What it takes
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As I had hoped for in the humid waning hour of summer sun, the schools of bluegills -- quality fish in that eight- to nine-inch range -- began swarming all sides of the pontoon, akin to the mosquitoes emerging in the twilight foliage surrounding the lake. Safe from the winged hordes on shore, with a family friend and his two daughters in tow, my attention shifted to the kids' every need: splitting nightcrawlers into sections sized perfectly for the 1/16-ounce jigs below their slip floats, unhooking the spiny finned, hand-sized panfish from their rigs, and helping them sort out the various members of the family of fish we were catching in the fading evening light -- grandpas, uncles, aunts and grandbabies, all according to size.
By the end of the evening, the size of the family tree for the bluegills we had caught rivaled the towering, ancient oaks all along the shore.
As we wrapped, comments like "fishing is the best," and "I love fishing" and "good bye bluegills," were shouted as we motored away from the weed line break just down the shore from the cabin. My hands were a filthy black with a combination of dirt, worm mucus, and fish slime, but my vision for the future of the two girls was clear. They'd be anglers if they wanted to be, and they already had a good base with a few outings at their grandparents' lake place just down the road, and plenty of opportunities surrounding them whenever they would have the urge to explore the waters of the upper Midwest, and hopefully, moments like the sunset cruise to a panfish-laded spot would set that stage. And that's what it takes. That's what it took for me, and I'm sure thousands of other anglers out there. At that same age, I had a family friend who invested in me, performing the same duties: baiting hooks, untangling line, unhooking fish, helping me master the push-button cast of a Zebco 202 adorned with a red and white bobber on the waters of the same lake. Later in life it was my dad on the shores of the Sheyenne River, and his suggestion of sticktoitiveness in one long outing that ended in a similar school of non-stop catching; an event pushed me over the edge and made me into a life-long angler, luckily equipped a knack for writing about his experiences.
Whether armed with all the latest side-scanning, front-facing, GPS-track tracing technology a boat can handle, or simply a set of rods rigged with neon-orange and chartreuse slip floats, every experienced angler has the opportunity at one time or another, or perhaps multiple times each summer, to provide a new angler those chances that were given to us. All it takes is a school of readily-biting fish -- white bass, crappies, perch, bluegills -- and an hour or so to hook not only a teeming quarry, but a soul or two on the experience of being in the outdoors and the joy that comes with a bobber going down and a fish coming up.
Don't squander it.
Other distractions abound. Kids are only kids for so long. Summer is getting shorter.
Distractions of all sorts, screens or sports or something else, will always be vying for their attention. What it takes is the same devotion, the same action, the same dopamine hit, and the same excitement that something living, moving, and pulling back provides. Odds are, they won't remember their best day on the iPad, but they'll be able to recall for a lifetime the results of someone providing them with what it took to catch a pile of fish, snap a few photos, and celebrate the start of their amazing journey ... in our outdoors.