When I was about 10 years old, my Uncle Al took me and my cousin fishing for our first time.

I watched him stab a squiggly worm onto a hook that was tied below a red and white plastic bobber. He tossed the line about 6 feet out and into the river. The water was still. The summer sun was just setting below the trees.

“Now, watch that bobber,” he said. “If it goes underwater, you got a fish — so reel him in.”

About 10 minutes passed, and while Uncle Al was helping his son fish downriver a bit, I saw the bobber twitch once, then twice, then underwater it went. I got so excited, I didn’t crank the reel, I yanked the rod as hard as I could, catapulting the line over my head.

When I turned around, there was a fish hanging from a tree limb.

“Got one!” I shouted to Uncle Al. He hurried to me.

“Where?” he asked.

“There,” I said, pointing to the wriggling fish in the tree.

He laughed and tried to reach it with a long stick without success. Up the tree he climbed, high enough to use the stick to untangle the mess. A minute later, he placed what he told me was a catfish back in the water and it swam away.

From that one experience, I was hooked into fishing, excuse the expression. It’s a love that begins with a child and grows into a man. In my early years, I rode my bike to a pond and caught carp, shiners and catfish on dough balls I made from stale Wonder bread my mother had given to me.

Of course there were plenty of times, I fished for hours with my buddy and caught nothing, but that was OK. I was still excited to go the next time with the hope of reeling in a big ol’ lunker.

As a kid, for bait I would take a flashlight onto our backyard lawn after a summer rain when it was late at night to pull up night crawlers that stuck their heads aboveground. I bought fishing lures with money I made from my paper route, and I soon learned what most anglers know about lures. They catch more fishermen than fish. A tackle box full of lures is impressive, even if none ever hooks a thing.

Breaking the line with a $5 Rapala minnow lure snagged underwater after a first cast is painful enough, but getting a hook jammed into my thumb when I was young man fishing with my friend Dominic was much worse. That happened while I was releasing a squirming trout. Dominic took a pair of pliers out of his tackle box.

“You don’t want to see this,” he said. “Look the other way and hold onto my arm as tight as you can.”

He couldn’t pull the hook backward because the barb wouldn’t give way and it would cause further damage, so he pulled the hook, barb and shank forward until it exited my thumb. A little blood wiped with a fish rag, and with Band Aid in place, I forced a smile at Dominic.

“That didn’t hurt much at all,” I lied, as I threw another cast into the water.

It’s ironic what a struggle it is to rise out of bed to go to work, but how easy it is to bounce off a pillow at the 6 a.m. hour to grab a rod and head for the lake. At my age now, standing on a shoreline at dawn casting my line into the misty water means so much more to me than it did when I was a kid.

Being one with nature is a spiritual awakening. The woods and the water are God’s true church.

A beautiful silence with only the croak of a distant bullfrog and the splash of a wood duck taking flight off the lake is sacred music to my ears. The air to breathe is fresher in the early morning, untainted by the incessant fumes that emit from the tailpipes of vehicles when people start their day.

Fishing requires a special kind of patience that does not exist in the bustle of a busy day. No hurry. Just absorb the wonder of the natural surroundings and watch for a bite. The hour is irrelevant. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Time is but the stream I go a fishing in.”

Thoreau was talking about life. We throw a line out in hopes of catching something we really want, but many times when we reel the line back in, our dreams fall off the hook and they get away.

Canadien novelist John Buchan wrote. “The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.”

That to me is life’s marvel of determination — we cast our lines out for love, joy and peace of mind in hopes of capturing these attainable pursuits.

And yet, there comes that one moment upon the tug of the line, the trophy sized fish, the biggest dream is captured, but we find that it’s not only the catch that rewards us, it’s the repetition of casting our lines out into the world, our journeys and experiences that define us much more than the whatever outcomes our pursuits bring to us.

English poet Ted Hughes wrote, “Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.”

I stand on a shoreline wrapped inside a blanket of Mother Nature’s serenity. I think back to that summer evening and give thanks to the catfish in the tree.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com