Ah yes, the lingering aroma of mashed angleworms and the tingle of Eagle Claw fish hooks stuck in my thumb. It just ain’t summer without that hypnotic waver of light on water as the hours float by while your line gets tangled in the cattails.
I told my kids many a rapturous finny tale, until they grew up and escaped – the Internet-addled brats – but they are having grandkids now, so soon I’ll be able to sit them down with a mug of milk and a stack of Oreos to begin the saga all over again . . .
Wayne and I were riding our bikes to Como Lake for a day of pure, unadulterated fishing. We raced our Schwinns down Como Avenue, past the State Fairgrounds, and into Como Park, skirting the fine old mansions that circled the lake until we came to the rickety wooden dock, gray with age and worn complaisant with the sandpapering of a thousand bare feet.
The first order of business was to assemble our bamboo poles and string a line on them. We had one spool of line between the two of us, but that’s the beauty of a bamboo pole – you don’t need much line at all, since you just dangle it over the water. Admittedly, we were a cheese-paring couple; our allowances were held in sacred trust for drug store Cokes and comic books – anything else of a material nature had to be scrounged, begged or borrowed. As the darning needles floated in mid-air, we tied on our rusty hooks of various sizes and clamped on some tiny lead shot. A red and white plastic bobber, slightly cracked, was added, about three feet above the hook.
Then the bait. We used nothing but worms, worms that we had worked hard to capture by letting the garden hose run on the front lawn for a good hour – forcing the drowning night crawlers up for a breath of fresh air; we harvested them like bog cranberries. They were kept in a coffee can filled with used coffee grounds. Come to think of it, those little devils seemed awful lively, after spending a few hours in that caffeine-loaded environment; maybe they never even noticed being impaled on our hooks.
Splash! The line is in the water, the bobber is the center of diminishing ripples, and we settle back to await our prey. And to discuss matters of importance to nine-year-old boys. Why was it when we cut those darn night crawlers in half both ends didn’t stay alive and grow whole again, like they were supposed to? Theoretically, all you needed was one earthworm to keep yourself supplied with bait the rest of your life. I boasted that over the long summer vacation I had already forgot how to do long division. That’s nuthin’, said Wayne; he had not only forgot how to do long division but also cursive writing! I couldn’t top that one. The awfulness of girls was reviewed for the umpteenth time; their unnatural obsession with combing their hair, their unfortunate tendency to scream when you put a minnow down their back, and their unaccountable regard for clean fingernails.
And then it happened – it really did happen – I swear on a stack of Izaac Waltons it absolutely did happen.
My pole bent nearly in half, as the head of a great, honking snapping turtle emerged from Como Lake, chewing on my hook and bait.
A snapper’s head is just about the scariest article you can raise from the depths of a Minnesota lake – it’s baleful glare is pure Bela Lugosi; prognathous jaws slaver; and it’s pink, pointed tongue darts about like a poison dart. You don’t get to see much more of it, usually, since the rest of it stays underwater. Fortunately my pole broke – since I was hysterically determined to capture the ferocious creature and bring it back to the house for loud acclamations of hero worship on the part of my family and neighbors – “Great Caesar’s ghost, look what Timmy has caught! It must weigh two-hundred pounds; somebody call the newspaper right away!”
But as I say, with a toss of its warty head the behemoth snapped my pole in two, and then sank back down to the abyss from whence it came. Wayne had to physically restrain me from jumping in and going after the creature.
We did little enough fishing after that; people heard the commotion and came over to find out what happened. I was only too happy to regale them, repeatedly, with my death-defying brush with the antediluvian monster that had cost me my bamboo pole.
When we returned home that evening I rushed into the kitchen, where mom was putting mayonnaise on a gelatin salad, and breathlessly narrated my narrow escape from death-by-monster. She absently nodded her head, and reminded me to wash all that wormy slime off my hands. My younger sisters were no better – they just wrinkled their noses and cooed “Turtles are ucky!” Dad did not come home for dinner that night; he was working his second job.
You know my story to be true, of course.
Dontcha?
