I didn't know either, so I found this story online...
Mumpers & Shiners
In the beginning we rigged our discount rod-reel combos with the least expensive tackle that had English-language packaging and was in stock at our local K-Mart, and baited-up our cheap snelled hooks with nightcrawlers or mumpers. It is remarkable to me now, looking back, that my father did not require me to dig or otherwise harvest the worms myself as a condition of our early-morning sorties. In those days, the dozen nightcrawlers and dozen mumpers could not have cost more than five dollars, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have bought them if they had.
The former, then as now, were sold in Styrofoam coffee cups, and came as a tangled, meaty skein of fidgeting life, poking here and there out of a fistful of fragrant, fudgy soil that would be their last kind of contact with terra firma until a hook was poked into one of their two ambiguous termini and run through the length of their unsuspecting plump pink bodies. Mumpers came in brown paper cartons, and were mixed in with damp seaweed like jumbo anchovies tossed in a rubbery saline pasta. The dark knobbly seaweed was rarely wet enough to compromise the integrity of the flimsy cardboard box in which they were sold. Their packaging never failed to inspire my curiosity about - and sympathy for - the ugly little mumpers, who I appreciated were slated for an end far more terrible than any sane person could possibly want to inflict upon a larger, better looking sentient being.
Mumpers are possibly a kind of miniature shad, and I have come to suspect that they are perhaps one of those proverbial vestiges of creation that are fascinating in their own way, from the proper evolutionary perspective. But be that as it may, they were very disappointing as bait, and though I pitied both their lowly station and unfortunate fate I had no love, and precious little esteem, for them.
To understand this completely, and to get some fuller idea of the significance of mumpers in my childhood, we want perhaps to approach them by way of a comparison to shiners.
Then, as now, the preferred live bait for largemouth bass (in my home state) is the shiner, whose ecology, proper scientific appellation, physiology, etc., I know nothing whatsoever about. As their uninspired but nonetheless very apt name suggests, they are clad in a shiny, delicate scale suit, and - very importantly qua their function as baitfish - they are active in the water, despite the presence of a stainless steel hook through their back and under their spine --- a regrettable pathos the telos of angling necessitates. When I took time to survey them with greater circumspection, I saw immediately why predatory fish liked them so much, and I have personally always thought shiners looked not merely edible, but positively tasty.
When sold as bait, they can be as short as a man’s pinky, or as long as a man’s middle finger, with their overall size and weight in splendid aerodynamic proportion. Twelve medium-sized shiners cost two- or three-times the price of a dozen mumpers. The ugly mumper is sold in the sort of paper carton I have already described; shiners need to be carried from the bait shop in a pail of water, which ideally is aerated by means of a small pump designed specifically for such purposes.
It is very difficult to entice and therefore catch big, healthy largemouth bass with mumpers; it is very difficult to avoid catching big, healthy largemouth bass with shiners. I can honestly say that in all my years of fishing with my father, only once did we encounter another bait fisherman using mumpers, and I never saw anyone else buy them. I imagined that the man in the bait shop secretly laughed at us, and thought derisively of my father and me as “The Mumper Guys”. I am grateful that it was only quite late in our fishing career that I began to feel a sense shame when we would ask the shopkeeper for “a dozen nightcrawlers and a dozen mumpers”, while the other fishermen in the queue waited pail-in-hand to collect their peck of dazzling little bass-slayers.
As to the mumper itself, I must again call upon my memory, as it has been thirty-odd years since I have seen a mumper --- and I have never once seen a rendering of one, either artistic or scientific. The mumper, if I remember rightly, is a stubby, slimy turd of a minnow --- a swampy Coelacanth in miniature, with a rude tailfin that suggests either descent from some lesser obligate aerobe, or phylogenic relation to something that aspired to be a small, ugly, insignificant amphibian. A mumper is a darkish green, with darker still bits here and there on its fins --- precisely the sort of mottling you would expect to find on a creature that divided its time between shallow water and a weedy, scummy, ambiguously soggy shoreline, where it would be vulnerable to the triple-threat of pelagic, terrestrial, and avian predation. The noble shiner would not last more than a minute in such environs.
And that was it in a nutshell. My father and I were mumpers in a world of shiners. I thought of this every time we loaded our cheap yardsale gear into the Pinto stationwagon, and fished from littered shores yards or perhaps feet from busy roadways. It was a fact that required getting used to.
I always wanted to be at the pond in time to catch the sunrise, but this never happened until I was old enough to take myself fishing. I’d set the Baby Ben alarm clock I pinched from my grandfather’s attic (but whose appropriation was retroactively sanctioned by my grandmother) for five ‘clock, explode out of bed within seconds of its terrible staccato clanging, and be ready in under three minutes. But we wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon.
I’d wait a long fifteen minutes before attempting to wake my father --- a neither easy nor safe undertaking. My mother always did her best to help me get him up, but there was never any telling when he would, or what kind of condition he’d be in when he did. Eventually however he would rise with a groggy groan and lumber to the bathroom for his primary constitutional and first few cigarettes of the day. His transaction with the commode completed, he’d then wobble into the kitchen to make himself coffee, and have a cigarette. He’d then go dress his lower half while the coffee was brewing, and return to the kitchen smoking his next cigarette, which he would finish just as it came time to pour his coffee and light his next cigarette.
If he took the coffee into the bathroom, that was a good sign, meaning he intended to sip, smoke, and shave ensemble. This conserved time, leaving me fifteen minutes to enjoy a leisurely bowl of cereal. But it could also be a bad sign, suggesting that he was in a rush to hurry up and get the obligatory father-and-son activity dispensed with as quickly as possible. I wouldn’t know until he emerged.
If he took his first cup of coffee and next few cigarettes at the kitchen table, this was a bad sign, most likely indicating that he was very tired, and would be moving slowly, and that by the time we got to the pond the sun would already be high in the sky. It could even mean that he was preparing to tell me that he suddenly remembered something important he needed to do, and that we might be able to get some fishing in after dinner, but couldn’t go now. I’d listen to the not unfamiliar litany looking into my cereal, trying not to cry, but more than once my bowl of Fruity Pebbles acquired a slightly salty taste.
And yet there were times when his 250-plus pound frame hunkered over a fist of steaming coffee and a fist of smoldering Winston wasn’t a bad sign at all. Sometimes it could mean that he needed extra caffeine and nicotine before embarking on a long, unhurried morning, possibly even beginning with a quick breakfast at a diner and concluding with a hot dog from a roadside stand. This rarely happened, but when it did it compensated handsomely for a late start.
I honestly can’t remember what we talked about, either in the car or at the pond, and I don’t know why it is I can’t. Did he encourage, or even insist upon silence? Did I? Was there a tacit understanding between us that we’d dispatch of the father-and-son activity with as little dialogue as possible? Did I ask him things? Did he tell me stories? Did we chat? Gossip? Did we exchange jokes, and laugh? Did he attempt to teach me things? Was there wise import to his words --- and did I notice? Did I tell him the things I wished and hoped for, or tell him about my dreams the night before? Did he tell me about his longings, his dreams? Did he have any?
I don’t remember. But I remember yearning for the day when I fished exclusively with shiners. "One day, no mumpers" I promised myself -- and out on the pond by dawn.
For years I was unable to drink coffee out of disposable Styrofoam cups without smelling worms.
I now fish with lures only.
