BOB KORNEGAY: There was something special about the ‘Riverman’

I met him on a sandbar on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee River, somewhere between the Andrews Dam at Columbia and the big rocky bend near Gordon. It was spring, 1969. I was almost 17.

I’d awakened just after daybreak, having spent the previous night camping on the riverbank and catching a few catfish with my high school running buddies Eddie and Virgil. I’d left my friends still snoring in their bedrolls to stroll down the bank in response to a beckoning call of nature. Owing to an innate bashfulness where biological necessity is concerned, I was a full hundred yards from camp, where the woods were thickest and concealing foliage more dense.

Mission accomplished, I emerged from the trees and made my way back down to the river’s edge. As I turned to head downstream toward camp, I saw him, a grizzled old man in a battered wooden skiff powered by an ancient, equally battered outboard motor. Just before he reached me, he gave the tiller a hard yank and ran the boat onto a big shallow sandbar extending outward from the bank into the brown water. I made a rather cautious approach.

The old timer, whom I have since come to know in my reveries as “Riverman,” barely glanced up as I came even with him and brought forth a tentative, “Good morning, Sir.”

He was busy, scarred hands with swollen knuckles untangling a length of snarled trotline with surprising dexterity. I sizable channel catfish I estimated at 10 or 12 pounds writhed and grunted on the boats floor near the bow.

“Nice one,” I offered.

“Tangled my damn line,” he growled, prior to ejecting a dark stream of tobacco juice into the muddy current. “Had the drop-lines tied too loose. Knot slipped. Orta knowed better.”

“Been out all night?” I asked.

“Yep,” came the reply. “Cain’t make no money otherwise.”

A pro, I thought. Commercial fisherman. There were still a few left in those days before the mammoth catfish-farming concerns forced them all out of business. Judging by the condition of both boat and motor, this one’s business wasn’t exactly booming.

“How old are you?” I asked. I was old enough to understand impoliteness, but still child enough not to fully comprehend tact.

“Eighty-one,” he answered, looking up. The old eyes, set deeply in his wrinkled, weathered, sun-parched face flashed for an instant, as if to say, “You wanna make somethin’ of it?”

Oblivious, I continued making unsolicited conversation. Riverman offered nothing, but gave perfunctory answers to my queries, as if obliged to do so.

“Where do you live?’

“Up a creek, just off the river.”

“How many lines you got?”

“Many’s the law’ll let me fish.”

“What’s the biggest cat you ever caught?”

“Don’t know. Never weigh ‘em one at a time.”

I’m certain the old man was mightily relieved when that last trotline knot came free. At any rate, he wasted little time starting up that old rattling, smoke-belching outboard. He didn’t protest, however, as I waded out, up to my knees, to shove the boat off the sandbar and back into the main run of the river.

“Good luck!” I yelled over the noise of inefficient internal combustion.

Away he puttered, without so much as a wave of gratitude.

That lack of acknowledgement hurt then. It doesn’t now. Today I simply wax nostalgic and smile wistfully at my memories of Riverman.

After all, how many endangered species is one actually privileged to meet in his lifetime?