Drive - A Memoir 85th Installment
“A
fish bone stuck in your craw will kill you! You can’t breathe.
Well, maybe you can breathe if it’s in your wind pipe, but if it’s
in your food chute, all the food piles up behind it like water behind
a beaver dam. Soon you get so choked up with the log jam of food, you
can’t breathe and you die. That’s my diagnosis and you’d better
believe it.”
“Good
theory, Dr. Kildare, or should I say Dr. Dumb Ass?” Russ could be
rude. “Anyway, we got some fishing in early this summer just as
school got out. Don’t you remember when they shut off the wells?”
I
remembered that Camas Creek had been nearly empty when we arrived to
try our luck soaking worms in the creek, so we’d walked up to the
artesian wells to see what was up. The irrigation district had shut
the water gates. The wells usually free flow huge amounts of water.
The water just comes up out of the earth, but the irrigation district
had built a high dirt wall around artesian wells. The large pipeline
through the embankment with gates to shut was closed. When the water
raises high enough the wells stop flowing; that’s how they can shut
them off. When the gates are open, fish can swim through the gates to
explore, although there isn’t any food for the fish. Nothing grows
in water that cold. As we crossed the catwalk, we could see fish
zipping around, trapped on the wrong side.
“I’ll
get the poles, and we can see how hungry these fish are,” I shouted
as I ran for the gear. We wormed our hooks and tossed in. Boom, we
had immediate strikes. We yanked out two fish; we quickly impaled
more worms on the hooks and caught two more.
“See
the swarm of fish around our hooks trying to be the first to get
caught,” Russ pointed out.
“These
fish are starving. We should catch them all; they’re going to die
anyway,” I reasoned. “Have you got the worms?”
“Nope
– all out,” Russ was shaking out the can. “I figure we’ve
caught about thirty fish.”
“But
we haven’t caught them all!” My mind racing I was trying to think
of what we could find and use for bait. “I’m going to try this
piece of weed. It looks a little like a worm; maybe the fish are half
blind from hunger.” Sure enough, I caught a fish with the weed. I
wrapped another weed to the hook, but it fell off as I tossed the
line to the water. “Yowser”, I bellowed, as I jerked up my pole
to set the hook. “I just caught a fish with a bare hook. They’ll
bite anything in the water!” Russ caught fish on a bare hook also.
We fished until it slowed down, and from what we could see, we’d
pretty much caught them all.
500 more words tomorrow
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