We reeled in the line like we were fighting for our lives

Trigger: Catfish

Location: The lake at Zucker’s Glen Wild Country Club, New York

For most people, looking into someone’s fish tank is an easy way to make small talk.

The same goes for me, in most homes. But every so often, I’ll peer through the glass and admire the fish — until I see that evil smirk, those long whiskers, that drab, flabby body — and then I’m triggered. Yes, I’m a soon-to-be 42-year-old, yes, I’m a school principal and a camp director, so yes, perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but it’s true: the mere sight of a catfish, no matter the size, makes my palms go clammy and my heart pound and my stomach sink — until my angst is washed away as I’m overtaken by the memories of my childhood summers.

We spent our summers in Sheldrake Dorms, an average early ’90s Catskills bungalow colony. Hallways weren’t in style, I guess, because our bungalow consisted of two bedrooms and a small kitchen. My five sisters and one of my brothers shared the second bedroom, while my older brother Simcha and I slept on a pullout couch in the kitchen. The shower sounded like a dying cat when the “hot” water was turned on, and the screen door didn’t screen out much, so there were mosquitoes everywhere.

For a ten-year old, it was nothing short of Gan Eden.

Sundays were special. We started with the 8:30 Shacharis across the street at Vacation Village (I still hadn’t discovered the inyan of davening at the 9 a.m. minyan). There was no day camp on Sunday, so after davening, my father would drive me to Yeshiva of South Fallsburg 15 minutes away, where we usually learned Minchas Chinuch or Maseches Succah.

As we entered the beis medrash, we were assailed by that musty old-book smell, which I can vividly recall, solemnly proclaiming, “This is a makom kadosh.” It was still the middle of the yeshivah’s zeman, and the booming kol Torah could almost knock you off your feet. It seemed crazy to me that they still had yeshivah in July — in the Catskills no less. (The last laugh was on me, when I had the privilege of learning for a year in South Fallsburg for beis medrash.)

The excitement happened after lunch. Almost religiously, we three boys and my sister Sori (there’s one like that in every family) climbed into the back and the “backety-back” of our blue station wagon for an adventure that defined our childhood: a fishing trip to Zucker’s Lake.

We stopped off first at Menorah Lake to catch little fish that we’d use as bait for the big ones. The thrill of filling up our bucket with small minnows was always mixed with the utter derision for the catfish that inevitably latched onto our hooks. Getting one off the hook was no easy task, because they had sharp fins on their backs; we were convinced that just touching it could finish you forever, and we always turned to Daddy to unhook the catfish and cast them away. Sometimes, he showed us, they’d swallowed the hook so deeply that he had no choice but to sacrifice one of our rods to rid ourselves of our number-one adversary. To this day, the sight of even the smallest-sized catfish has me going numb.