Alternative Fishing Amid the Buzz of Modern America

Yesterday I assembled my new fishing pole and drove out to J Percy Priest Dam in Nashville to try it out. I sat just below the dam enjoying Nature with Interstate 40 rumbling by just downstream, jets loudly shredding the air a few hundred feet overhead, and titanic power line towers adding their electromagnetic buzz to the scene. A peaceful afternoon. Despite the encroachments of our running world I saw a least bittern and some ducks, female mallards I think. There was also a large buffalo which made a few passes up and down the shoreline right under my nose.
Not many people were fishing, just a few Mexicans enjoying the cheap entertainment, and like most uneducated people, they left their trash, their worm boxes and the plastic bag that held their Cheetos, behind on the river bank to be swept downstream by the next flood. I've never understood people too lazy to pick up their trash. But I admit a certain guilt: as a youth my job on boat outings was to fill the beer bottles my dad and his friends passed to me with water and sink them to the bottom of Center Hill Lake. But that took effort.
For a lure I used a small, floppy plastic crappie with a treble hook on the bottom of it. It didn't take many casts to decide this was not going to garner much attention in such a river setting. I needed worms or dough. What I had was a Cliff Bar. So I balled a small pinch of the energy bar around a barbed hook and cast out. Over the course of ninty minutes I caught zero fish but had about four good tugs. My conclusion: a Cliff Bar will catch a fish but you have to make sure enough of the point is exposed to set the hook.