Rubber Legs and White Tail-Hairs, page 4
Cast—There are almost as many kinds of casts as there are kinds of anglers. There’s the foot cast, the leg cast, the arm cast, the full-body cast, and many more. One of the common methods of achieving a full-body cast is by following the advice of a fellow fisherman who yells, “Take a running jump, Stan! You can make it!”
Sinker—An angler who steps off a dock with a ten-horse outboard motor in his arms is referred to as a sinker. Some athletic anglers claim they have actually swum fifty or sixty feet to shore while dragging a ten-horse motor, but it is generally believed that they simply walked along the bottom until they reached shallow water. Since the other anglers present continued to concentrate on putting their tackle together, no eyewitness accounts exist as to what actually may have been the case.
Split-shot sinker—An angler who suddenly drops into the water while standing with one foot on the dock and the other in a drifting boat and holding a ten-horse motor in his arms is known as a split-shot sinker. First he splits, then he sinks like a shot. The split is usually accompanied by a hideous screech, so horrible in fact that other anglers present have been known to look up briefly from sorting their tackle boxes.
Purist—An angler who doesn’t catch any fish, because he uses only dry flies the size of dandruff, often conceitedly refers to himself as a purist. Other anglers refer to him as a loon.
Fresh air—This is what the purist claims he enjoys getting out in, even though he doesn’t catch any fish.
Fishing journal—An imaginative work of sub-literature in which the angler records the weight, length, and species of fish he didn’t catch.
Rock—This is a tool used in the field to make delicate repairs on expensive fishing reels, because the tool kit was sucked into the void by the car roof.
Pink nighty—Dry-fly purists enjoy coming up with colorful names for the various bits of fluff they employ not to catch fish. However, when they see a lunker brook trout that they really want, they will often tie on a No. 10 Pink Nighty, which usually does the job. Also known as a ten-inch nightcrawler.
New car—An expensive dehydration chamber that ten-year-old boys use to dry out strings of perch on hot July days.
Blue upright—Although primarily the name of a dry fly, it also denotes ice fishermen in Wisconsin.
Blue darter—Refers to a Wisconsin ice fisherman who has just stepped through a hole in the ice.
Best fishing time—Yesterday or last week.
Worst fishing time—Now.
Gaff—What old gaffers do when they have a young fisherman trapped in a boat with them. Fatal only if the young angler leaps out of the boat and attempts to swim three miles to shore while carrying his tackle box.
Fishing tackle—This is an extreme but useful maneuver for preventing a fellow angler from reaching the best fishing hole before you do.
Carp—This is a form of immature behavior displayed by fishing partners, often consisting of whining, after you have clipped off the tips of their flyrods by inadvertently pressing the switch on your car’s automatic windows.
Forked stick—Stylish fishermen often use forked sticks to carry their catch, after a sixty-dollar creel has been claimed by the kitchen table.
Who wants raw egg in their beer?—A little joke that charter-boat fishing captains wish they had never called out to their clients after the boat has been tossing about in rough seas for six hours.
Fair-to-middlin’—This is the standard reply used by fishing resort owners to describe the worst fishing in fifteen years.
Good—Fishing resort owners use this word to describe fishing that’s fair-to-middlin’.
Awesome—A favorite word of resort owners to describe fishing, it is based on the fact that they heard of some kid who caught two small perch the previous week.
Let’s tell Mommy I caught some of the fish—This is a pathetic plea that comes up anytime a father takes his little son or daughter fishing for the first time. The situation is delicate and should be handled with utmost care. One way is to promise the youngsters ice cream or candy. Then there’s a good chance they’ll let you get away with the ruse.
The Mountain
“April,” the poet wrote, “is the cruelest month.” Boy, no kidding! If I had read that poem while in third grade at Delmore Blight Grade School, I might very well have said, “How true! How true!” Although it’s more likely I would have said, “Do I really have to read this stupid poem?”
Outside the grimy windows of third grade, April was dissolving the last lingering stains of winter. Inside, however, Miss Goosehart was stretching us pupils on the rack of the multiplication table, a fiendish device once used to torture young children. April was slipping from our grasp. Flowers were bursting into bloom, trees were leafing out, and the sap was rising, namely one Milton Clinker, to give the answer to four times seven. Who cared about four times seven, anyway? Only a sap like Clinker would want to multiply while all outdoors filled up with April.
Miss Goosehart cranked up the rack another notch. “Pat, would you take one of your wild guesses at three times six?”
I scratched my head in a show of concentration. Crazy Eddie Muldoon, who sat behind me, leaned forward and whispered something. I thought maybe it was the answer. But it was, “Saturday, let’s climb the mountain.”
Eddie was so far gone with April he didn’t even realize it was my turn on the rack. He wasn’t called Crazy Eddie for nothing.
“Give me a hint,” I said to Miss Goosehart. “How many letters does it have?”
Had Eddie really said, “Let’s climb the mountain”? What a terrific idea! My heart did a handspring at the very thought. “Okay,” I whispered back. Eddie groaned. Miss Goosehart now had him on the rack, trying to wrench out the answer to seven times seven. It was ghastly.
The mountain Eddie and I intended to climb reared up abruptly from the valley about a mile from our farm. At night, in the glow of the moon, the mountain took on the shape of a sleeping dragon, the high, ragged peak forming the hump of its back; a long, descending ridge was its neck, and another knob of mountain was its head. The head of the dragon rested on the valley floor not far from Delmore Blight Grade School. It was easy to imagine the dragon awakening one night, stretching out its neck, and gobbling up the school in a single bite. In the morning the only evidence of what had happened would be a gaping hole in the ground and the smile on my face.
The dragon lived only at night. Daylight revealed a solid, no-nonsense mountain, with a craggy granite peak, sheer cliffs, a crosshatching of crevices and ledges, and, lower down, thick forest.
The mountain talked to me. I don’t mean to imply that we held long philosophical conversations, but even as a small boy, sitting on the back steps of my house, I could hear it calling: “Pat! Pat! Come climb me! It will be fun! And I won’t try to kill you, as I do some folks!”
On an April Saturday at the age of eight, I learned that mountains don’t always tell the truth.
Before setting out for the mountain, Crazy Eddie and I told our mothers that we were going for a hike. It seemed like the only decent thing to do.
“Don’t you go barefooted,” my mother ordered. “It’s too early in the year, and you’ll catch your death. Stay away from the crick, because it’s too high and you might fall in and drown. Don’t tease the Guttenbergs’ bull, because he might gore you to death. Don’t cut yourself with your jackknife because you might bleed to death. Don’t wander around in the woods, because you might get lost and starve to death.” She stopped to catch her breath and search her memory. “Oh yes, don’t climb any tall trees because you might fall to your death.”
Mothers can be depressing. Mom couldn’t recall any disasters with me and a mountain, and I saw no reason to give her further cause for worry by going into a lot of unnecessary detail about the hike. My mother was downright permissive compared with Eddie’s parents. On Saturday mornings at his house, the family had to get up an hour early to run through the list of don’ts for Eddie and still have time enough to get the milking done by eight.
Eddie, as I expected, was late getting to my house. He looked good, swaggering into the yard, his eyes bright with the anticipation of great adventure. His broken arm had healed nicely. I envied the scar at his hairline, the result of his not having ducked quite low enough as we threw ourselves under the Guttenbergs’ fence, and just in time, too. (There’s nothing quite so disgusting as getting bull slobber sprayed all over you.) I thought maybe Eddie was concealing his limp from me, but apparently the fall from the cottonwood tree hadn’t done any lasting damage. He seemed fit, which was more than I could say for his parents, the two most nervous people I’d ever known. As Eddie said, they probably drank too much coffee.
“Your folks skipped ‘Don’t mountain climb,’ didn’t they?” I said, grinning.
“Yep,” Eddie said. “Never even occurred to them. They hit everything else, except dirt-clod throwing. The lump on your head go away?”
“More or less,” I said. “It was my fault. I would have ducked faster if I’d known you were gonna charge my foxhole. You ready?”
“Sure,” Eddie said. “Let’s go!”
An hour later we were working our way up the lower slope of the mountain. Here and there the April sun had slipped in among the trees and incited a riot of buttercups. We each picked a handful of the little yellow flowers and put them in our shirt pockets to take home to our mothers. For some reason, mothers seemed thrilled by these little squished balls of withered flowers. So what the heck. The effort more than paid for itself with the PR spinoff. Say you were found guilty of getting home five hours late and had been sentenced to some whacks, the number to be determined by how long it took the parent’s arm to feel as though it were about to fall off; the idea was to haul out the pitiful little bouquet and present it to your mother just before the penalty was to be executed. Nine times out of ten the bouquet got you a stay of execution. Wilted bouquets of wildflowers were not only good PR but excellent insurance.
“You got enough buttercups?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Eddie said. “These should do the trick. Anyway, we probably won’t get home that late.”
We climbed the mountain for an hour, expecting always to reach the top at the next rise. But there was always another rise and another after that and still another. Finally we broke free of the sloping forests and could survey the valley down below. The familiar fields and pastures had taken on a new look, shaping themselves into intricate rectangular patterns of spring browns and greens. Mouse-size cars scurried up and down the roads.
The climbing had now become more difficult. Eddie, a born leader (the worst kind), took charge of planning our ascent. It seemed to me his motive was not to find the easiest route but to test our character. When we came to a rocky knob we could just as well have walked around, he insisted that we make a frontal assault on it, finding little cracks and protuberances with which to pull ourselves upward. When I complained, he said, “This is the way mountain climbing is done. Any sissy could walk around.”
Now we were high up on the mountain. The cars below had shrunk to the size of ladybugs; cows and horses appeared no larger than ants.
“It’s getting steeper,” Eddie said, panting.
“And colder,” I said, shivering.
“That means we’re nearly to the top,” Eddie said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ve been ‘nearly to the top’ fifteen times already. Maybe we should turn back.”
“Only a sissy would turn back,” Eddie said.
“I’m not turning back,” I said.
“Okay,” Eddie said.
Among the patchwork of fields below, I could see my own little tiny warm house. It called to me in the same way the mountain had. “Turn back,” it called. “Turn back.”
“I’m not turning back,” I muttered.
“Okay, okay,” Eddie said. “I didn’t say you were.”
Eddie no longer had to seek out difficult routes. Every route had become difficult. Once we had to drop into a deep ravine, losing altitude we had already paid for, only to have to buy it again, inch by inch, foot by foot. On the shaded side of a ridge we encountered deep drifts of snow, streams of ice water gushing from beneath them. The April sun had rotted the drifts, and at every step we sank in almost to our waists, the gritty snow stinging our legs raw.
Once, as we stopped to rest against a gnarled, stunted tree, my pants freezing to my legs, my lungs aching, I stared out over the empty space to where Delmore Blight Grade School snuggled up against the edge of town. Old Delmore Blight Grade School, I thought. Well, this is a heck of a lot better than being there. The thought gave me strength to go on.
Late in the afternoon, finally, the jagged peak of the mountain came into view. There was no mistaking it. A few hundred yards more and we would reach the ridge that led up to the peak. After that, the summit would be as good as ours!
But our ascent now appeared to be blocked. A twenty-foot cliff rose directly above us. To get around it we would have to drop far back down the mountain and climb up again by another route. I knew now that we would have to turn back. Only a crazy person would try to scale the cliff.
“Boy, this looks dangerous,” Eddie said. “Great! I bet a lot of guys would chicken out right now. Here, let me give you a boost.”
I hauled myself over the lip of the cliff only to discover a great expanse of rock sloping steeply toward me. Water bright with sunlight trickled in tiny streams down the face of the rock. There was no going back now. I began to crawl on my belly up the slippery slab of granite—five feet, twenty feet, fifty feet. I thought: Just about got it made. Then I can watch ol’ Eddie climb up here. Ha! Bet he’ll be sacred. Just a bit more and I can reach for the upper edge of the slab. Only ten inches to go! Six inches! Three inches! Oh-oh, I slipped back an inch. Better get a foot in a crack or something. Still slipping. Still slipping! Dig my fingernails into the rock! No! Wait! What’s happening? I can’t stop sliding! I’m going too faaaaaaaaaaaaaast!
Buttons flew off my jacket and shirt like shrapnel. The knees ripped out of my pants. I felt as though I were leaving a streak of hide all the way down the rock. I whipped over on my back to see where I was going. Then I saw where! I tried to whip back on my stomach so I wouldn’t have to see. But it was too late. I shot off over the edge of the cliff.
WHUFFF!—I saw green. I had flown spread-eagle right into a scrawny but merciful fir tree. It bent over and deposited me with a plop on a patch of snow.
I lay on my back, eyes closed, letting life drain back into me. Except for a few miscellaneous patches of missing clothing and hide, I seemed all right. Presently I heard a scrabbling in the rocks off to one side. I knew it must be Eddie. So I played dead to teach him a good lesson. He didn’t say anything, but I could sense him looking down at me. I held my breath so he couldn’t see me breathe. I could feel him studying me intently, wondering how he could explain the fatal accident. (“I tried to talk Pat out of it, but he wouldn’t listen. Can I go play now?”) Peeking from beneath my eyelids, I saw him bend over me. What was he doing? Checking to see if I might still be alive? Eddie set a large rock on my chest. He put another rock next to it, and then another. He was burying me.
“Stop!” I yelled. “I’m alive!”
“I knew you were still in there,” Eddie said. “I saw you peeking out from under your eyelids. I just wanted to practice burying a person, in case I ever have to. Did you know you’re bleeding through your shirt?”
“Just a scratch,” I said. I had always wanted to say that.
“Good,” Eddie said. “But next time you get up near the top of that slab of rock, grab hold of a branch or something. Otherwise, you’ll just slide off again. C’mon, I’ll give you a boost to get you started.”
I stared hard at Eddie. “Forget it,” I said. “I’m not climbing back up there.”
“But we’re so near the top!” Eddie cried. “You can’t quit now. Look, you can even see the peak.”
Against my better judgment, I looked at the peak, that ragged, twisted point of granite gleaming against the dark blue of the April sky, so beautiful and majestic that the mere sight of it could make a person dizzy with awe. Suddenly I knew what I had to do, and I did it.
“Cripes!” Eddie wailed. “Not on my shoes!”
I wiped my mouth on my torn, bloody sleeve. “Sorry about your shoes, Eddie, but I’m going back down the mountain. You can climb to the top by yourself if you want.”
“I will, too!” Eddie said.
I limped back the way we had come. Then I heard Eddie running after me. “But I’ll climb it some other time,” he said. “Now I’d better help you.”
“To do what?” I asked.
“To pick buttercups,” Eddie said. “When your mom sees those clothes, you’re going to need a whole lot more buttercups than you’ve got.”
Not Long for This Whirl
As at the beginning of every spring in our part of the country, water invaded the world and ruled over it with a cold and merciless hand. It drizzled out of the murky sky, oozed up from the saturated ground, and roared in torrents from the melting snow in the mountains, filling the creek and river channels to overflowing, washing out bridges, pump houses, and any other structure within its grasp. Water that could find nothing more enterprising to do with itself turned the dirt roads of the country into sloughs of mud the color and consistency of butterscotch pudding.
It was not a fun time for a teenage outdoorsman. More or less trapped in the close confines of our farmhouse with my mother, grandmother, and sister (the Troll), I grew increasingly frustrated and irritable that my weekend had been washed out by the water. Seeing her chance, my grandmother rushed to aggravate my sorry state of mind.
