Catching Up on 6th Grade Homework
Posted by Pete Robbins on Sep 22nd 2019
I am finally getting around to completing my 6th grade homework, nearly 40 years later.
My teacher for that 1981-82 school year was Mrs. Dater, a 4’11”, 80-year-old spitfire who inspired only modest fear in a classroom of rowdy pre-teens. Her late husband Henry was a celebrated naval historian with a particular expertise in US Antarctic operations, and even after his death Mrs. Dater remained an active member of the Antarctican Society. Perhaps that was what inspired our fall assignment, a scrapbook filled with essays and artwork about South America.
Mrs. Dater was smart enough to know that if she forced us to write dry reports about Simon Bolivar and the gauchos and the wildlife of the Galapagos Islands we’d likely rebel. Instead, she tricked us into learning by allowing us to pick a particular interest and then write a series of letters about how that topic manifested itself in South America. If you were a nascent foodie, you could write back to a chef about the local cuisines. If you loved sculpting, it could be a series of letters to a museum curator about exhibits you’d like to create.
I set myself up as a location scout for the Bill Dance’s TV show.
I’m not sure how I picked that angle, because at 11 I knew that I loved to fish, but had relatively little experience with the sport. I’d started reading Field & Stream a few years earlier, so I suppose I fancied myself an expert, but I had little time on the water, and none outside of the east coast of the United States. My family also didn’t have cable television, so I’d likely never seen Dance’s show. I hadn’t even been to Tennessee, so for all I knew the “T” on his hat could have stood for “Tierra Del Fuego” or “Titicaca.”
I defined the assignment a little bit too narrowly, writing extensively about the look of the Maracaibo-strain tarpon in Venezuela and the flies best suited for sea-run brown trout in Patagonia, largely to the exclusion of the history, culture and scenery of the continent.
I hadn’t really thought about that long-ago scrapbook or that awkward 6th grade year until I realized how much I’ve been writing about South American fishing in recent times. The scrapbook is long gone, thrown out by my parents with my baseball cards and “the magazines under the bed.” Yet travel remains a passion for all of our close family members. Indeed, my 14 year old niece Madeline has been to more countries than I have. She spent her early years in Tokyo and recently returned from a summer in London, after which she somehow convinced my parents to pick her up and take her to Geneva for a few days. Still, I’ve been to quite a few places, not just for fishing, although in recent years that has been my focus. I’ve wet a line in Brazil three separate times, Alaska twice, Canada, Costa Rica, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and most of the lower 48, as well as Mexico more times than I can count (Sorry Mrs. Dater. I was distracted during math class, too). The next trip on my calendar to a new foreign location is Guatemala in early 2020.
Brazil in particular has increased my appetite to explore the world with a rod and reel and perhaps a camera. While I’ve seen only a small slice of the country, I am awed each time by the people, the wildlife and the incredible angling. Norman MacLean might’ve been haunted by waters, but I am haunted by peacock bass. There’s already a trip back to the Amazon scheduled for next December. Eventually, though, I’ll need to pull away from peacocks (or find a way to supplement them), because I want to go to Guyana for arapaima, and to Argentina, Uruguay or Bolivia for golden dorado. It wouldn’t hurt my feeling to chase big trout in Patagonia, either.
I may have been a slow academic starter, but I finally seem to be getting into the groove of becoming a lifelong learner.
As long as I’m discussing my early education and its effect on later life, I need to apologize Señora Marra-Lopez, Señor Whitehead and Señor Hurtado. They told me that paying attention in Spanish class would one day benefit me and I did not believe it. They did a good enough job that I left high school with enough Advanced Placement credits to fulfill my college’s language requirement. I never studied it again and I’ve paid for it on my subsequent trips to Latin America – although they did not tell me that Portuguese, which looks similar to Spanish on the page, doesn’t sound like it one bit.
Boa noite, Alice Dater, wherever you are.
