My grandfather, J. Berton Daigle, loved to fish. After he retired, he was on the water at least four or five days a week, and fishing was as much a part of his routine as anything else.
I remember we had several large freezers in an outside building. One was for frozen vegetables and meats, and the other was Berton's. It was always full of fish and bait.
He would take old half-gallon milk cartons, fill them with shrimp and water, and freeze them. Whenever he went fishing, he didn't measure the trip by time. He measured it by how much shrimp he had. If he ran out of shrimp in an hour, he was done. Sometimes it would take three or four hours, depending on whether the fish were biting
or the crabs and hardheads were simply stealing his bait.
One of his favorite places to fish was an area called North Prong. To get there, he would launch his boat from a tiny ditch on Aunt Ozite's property. Aunt Ozite was Grandpa Pierre's oldest sister.
In some places the little ditch was barely wide enough for his 15-foot aluminum boat to pass through. As we made our way through it, I had to sit in the middle of the boat and duck and dodge the trees and bushes hanging over the water. Every now and then, we would have to watch for a wasp nest hidden somewhere in the branches. Just getting to the fishing spot was always an adventure unto itself.
Another place he liked to fish was Lambert Bayou, a small bayou off of Grand Bayou. It was close to the weirs going into Big Lake, and the redfish were usually biting in that area because they loved feeding on the shrimp and shad running thru l through the weirs.
One of my best memories from fishing with him was finding Native American artifacts along the banks of Grand Bayou. We would pull up to an area he called Shell Hill, and I would walk along the shoreline looking for pieces and shards of pottery. Some were pieces of bowls, with small designs and imprints still visible in the clay. I even found a few arrowheads.
I kept a whole collection of them in a box. I always thought that one day I might donate them to an anthropology or archaeological department. Sadly, when Hurricane Rita struck in 2005, those pieces were lost along with so much of southern Cameron Parish.
Looking back now, all those times I spent fishing or running the crab traps with J. Berton are some of my best memories.
J. Berton was a man of few words. We might have been in the boat for two or three hours and barely said a word to each other. But there was never any need to fill the silence. Fishing with him gave me a chance to slow down and simply be there.
I would sit and watch the water, waiting for that little nibble that might turn into a strike. For those few hours, there was nothing else to think about. No worries. No cares. Just the water, the boat, the bait, and the possibility that the next tug on the line might be a fish.
As I have gotten older, I've come to understand something I didn't realize back then. J. Berton didn't always go fishing for the catching. Sometimes, I think he went simply to get away from everything and spend a few quiet hours with his thoughts.
And whether we caught anything or not, I was lucky enough to be there with him.
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