Drive - A Memoir 70th Installment
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and simultaneously shouted ‘rodeo’! I sidled up to a particularly
large sucker fish, diving on its back and giving it a bear hug. The
fish came to life and took off while I hung on; after getting
thoroughly wet, dunked under, and taken several yards, I lost my grip
and came up sputtering. I know I was grinning from ear to ear as I
saw Russ pounce on another big sucker. All I saw was a thrashing fish
tossing Russell around like a flapping flag in the wind, his legs
splayed.
“The
hardest thing is hanging on to those slick suckers,” Russ said
after he was shook loose and came up gasping. I also noticed some
other kids watching and soon there were splashing fish rides all
around. I took a lot of fish rides: some wild thrashing adventures
and some slow rides like being towed by a slow boat. After a couple
of hours of fishy fun, a Fish and Game officer came over and told us
we really should get out of the water because they had poisoned the
lake to kill the fish, and it wasn’t healthy for us kids to be in
the water.
Camas
creek was the inlet water supply for Mud Lake, and the farmers around
had water rights and would pump irrigation water from the lake. Most
of the water in the creek was supplied by a bunch of artesian wells.
Camas Creek and Mud Lake down stream were filled mostly by artesian
wells making it more of a canal than a creek. Because of this, the
water at North Lake Road Bridge was crystal clear and too cold for
algae to grow. On the bridge you could see clear to the bottom of the
creek, with the only interference the shimmer of the sun on the
surface. We had tied a rock to a twine and lowered it to the bottom
of the creek; pulling it up and measuring it, we found the water was
twelve feet deep. Even at that depth you could toss a quarter into
the creek and see if it was heads or tails as it lay on the bottom.
The natural Camas Creek head waters were the Camas National Refuge
and the Refuge was where the fish would migrate from the wild to the
Camas canal and Mud Lake. The Idaho fish and Game stocked the creek
with game fish from time to time. Russell and I would lie on the
bridge and watch the fish that seemed to be floating in the air as
they swam by. The trout would scatter as occasionally a mammoth
bottom feeding sucker fish would float by hugging the bottom. The
suckers and chubs were trash fish; they were always in season and we
were allowed to take as many out of Camas Creek as we could. We put a
juicy worm on our biggest fishing hook, and because the water was so
clear, we
500 more words tomorrow
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