"My daddy has a picture of me as a 10-year-old boy, standing on the porch at home, holding a cane fishing pole," Newby said.
I'm eight years old, barefoot, wearing bib overalls, a ten foot cane fishing pole rests on my shoulder along with night crawlers squirming in an old Prince Albert tobacco can clutched in my hand; off to Main Creek for a day of fishing and adventure with friends.
Although demolished trees provide the film its unsettling backdrop, its real focus is the three families, and the meditative rhythm of their lives: hands rooting for potatoes, scythes mowing through swathes of cane, fish cleavers thumping against chopping blocks.
Their assembled creations include baskets, split-cane fishing rods, furniture, brushes, kites and much more.
I barely remember my grandfather – only that he would clap his hands above his head if I behaved well and, more hazily yet, him turning towards a river, a split-cane fishing rod resting next to his perfectly bald head.
Except for garden canes, fishing rods and conservatory furniture, the plant has never found a major market niche in the developed world.
Some say it is a modern version of old-fashioned cane pole fishing in which the angler uses a long bamboo rod to plop worms into a honey hole.
A cane fly-fishing rod that belonged to my great-grandmother.
Jinja, where Lake Victoria pours into the Nile, is a favoured tourist spot but was once also a thriving town, refining sugar cane, canning fish and spinning cotton.
Its main proponent, Mr. Perdue, had grown up cane-pole fishing with his grandfather on the Big Indian Creek in central Georgia.
For example, this weekend the city of Hartford will hold its annual Mark Twain Days festival, with, naturally, cane-pole fishing events, and frog-jumping and fence-painting contests sponsored by the Mark Twain House there.
