Free Tales from the Dad Side by Steve Doocy

had demoralized us many times that morning because each time they hooked a tiny sun perch, they yelped as if they’d just reeled in another great white.
    â€œBe careful, that hook is sharp,” I reminded as he struggled to pierce the razor-sharp curve through the worm’s hind end. It was at that time that I first noticed the critter’s distinctive markings and coloring.
    â€œPeter, drop that thing! It’s not a worm, it’s a live baby water moccasin!”
    We don’t know who got the trophies, because we were in the emergency room making sure he’d not been injected with whatever factory-installed poison water moccasins have at the ready. In the waiting room I reminded myself that fishing, just like raft building, was an antiquated and dangerous leisure-time activity. Why would anyone subject himself to possible West Nile infection standing downstream from a leaking sewage-treatment plant? More to the point, why do people still fish today, especially if we’ve got Mrs. Paul out there somewhere reeling in the tilapia?
    That was the last time we took our lives into our hands and went into the woods. I’d like to think it was from the fishing, but I think my son freaked out after I walked in and saw him watching Deliverance. The closest we’ve since been to a campout was during an electrical storm that knocked out the power to our neighborhood grid and forced the family to gather around a hurricane lamp in the living room. The thunder in the background provided the perfect atmosphere for ghost stories. The kids had never heard the one about the couple on lovers’ lane who heard the radio bulletin about the guy with the hook for a hand who’d escaped from the mental hospital, and when they heard scratching on the side of the car they drove home, only to find the hook hanging on the door handle. I had goose bumps on my arms telling it.
    â€œDad, I saw that on an after-school special.”
    An undaunted terror master, I moved on and explained how my father had built me a tree house when I was in fourth grade and I’d begged him to let me and a couple of friends sleep in the tree house before the end of the summer. Finally he said yes, and we camped out in the tree, until I woke up about three in the morning to discover I was alone because everyone else had gone home. It wasn’t an adventure without my friends, so I went in the back door of my house and fell asleep in my own bed.
    â€œWhen I went back into my house my dad heard the door close, and he got up to see what was happening. That was when he looked out and saw our weirdo neighbor who lived with five dozen cats climbing up the ladder.”
    They were speechless. Mission accomplished.
    â€œDad, you never mentioned you had a tree house.”
    After two weeks of nonstop begging I built one. Safety was always an issue, so I used dinosaur-bone-size bolts to hook it to the tree so it would be able to withstand a category-three hurricane before I’d have to call my insurance adjuster, who would inform me that I could not file a claim for something that was illegally constructed in violation of every building code in my town’s big book of dumb rules.
    In a moment of absolute coincidence that shows that there is some sort of cosmic connection between fathers and their sons, during one of our final supply runs to Home Depot, my boy, Peter, noticed one particular option they were selling for tree forts that he wantedto install on his deluxe custom tree house. So I bought a sunshine yellow steering wheel.
    I wanted to tell him that I had built my own steering wheel once, but he’d think I was about to launch into another one of those sepia-stained stories about walking five miles to school in the snow or writing with chalk on the back of a shovel, so I stopped and screwed the steering wheel to a beam next to the trapdoor.
    â€œEvery boy should have a tree house,” I announced to my wife at its grand