CARLTON FLETCHER: When it comes to memorable gatherings, ‘pond drainings’ can’t be beat

“You get a line, I’ll get a pole, we’ll go fishing in the crawfish hole.”

— Little Big Town

I saw a couple fishing in a little beside-the-road water hole the other day, and it transported me back to growing up in Irwin County on land that included a 100-acre-plus cypress pond.

As anyone might imagine, there were any number of adventures an inquisitive boy could get into with daily access to such a body of water. And my brother, some of our friends and I certainly had our share of fun times there.

The memory that came to me when I saw those side-of-the-road fishermen recently was a time when dozens — perhaps hundreds — of eager … I don’t know if “fishermen” or “-women” is accurate … came to our property located a mile off the main highway equidistant between Ocilla and Tifton.

My father’s dad — Grandaddy Eddie — used to, before we moved onto the family home property, sit under a large, ancient oak tree that sat pretty much in the middle of the property that became my family’s home when I was 6. Granddaddy would collect a dollar from people who came to the property to fish in the cypress pond. He also rented boats to interested anglers who wanted to explore the huge waterway. (After we moved onto the property, it became my brother’s and my responsibility to keep the boats clean of debris and water.)

Every few years after we moved onto the family land — into an old homeplace that had no indoor plumbing: an outhouse and a pump for water on the back porch — my dad would hold a “pond draining.”

What that meant was my dad and some of the people who worked with him would remove rows of blocks from an overflow well that forced the water out of the cypress pond, across a spillway through a pipe that ran under an adjacent dam. As the flow of water out of the pond increased, it would eventually flow into the nearby Alapaha River.

After the water had sufficiently drained for about a week, the pond was shallow enough to wade in and just scoop up fish, some of them huge beyond expectation.

The day of the pond draining always became quite an event. Hundreds of people — and, to this day, I wonder how they heard about it; there was no social media and very little mass communicating — came to our land, vehicles parked in every available spot in our yard and in adjacent fields. They paid, if I remember correctly, a couple of dollars to wade into the water that, before being drained, was up to 15-20 feet at its deepest points but after being drained was knee- to waste-deep. They came in search of a mess of fish, including some really monster bass.

At the announced time on the day of the pond draining, people who’d paid their $2 would line up along the banks of the pond, anxiously awaiting a signal. It came in the form of a gunshot, and people with dip nets and croaker sacks went “hunting” for fish.

The pond draining was a family event. My dad would sell tickets, answer questions and trouble-shoot, while my mom would cook burgers and hot dogs on a large outdoor grill, where we’d also boil peanuts freshly dug and pulled off the vines by the three Fletcher children.

The memories of those pond drainings come flooding in … most in the form of visions: People yelling excitedly and holding up nets with an especially large catch … wading in the water with Wayne, Eddie and Dennis Whitley; Jack Peavy, and Tony and David Sumner, all of us trying to catch fish with our hands … fish so large that they partly extended out of the water and me being too chicken to take on one of these behemoths bare-handed … cousins, aunts and friends hustling to help mom keep up with the food orders.

I’ve been to all kinds of festivals and gatherings in the decades since those pond drainings — from the massive (300,000-plus) Woodstock ‘99 (yes, the one where the vendors’ booths got torched and pretty much put an end to all that peace and love nostalgia) — to birthday and political gatherings with only a handful of participants.

None — well, maybe Woodstock and the Music Midtown that featured Eminem — has left me with as vivid memories as those pond drainings in rural Irwin County. I doubt any ever will.