Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 5, 1994 TAG: 9410190015
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Just in case Gerald Baliles and William Wilson decide to take another Labor Day float down the James River.
Their trip two years ago, hopefully, was enough. It remains the source of considerable tongue-in-cheek and knife-in-back banter.
The outing began under a dark cloud, although that hardly was noticed by Baliles and Wilson when they launched their canoe near Iron Gate. If the names appear familiar, Baliles was governor of Virginia 1986-90 and Wilson, a Covington lawyer, was a member of the General Assembly for 16 years.
It takes only a couple of pulls of a canoe paddle to put you into smallmouth country most anywhere along the upper James, so before long fish were popping at Baliles' lure.
A man not shy about giving advice to governors, Wilson told Baliles the next time a fish hit he should strike with authority. Some will tell you this might have been the first time Baliles really paid any attention to Wilson.
"He brought this bass in that weighed about a pound-and-a-half," Wilson said. "I heard him cry out and he turned around and he had a treble hook in the meat of his thumb up to the shank. I naturally thought that he would take my remark to mean set the hook in the fish."
If Baliles ever needed counsel, it was then.
"What do you suggest?" he asked.
"I was trying not to look like I though it was serious," said Wilson. "I said, 'Gerry, it looks like a simple proposition. If you can fish with your other hand, we will go on down the river and continue to fish, hoping that the bass won't flop too much.'"
Baliles pressed for additional options.
"We can take the fish off," which Wilson did. "Then we can run the barb through your thumb. Most of the men in the Old West did that sort of thing. And I will snip the barb off and we will go on fishing.
"Or we can cut right behind the barb and back the hook out. That will require a fair amount of pain and bleeding and anguish, and that sort of thing."
Baliles appeared uneasy.
"The third alternative," Wilson continued, "is one you won't even consider, which applies to wimps, weasels and lollipops and girls and people of that sort. That would be to go to the emergency room of the hospital."
"How far is the hospital?" Baliles asked.
"I had to get out of the canoe, haul it back up the river for about a quarter-of-a-mile and pull it onto the bank, then get him into the car holding his thumb," Wilson said.
Baliles drove himself to the hospital while Wilson secured the equipment.
About then it began to rain, one of those late-summer, Old Testament kinds of storms, when the sky turns black and the wind bends the trees and water comes down in sheets as lightning flashes and thunder rolls.
"So I stayed out there and got soaking, dripping wet," Wilson said
Meanwhile, Baliles was safe and dry in the emergency room at Low Moor.
"When I got to the hospital, he was sitting in the emergency room with about 50 other people, holding up his thumb," Wilson said. "Of course, I went around to make sure the medical people knew who he was. It is not often that you get to save the life of a former governor."
To this day, Baliles will tell you: "The fishhook in the thumb was simply a self-inflicted wound in order to get the two of us off the James River, where Bill Wilson was determined to forge ahead in an aluminum boat in the middle of a storm of rain, thunder and lightning."
by CNB