Conversation with fisherman-philosopher Jimbo Meador

I’ve always been a hunter-gatherer by nature. My family spent summers in Point Clear, Alabama, on the eastern side of Mobile Bay, and from the time I was about eight a guy named Duke Cox came most mornings to get me before dawn. Back in our summerhouse, I used to sleep on a screen porch, and Duke, who always knew I wanted to go fishing, would come by and scratch on the screen before daylight. We would go off for the day in our old wooden, cross-plank cypress skiff, rowing. We fished for speckled trout, threw cast nets for mullet and gigged flounders at night. Duke made me my first cast net and taught me how to throw it, and I spent a lot of time with him; he was a mentor to me.

Duke and I used to sell speckled trout and flounder to the fish market and when we had a jubilee, it was like a gold mine. A jubilee is a phenomenon that happens on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay and I’m not really sure if it happens anywhere else. Low dissolved oxygen in the water causes it, but the conditions have to be just right. You need an east wind and an incoming tide. I used to keep a logbook, and if the conditions seemed right I’d stay out all night looking for the jubilee.

When water on the bottom doesn’t have enough oxygen all bottom dwelling fish and marine life rise up to the surface where there is a layer of water containing more oxygen. Flounder live on the bottom don’t have swim bladders to elevate themselves in the water very easily. So they follow the bottom all the way up to the shore where the layer of oxygenated surface water meets the beach. Soon there’s big congregation in the shallow water along the beach of flounder, crabs, shrimp, eels and catfish. In the old days it was a big day when there was a jubilee. Everyone started hollering ‘jubilee’ and you’d see people out there in their pajamas, underwear and everything, women with rollers in their hair gigging flounders and scooping crabs and shrimp. Eels were pretty much let alone.

Gigging is another thing. You have a wood pole with a spear on the end and that’s what we call gigging – a flounder gig. Flounders lay on the bottom, they’re flat fish. We always tried to gig ours in the head ‘cause old Mr. Stern at the fish market was more likely to buy them if the body meat wasn’t messed up.

Living here on the bay we always caught shrimp for the table and I still do. I catch white shrimp in my cast net right in front of the house. I’ve always been interested in shrimping because you catch a lot of unusual stuff. As soon as I got an outboard motor for my boat I started shrimping even more. Later, when I realized that I caught more shrimp than I needed for the table and I could sell them at the local fish market, I became a commercial shrimper. Everyone up and down the bay wanted shrimp to put in the freezer, so it was a good way of making money.

When the sports fishermen began to clash with the commercial fishermen I was on both sides of the fence. In my opinion it’s a shame that they spent all that money and time fighting each other. I always thought it would be better to put that effort into protecting the nursery areas. While everybody was pointing fingers at each other, they were missing the bigger problems – growth and development and pollution.

When I got out of the seafood business I started guiding fly-fishermen, practicing catch-and-release and using barb-less hooks. I grew up fly-fishing for bass and bluegill in the lakes and rivers, and as a kid we’d go offshore for dolphin. Guiding fly-fishers was another way of making a living and doing it on the water. I was really just catching them for the fun of catching them and then I would release them. This was my way of conserving, living in harmony with nature.

On the shrimp boats, I always saw that when you pushed bycatch overboard there was a big congregation of fish around to eat it. So I started taking fly-fishermen out there and I’d tie flies that looked like bycatch. I could just about guarantee that I could take somebody out there and catch all different varieties of fish. So I was still taking advantage of the shrimping fleet. I guess I was a pioneer in that field in the gulf.

Bycatch became a big issue in late 1980s. A shrimp boat catches a lot of fish, crabs and eels that you can’t sell, so they throw it overboard. The bycatch on a shrimp boat is visible. You can look at that and see what’s happening. But it’s hard for people critical of shrimping to appreciate what’s happening in our estuaries—mostly invisible to the naked eye – where microscopic eggs and juvenile fish are being killed because of pollution and development. The anti-shrimp people seem mostly concerned about a shrimper who’s made his living that way all his life, the way his family did for generations. So who’s right and who’s wrong?

Having a background in shrimping sometimes brings on added responsibilities. Winston Groom was kind enough to dedicate his book Forrest Gump to me and George Radcliff, another friend of ours. When they were getting ready to make the movie, a dialect specialist from Paramount called me to tape a conversation because, she said, Tom Hanks wanted a Southern accent to listen to. We did that, and then the movie came out, and it was a big hit. All of a sudden the media started sending people down to interview Winston. Then they started asking about me because of the dedication, and found out that I used to shrimp and used to be an obsessive runner.

Suddenly, a lot of the media wanted to make me out to be the real Forrest Gump. Problem was, Forrest was an idiot. It was an honor that Winston had dedicated the book to me, but I didn’t know if I wanted to go along with the part about being an idiot. Winston was encouraging me to talk to these people, but it really got out of hand. People magazine came down here and a television program called A Current Affair. The London Times sent a reporter, different magazines and newspapers, even a radio station in Australia. Finally, the people at David Letterman called to talk to me about being on the show but there I drew the line. I kept telling everybody the story is fiction.
After all that quieted down a little, the lady who was the dialect specialist called me and I said to her: “I’ve been asked a million times, did Tom Hanks actually study the tape I made?” She said, “Yes, he did use it.” And I said, “Well he talked like an idiot.” And she said, “That came from the kid actor who played him as a child. They decided to use that dialect throughout the movie, but Tom found your accent very interesting.” That’s how she put it.

There are things I liked about Forrest. He was a good person, kind of naïve, but a good person who went with the flow. Today, everyone is more concerned about the dollar than doing the right thing. They don’t think about everyone that’s living, everything that’s existing. People want to live on the water, but in the process of developing all this waterfront property we are destroying nursery areas where fish and marine life have to grow up and live until they get into deep water.

Because of the population explosion on the coasts, our environment has become far more sensitive than it was when I was a kid. I got concerned about the changes in the fisheries and our estuaries because I could see it changing for the worst before my eyes while I was growing up. So I got on the board of directors of the Mobile Baykeeper. I’m now an honorary board member and always trying to do my part to support our Baykeeper, Casi Callaway.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to the old times. It seemed like we had more of a sense of community then. But there are some people doing things now that are helping the fish and the bay. I always thought people should enjoy life but not do anything that is going to hurt anyone or anything. That’s just the philosophy I try to live by.