I don’t like worms, never did. My father neither.
We Mulcahys never used bait as far back as I can trace. Guess someone, my great-grandfather maybe, discovered you could blow up a whole mess of fish without even using a pole.
Times have certainly changed–what with the airplanes and all–but one thing’s stayed the same.
I still fish with John Brown dynamite, and so do my children…and my children’s children.
When they were old enough to light a fuse, I took my grandkids, Louisa and Paul Thomas, to the spot on Wabasha Lake where my grandfather first took me.
They each tossed a stick in the water, one right after the other, and damned if we didn’t have forty fish to scoop up and haul back.
Is it dangerous? Course it is. It’s dynamite after all.
Folks mess with the fuse or light it too low to the stick or send their kids out fishing without proper instruction. That’s just bad parenting.
But it’s no more dangerous than getting a haircut from the wrong barber.
You’ve got to respect the gun powder.
Now I’m not sure where it comes from–China, I suppose–but I trust that it gets me my fish with every explosion.
Most important, of course, is using water-proof fuses. Without those, the whole thing is an exercise in stupidity.
