My Sunday morning e-mail jolted me into reality. A short note from my best friend John Beall’s e-mail account hit me like a brick. It was actually written by John’s roommate, and it simply said that John had died on Saturday. There were no details. I think the lack of details made this even harder to accept.
All of you who follow my articles know John. I’ve written about our fishing escapades through the years. We fished together more times than I can remember over the past thirty-seven years, even though our individual lives took different paths. Our common bond was a love for fishing, the outdoors and each other.
John was probably the best technical fisherman I ever met. He knew ever nuance of lure movement and bait presentation. He could manage to catch fish when no one else could. And it did not matter where or on what body of water he was fishing; he always had a handle on the fish.
We trapped muskrats together while we were stationed in North Carolina in the Marines to earn some spending money. John knew all there was to know about the outdoors in my eyes.
We fished the rivers, creeks and coastal waters of North Carolina together. Even though he was from Iowa, he knew how to catch saltwater fish. I have pictures of him and his son, Nick, then a toddler, with stringers of bluefish and seatrout.
We fished the lakes and rivers of the Midwest, from Des Moines and Red Rock to Table Rock. I remember one trip where we caught no fewer than thirty bass on spinnerbaits, all from one single point below the Red Rock dam in Iowa.
We chased up pheasants from his Aunts corn field in Iowa one summer. The corn was so high I only heard them; I never saw one fly. Then we snuck over a small rise in the cow pasture as I listened to him tell me stories about how many ducks he had taken over the years from the farm pond just over the hill.
We deer hunted, squirrel hunted, and dove hunted. The first dove hunt I was ever on was with John. I went through two boxes of shells without hitting the first bird. The first deer I ever killed was with John. I shot at it sixteen times with a .22 automatic before it fell. I actually hit the deer with eight of those shots. At that time rim fire cartridges were legal where we hunted.
We mounted a couple of squirrels together one year. We mailed off to Herter’s and got the glass eyes and spent one entire Saturday practicing our taxidermy skills. I still have that squirrel thirty-seven years later.
The stories of our times together could go on for a long time, with lots of laughs and more than a share of disbelief from most people.
I fished with John this past March at Toledo Bend in Texas. John was living in San Diego and I in Florida. He drove from there and I brought my boat from here. We stayed together in a cabin at Lowe’s Creek, fishing for almost a week. We talked about old times, about all the things we had done together and then about the things we had done away from each other. John had overcome a number of issues in his life, and it appeared he was finally going to do well. It was good to be together again.
There are reasons for everything, I suppose. And there are some things that happen that we may never understand. John’s death is one of those I think will never understand.
We had planned to fish on Lake Okeechobee for a week this spring. It’s a trip we made several times in the past with several other people, and he so looked forward to it. This time it would be just he and I, fishing together again. The shellcrackers would be bedding and as John put it when I last talked to him, we needed to do a little “perch jerking”.
I will make that trip this spring. And, I’ll jerk a few perch while I’m there. But it won’t be the same. One seat in my boat will be empty, although it won’t be as empty as that place in my heart. Suzanne, this is for you. John was a good man and a good friend. He is gone and that hurts me. I shall miss him.
