Crossing over on the ferry, Jim opened the car door, walked over to the edge of the boat and scanned the river, “Water’s clear, current’s slow, light wind from the North, no chance of rain.” Sam’s response to Jim’s typically thorough-going analyses was a laconic, “OK.” He never doubted Jim’s knowledge of weather, tides, and air currents, but he just wasn’t that interested.
As the ferry crunched the cement landing on the Maryland side, thirty or so cars vibrated to life, each moving forward an inch or two, eager for dry land. Sam drove up the steep incline, took a wide turn, boat trailer directly behind and slowly backed towards the water. Stopping just at the water’s edge, the men readied the boat for the day; gas line attached, anchor tied, lunches, fishing rods, bait boxes; all the accoutrements of a fishing day in their right place, ship-shape. As the boat slid into the shallow water, Jim stood holding the rope. His thin body covered, floppy white hat, long sleeves and pants, not shorts, even though the day was heating up. Sam drove the car and trailer back up the ramp to park. When he returned Jim was still standing by the water, rope in hand, watching the ferry return to Virginia. Sam climbed in the boat and Jim, quite spry for seventy-nine years, put one knee on the bow and pushed off with his other foot.
It was a quick trip up to Sauna Straits their destination even though the six horsepower outboard struggled to push the fifteen-foot fiber glass boat upriver against the current. The Potomac is a shallow river with rocks and trees presenting a constant danger to the uninitiated. After five years of fishing these waters, Sam considered himself competent even though he saw the irony in a sixty-year-old former New Yorker calling himself a “Potomac River Man.”
“Do me a favor, put this darn lure on the line, I can’t see.” Jim’s macular degeneration had accelerated in recent months. Holding the fishing rod in his right hand he began, “I heard from Wilson Backstrom the other day. He’s an old Swede like me and we were friends back in Duluth. He and I used to play on the railroad tracks outside of town when we were four or five. We stayed friends until I left for the Annapolis in my Sophomore year of college. No Air Force Academy then and I wanted to fly so it was the Naval Academy for me”.
The Potomac water that day was clear. A school of carp, some three feet long swam under the boat. “Look at that, Jim, it’s almost prehistoric.” “Can’t see’em”, Jim replied, “Macular degeneration. I take those shots at the VA every two weeks but the doctor, an Indian women, really good-looking, says that the best we can hope for is to slow it down.”
The men cast towards shore using chartreuse rooster tails. When that wasn’t successful, they switched to black ones, then plugs and then plastic worms.
“Coming out of the Academy I trained as a fighter pilot on F100s. Flew all over the world with them. Flying….Then McNamara came in and everything changed. First, he told us fighter pilots that we would be trained to carry H-bombs. You see those babies were SAC’s responsibility not ours. So, there I was, flying around with an H-Bomb in the back of my fighter. I even had my own target, a wheat field in Romania.” “Jim, I don’t get it. Why would you target a wheat field?” Sam asked. “Well, I was told it was a potential landing field for the Russians. See, we had so many bombs that we could target potential dangers not just actual ones. The problem was dropping it and then getting away safely”. Jim reeled in his lure. It was coated with weeds. Obviously, he had pulled the lure in too slowly and it had dragged on the bottom. Sam didn’t even wait to be asked. He grabbed it and removed the grass from the sharp hooks.
“Well, here’s how it worked.” Holding the rod in his left hand and using his right hand to describe an arc, “I would dive in vertically towards the target and at almost ground level I would swoop up like a rocket almost over on my back. At the moment my belly began to arc up I would release the bomb which was thrown towards the target and away from me. Then I would get the hell out of there. We practiced a lot with fake bombs in California and Nevada. Of course, no one really believed this would save our lives if we dropped an h-bomb but we got really good at it.”
“Jim, drink something. You don’t want to get dehydrated.” Jim reached for his Coca Cola bottle. “McNamara”, he said softly and shook his head. “Drink it Jim, drink, stop talking for a minute!”
“It was uncoordinated, they didn’t know what they were doing.” “Who?” Sam asked. “McNamara’s boys. SAC had over a thousand B-47 and B-52 bombers loaded with nukes ready to fly. They would drop’em safely from thirty thousand feet. We had our targets and they had theirs. So, guys got pretty antsy about that. What if they dropped one near us as we were going in for our bombing run. Even if we survived our own bomb, we would be blinded by the flash from theirs, so MacNamara’s boys came up with solution. Eye patches. We were issued eye patches. We were told to put the eye patch on before the bombing run. That way if we caught a flash, we would still have one good eye.”
Both men were quiet for a few minutes as they watched a great blue heron land on the far shore. “Drink some of that Coke, Jim and let’s catch some fish,” was Sam’s only reply.
-end-
This true story was written in 2020 upon the death of my close friend and fishing buddy, Jim Olson. Jim was one of the most interesting men I have ever met. – Paul KReingold
Waters, Shallow and Deep, A Potomac River Tale – Copywrite 2020
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