” says Moore. “Saban brings a sense of command, a sense of toughness and discipline.”

Saban is no rainmaker, no snake oil salesman. The way to his mountaintop is hard and paved with woe. “We can be part of something, build something all these people can be proud of and excited about again,” says the 55-year-old coach, who can look intense even when he is not mad and probably looks that way holding a kitten. “I got on our guys in a team meeting. I said, ‘I’m tired of hearing all this talk about a national championship when you guys don’t know how to get in out of the rain, don’t know what to do in the classroom.’ It’s like you’ve got little kids in the backseat, saying, ‘Are we there yet?’

“The journey itself is important, not just the destination. You have to follow direction. Discipline, off-season recruiting, conditioning, practice, more recruiting, player development, classroom development. I’m not interested in what should be, could be, was. I’m interested in what is, what we control. And when we lose—and we will, one game, two, or more—we have to have a trust that what we are doing will work, trust and belief in who we are. And you get where you’re going, one mile marker at a time.”