Hank Aaron (part nine)

The Threemile Creek in Alabama is five miles west of Mobile and it streams into the Mobile River which is a tributary for the ocean that makes up the Gulf of Mexico, and is where Aaron learned to fish and where he fished often as a child. In the off seasons since becoming a Major Leaguer, he’d return home as often as possible to be with family and close friends, and come back to the creek for solace, for silence and peace of mind, to enjoy days fishing.

Just before the 1974 season, about one week before breaking the record, he went on a fishing trip with his brother Herbert, Jr. at a marshy spot likely somewhere along the creek and river and gulf. The waters would have been the habitat for speckled trout and redfish and sheepshead fish too.

Aaron wore blue jeans and a tank top undershirt. His brother was shirtless. They faced opposite sides of the water and stood on the platformed bow at the front of the boat so their feet were level with the steering wheel. The gothic fingernails of the Southern sun clawed out sweat from beneath their flesh and it was as though they did not notice.

Aaron had been at bat against the nature of this world for his entire life. As seemed typical throughout his career, Aaron appeared as a modern day and American biblical prophet with a fishing rod in his hand.

Their white boat looked about seven-feet-long and was steered and then engine turned off about twelve feet from where the salt grass and cordgrass grew knee high and where black oak trees lined and layered the forest beyond.

Aaron threw a spincast rod with his left arm toward the shade of water where the fish would have been to keep from the heat of the boiling sun.

A trickling halo expanded from the waters, silent and shimmering and reflecting his image like a stained-glass window against the surface of the water.

Throughout the day they might have shared a few jokes and a few memories from their life, “Remember when Mama this,” and, “How ’bout when Daddy that,” but likely they didn’t speak too much and by the day’s end they caught somewhere over sixty fish. The makings of a perfect day.

There was a picture of this moment captured by the photographer Ken Regan and depending on the dimensions, a copy of the photograph is worth between $900 and $3000. But its value ascends monetary. It represents where Aaron found, near his childhood home, in a time of loathing and dread and awful fear in his life, a moment of pure and uncompromising peace of mind and refuge from the wickedness of this world that he was experiencing.

He was very likely seven days away from his own death and he’d have known this. He and his brother were on the same waters where he had first learned to fish, somewhere around thirty-three years earlier.