A guy in my local bass club was killed Friday morning in an auto accident. He was traveling a rural road through rice country before daylight, on his way to work as a correctional officer at the county jail, and for some reason ran the stop sign where the road intersects with the highway that divides Northern California's Sacramento Valley into eastern and western portions. His Ford F-250 was broadsided by a tractor-trailer rig.
I didn't know Robert Jackson well; he'd only been in the club for a year or so, but he seemed like an extremely solid guy. He was recently elected to the board of directors. I voted for him.
I found out from an online report of the crash that he was 48 – a year younger than me. At the moment, I don't know whether he left children behind, but it's very likely that he did. If so, I can only hope that they're all grown up and self-sufficient.
We'd spoken a few times at the club's monthly meetings, but the only conversation we'd had on any topic other than bass fishing involved alligator meat. I'd eaten it for the first time at a recent Gary Yamamoto Custom Baits event in Texas and he'd had it on a couple of occasions, once in Louisiana and once overseas somewhere when he was in the Navy. We both thoroughly enjoyed our experiences with it.
The club meets in a side room at one of the two local pizza parlors, and he'd sat at a table adjacent to me and my 4-year-old daughter at the October get-together. I'd brought a jerkbait rod that another member had wanted to see, and he became interested in it, too. He said he was looking to buy such a setup, but was unwilling to shell out the money for exactly what he wanted at the moment. I told him to take that one and try it out, and he could return it at next month's meeting. If he liked it, I'd make him a real good deal on it.
That meeting will take place tonight, and it'll be a real solemn occasion that my daughter won't be accompanying me to. She thinks really sad things only happen in story books, and even then they're always made right in the end. I'd like to keep it that way for another year, or month, or week, or however long I can.
I won't be getting my rod and reel back. I just hope that it had been used at some point over the past month.
Maybe it produced the last fish he ever caught.
--John Johnson
--BassFan Senior Editor
