Today is December 13. Today is my friend, Christopher Knibbs’ birthday. He isn’t here with us to celebrate it, but I wanted to take a few moments to celebrate him. Tim McGraw once sang a song that’s quite fitting. To paraphrase, “My old friend, this [post’s] for you, because a few simple [paragraphs] was the least that I could do to tell the world that you were here.”
Chris (or “Knibblet,” as we called him) was one of those very decent human beings placed here on this earth for far too little time. While he had his struggles as we all do, he also had a deep sense of honor and conviction and lived his life by a code.
The first time I noticed this was in high school. I’d recently broken up with my longtime girlfriend. He caught her eye, and she pursued him. It was still a fresh wound, and he asked me what I thought. I told her, “I still love her, dude.” He tilted his head down, shook it, and that was the end of their dalliance. Most high school kids wouldn’t have done this (she was a real looker). In fact, most didn’t (she was a real looker). Knibblet did.
I always thought this was admirable. Knibbs was my best friend’s cousin, you see, and we got along just fine, but it’s not like we were hanging out every day. He owed me nothing. Luckily for the pit in my stomach, he owed his own sense of honor, morality, and code the duty of doing what he felt was the right thing.
For me, simple as the gesture was, long ago as it was, this was the act that cemented in my mind the thought that Knibblet was an all around good guy, and I was very glad, some years later, to spend a wonderful day with him at Putnam Creek in Crown Point, NY.
Knibblet and My Adventure at Putnam Creek
In the years before I was a father, and before I took fishing very seriously, our family home at Crown Point was a bit of a party house. I’d routinely travel up there with friends to enjoy the Adirondacks and all the fun they had to offer each summer. Knibbs was routinely a guest, and he loved the place so much that his parents would eventually choose it as his final resting spot, spreading his ashes there. I like to think that part of the reason he loved it so much was Labor Day weekend of 2006.
We went up to the lake with our usual group of friends. The girls, always adventurous, wanted to rent a boat down at Lake George. Knibbs and I considered it, but the water at Lake Champlain was too inviting and we decided to stay back and drag out the canoe instead. We loaded up a couple of rods and several dozen nightcrawlers, and headed off for nearby Putnam Creek.
Neither of us were particularly skilled anglers at the time, but it didn’t matter. We moved through Putnam Creek catching fish after fish – mostly sunnies. We made it past the bridge into the backwaters, seeing heron and listening to mourning doves sing, telling jokes and laughing the whole way. This day cemented our friendship firmly and from that day on, I’d consider Knibblet one of my best.
Every now and then, we’d tie into a small pickerel deep in the marsh, which was a good thrill amidst the perch and bluegill. Eventually we came to an especially clear section of the creek near some fallen trees. Peering into the water, we spied a largemouth bass! It wasn’t particularly large, but we hadn’t caught one yet and we were determined to catch this one. We tossed worm after worm at that darned fish but he wouldn’t take any offering. This was strange, as he was so little, and we were so far back in the creek, past where any bass boat could go, that surely he hadn’t seen a lure once in his life, but he wouldn’t budge or bite. After about 30 minutes of trying we moved on. I’ll bet that bass sired some huge monsters with lockjaw in his day.
We were out there for hours and hours having the time of our lives. We spent the entire time it took the rest of our friends and the girls to drive the 45 minutes to Lake George, find a boat rental, use it for their allotment, and come back. Our cell phones rang eventually as the girls were looking for us. They took the rowboat into the creek and found us, and Paulina, twig though she was, nearly capsized the darned canoe transferring in. Knibbs then transferred to the rowboat to help the other girl out and I got to hear all about how much of a pain in the butt that was to row home through the late-season weeds.
Knibblet and I would have many more trips to Crown Point but we’d never have a fishing trip quite like this again. As years went by the house became even more of a party destination than before and fishing took a bit of a backseat for a time. Even so, 18 years later, I look back on that early adventure with Knibblet and consider it one of the better days I spent alive.
Miss you buddy,
JP
