You get a line, I'll get a pole

 A footnote on river cane: Specimens of Arundinaria gigantea were fishing poles when I was a boy.

My grandfather was a walker of the land. He’d scout good weed fields where quail and dove would gather long before hunting season. And on his walks he’d occasionally cut long, straight canes. The poles would dry for months, hanging from a set of nails in posts high above the barn floor.

When the canes were cured, he’d rig them with lines, hooks and sinkers. We’d dig worms and put them in old Prince Albert tobacco tins.

We’d catch catfish and all kinds of perch: red-ears, bluegills, goggle-eyes and sunfish, all members of genus Lepomis. Pomoxis annularis — what we then called white perch but later came to know as crappie — still strike me as the best a fish eater can do.