Dad Fixes Cars

Dad was always fixing cars. I just assumed that was one of the struggles of life. As a kid you think everything around you is normal. I had no idea that it was possible to have a car that wasn't always in need of repair. Like taking out the garbage or chopping firewood - keeping the cars running was just part of the routine.

Western Washington is a notoriously rainy place, and - nestled snug in the foothills of the Cascades, Granite Falls gets more rain on average than even famously-soggy Seattle. And, at our northern latitude, for most of the year it gets dark quite early. These factors combined to further dad's misery as he battled the beasts, seemingly daily - maybe weekly. I'm not really sure. Suffice it to say - all the damn time. He didn't have a garage or even a paved driveway in which to work. It was out of doors, in the muddy, puddle-riddled, gravel driveway where he labored. Often with a tarp stretched from the corners of raised hood, to the two small evergreen trees at the end of the driveway. He had a single-bulb drop-light at the end of an extension cord, wedged wherever it needed to be to shed some light among the dirty hoses, and cold, greasy metal guts of the car.

It wasn't just one vehicle which was the object of dad's angst. There were many. I remember a 1970-somethin Ford pickup truck from which dad hoisted the engine, using the frame of my swing-set as a boom. There was a red Ford Pinto with Yosemite Sam "Back off" mud flaps that had the transmission out at some point - for what I don't know, probably a clutch replacement. I'll never forget the baby-blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme which caught fire for no apparent reason in the Behnke's driveway, and burned completely to the ground after school one day. They each needed their fair share of dad's time, cash and blood to stay functional. But there was one - one car in particular which was the thorn in his side like no other: The Datsun 710 station wagon. What a piece of shit!

Dad was under that car, while rivers of rainwater crept in from the sides, or busting his knuckles on the sharp edges of the engine block, or struggling to reach some out-of-the-way stuck bolt more times than I could possibly recount for you. It was a fairly common sight, in the evening time, to see dad sitting at the dining room table, with a tarp laid out to protect the table surface, and the hundred tiny innards of the carburetor spread out like the yields of some gruesome mechanical dissection: Springs, mysterious, funny-looking brass screws, gaskets of all shapes and innumerable nuts, bolts and washers.

It wasn't a hobby and dad took no joy from this endless dance. He simply needed to get to work in the morning. And mom needed to get us kids to school. There was always an undertone of desperation and frustration. It was during these unpleasant episodes where I first learned the phrases "racing the clock" or "racing against time". I'm quite sure there were other things he would have rather been doing on any given evening than getting oil, brake fluid, gasoline and carburetor cleaner all over himself. His hands were often greasy and his knuckles often bloody - as he pressed on, well after dark time and again - cursing that Datsun under his breath - and often aloud - as he did.

I don't know why we didn't ever have a decent car. I guess it was a money problem. Maybe they didn't want to take out a loan or maybe they couldn't get one. I'm not sure.

For all the hard times and problem, at least one good thing did come of all this: I learned to work on cars, without hardly ever trying. By watching dad while I held a flashlight for him or handed him tools, I got rather comfortable with the inner workings of the average motor vehicle. And he was always good at explaining what he was doing and why - I guess that's just something teachers and/or dads do. Those skills have come in quite handy for me over the years and I've saved quite a lot of money performing my own repairs since then. Thanks, dad.

Raised by Owls

Back in the day - in the 70s, before I was born - my mom and dad lived on the Tahola Tribe reservation, out on the Washington coast. How they wound up there, I'm not sure. I'm guessing there was some kind of incentive to lure teachers into certain rural areas. My dad taught science at the local high school and says that for that reason he was the de facto village "scientist" which somehow also made him the unofficial town veterinarian. Mom has many old stories including coming home to find an oil-stained duck swimming in the tub (dad always interrupts her to insist it was a merganser), a raccoon recovering in the laundry room and many other tales of convalescing critters - I forget all the stories. Except this one.

Somebody from town sighted a large, white owl floundering in the sand, out on the beach. Snowy owls don't usually venture this far south, being a true arctic species, so to see one at all is a rare treat, their bright white plumage standing out in stark contrast against our dark landscapes.

The ailing owl was captured and taken to dad at the beginning of the weekend.

Nobody knew what was wrong with the bird, it did not appear to be injured, just sick. Dad tried to feed it, but it would not eat. Because of the weekend the nearest vet - which was hours away - was closed, and Seattle offices did not answer their phones. He placed a final call to the professor or ornithology at the University of Washington and hoped the bird would live long enough for some answers to come back.

On Monday morning, he found the bird dead. A few hours later, his phone call was returned and he then learned the proper technique to force feed a hungry bird. Next time, I guess.

Dad now believes the owl starved to death. Sadly, he learned, this is a common fate for snowy owls who travel this far south of their usual hunting grounds. Their bright white color makes it difficult for them to sneak up on prey. And they require a huge calorie intake to even have a chance to make the trek back to their homes in Russia, Alaska and northern Canada.

So he took the limp owl to the local taxidermist (interesting that there was a local taxidermist, but not a vet) where he was met at the door and told to take the federally protected bird anywhere but here. According to the taxidermist, killing a snowy owl or trading their feathers can bring heavy fines and can shut down a taxidermist for good. He mentioned something about a hard-to-get permit, wished my dad good luck, and shut the door behind him.

One way or another, dad got the permit - and the previously skittish taxidermist was convinced to stuff the owl. Dad says he still has that permit - just in case anyone ever questions him - stashed in a folder someplace.

That bird was on the wall in our house my entire life. Not as a trophy, like most dead things you see on people's walls, but as a respected ambassador from the natural world. Dad talked about the white plumage and how they are camouflage in their natural, arctic environment. He explained everything he had learned about their rare migrations south, their hunting and nesting habits and the differences between males and females. This bird was a female - the males are all white, no black markings.

I have many happy memories involving that owl. She perched near our fireplace and was always part of that warm, happy corner of the house in the winter. She was present for every Christmas morning, pink in the glow from the tree lights. The fluffy nook between her feet was my favorite place to find a hard-boiled egg at Easter. Guest's dogs would bark at her. Her life-like, glass eyes seemed to look directly at you, wherever you stood. Funny, I never thought of her much as a kid. She was just always there in the background, silent. She watched over my entire childhood from that driftwood perch. Come to think of it, that owl has known me longer than any of my adult friends have - much longer. The bottom line is I just love that goddam bird. I guess that's all.

Chocolate Bars and Lottery Tickets

My dad used to buy a lottery ticket every now and then. Just a little scratch ticket. Just for fun. Not very often.

You scratch off the silver wax, hoping to match up three of the same number. He'd scratch off one of them, then wait. A long time. All afternoon. He'd set the ticket down and then dream about what he was going to do with his five thousand dollars. Maybe after dinner he'd scratch off another one, set it down again, and cherish the possibilities for the rest of the evening. He'd reveal the last of the numbers in the evening, at bed time, having squeezed a good 6 hours of happy thoughts out of it. He explained that he never expected to win anything and didn't real care if he did or not, but he enjoyed daydreaming about the possibilities.

On a somewhat related note, Dad could also make a Hershey bar last a full week, storing it in his sock drawer next to his little Native-American-made basket full of tie tacks and the little box of bullets for his never-been-fired .38 special. He'd break off one little square of chocolate at a time, right along the provided score lines, re-wrap the remainder in the silver foil packaging (which he had opened very neatly and non-destructively), slide that back into the paper sleeve, and place it back in amongst the socks and bullets, looking very much like it had never been opened at all. I bet that sock drawer is still organized exactly the same right now. I'm going to go look next chance I get.

As a kid it would kill me. At the store he'd get two chocolate bars, one for each of us, and soundly ignore them both for the entire 2-mile drive from town back to the house. It was everything I could do to be patient and not devour mine as soon as we got in the truck. I could sense them right through the paper grocery bag. Like Superman with X-ray vision. I could see them sitting in there. I could feel them, bouncing and jostling with every bump of the truck. But I waited. Because that's what dad did. He never said that I should, or explained why he did. That's just what you did. That's one tradition I have not been able to uphold.

The House that Dad Built

They say that dad and uncle Roy built the house together. I don't know what exactly they did, or how much hired help they might have had. I know that uncle Roy was a contractor at the time, and had built his share of homes, so maybe between the two of them, they did it all. I always loved our house and was proud of it, but looking back, it certainly had it's share of quirks.

I'm happy to say that mom and dad are still living in that house, as I write this. However, there have been many changes over the years, so I'm going to refer to the house in the past tense.

Oddity #1 - One and a Half Stories
The house was officially one-and-a-half stories. That means that the upper floor didn't have straight walls that went all the way up to the ceiling. They went straight up about 3 feet, and then angled in toward each other, like an A-frame, before terminating at a horizontal ceiling that was about half the size of the floor. You could hit your head on the slanted part, and I often did. This was not only hard to explain to other people, but it created a "crawl space" at either side of my room between the short vertical walls and the angled roof that continued down past them. Mom and dad used this area for storage. I remember all the variety of "Washington Apples" boxes packed in there, full of grown-up stuff. I don't know what was in those boxes, old books probably, and some Christmas decorations.

At some point, I moved many of those boxes out of my way and had a pretty fantastic little fort back there. There were two openings in my bedroom, so I could have a back and a front door. The openings were covered by old sheets or towels that hung from nails - or they were open. It was up to me. Mostly this area was referred to as "The tunnel" and it was a great source of joy in my life. In the fourth grade, I got my hands on my own string of colored, mini Christmas lights and strung them up in there. Nothing could have been finer. That reddish, colored glow was simply magical. I'd line the floor with layers of soft blankets and drag in an assortment of pillows and stuffed animals. I'm sure it was a world class fire hazard. In the summer I'd have a fan in one end, blowing a torrent of cool air all the way through from one end to the other. There was a particular smell in there, some combination of plywood, drywall, insulation and dust. It was a comforting smell. Like an old house. It seems like just the kind of place that would be inhabited by spiders, but thankfully I don't recall meeting any. It was all mine, a fortress of solitude.

My little fort was not very roomy - it was a quite confined space. Only enough room to lay prone or maybe sit cross-legged when I was really little. I was always banging my head, elbows and knees on the walls and exposed studs. I remember enjoying that space until I was too big to move about in there at all. I started getting stuck and had to abandon my little fort. I had many good years in there.

I can still see the artwork that was printed on the sides of those old apple boxes: Plen-T-Color, Mad River, Red Delicious - there were others. The names and artwork on those boxes were a regular background item in my young life. I would sit and stare at them, contemplating what they meant and wondering why grownups often spelled things strangely even though I wasn't allowed to. I remember noticing that the colors frequently didn't line up. That kind of thing would bother me. I had the same frustration with comic books.



Oddity #2 - The Laundry Room

The laundry room was a little closet off the dining room. I believe it had a curtain of some kind instead of a door. This was an important room for many reasons - to a kid. This is where the upright freezer was, on top of which were stored Christmas gifts. The pile would grow from November to December, some wrapped, some in plastic shopping bags. Watching that pile grow was a magical thing. In later years the laundry room was also a great place to take a phone call. In my early teen years we were still tethered by corded phones, so there was very little privacy for the romantically inclined conversationalist. Thankfully, one could drag the phone from the dining room, into the laundry room, perch rather comfortably on top of the dryer and speak with relative privacy. But none of these things really qualify as "oddities." I'm getting to that.

In the ceiling of the room was a small recess. Just one of the handful of unfinished fixtures about the house. There were a few locations that had capped wires poking out - some switch or light that never got installed. Mom told me that the laundry room was originally intended to be a bathroom, and that the box in the ceiling was where a ventilating fan would go. We didn't have a fan that room or the upstairs bathroom. At other people's houses I remember always being annoyed that I never knew which switch turned on the damn light and which one turned on those stupid fans that everyone had. I didn't want the fan. I never wanted the fan. I didn't even know what it was for. The switches in our bathroom made me happy. They both turned on lights. Lights in a dark room make sense. Fans do not. I went for years, in other people's homes, dreading the dumb bathroom switches because you never knew which one was the "right" switch that turned on the light, and which one was the trick switch that turned on a noisy, pointless fan, and left you still fumbling in the dark - while announcing to everyone in the building that someone was about to take a crap. I didn't want that much publicity associated with my restroom visits. It was like drawing the joker when you hit the fan switch. I'm glad we didn't have a fan in our bathroom.

Anyway, our downstairs bathroom was never finished as such (it became a laundry room) and so the fan was never installed. That's fine because if dad had installed that fan, those birds would have had no place to nest. Every spring, we'd hear the clatter of little claws on galvanized ducts. You could see a robin darting in and out of the vent pipe on the outside of the house (that's the pipe that you can see in the brown strip of trim in the middle of the house, in the photo below). Before long, you'd hear the frantic chirping of little baby birds at feeding times. I always enjoyed those little birds. They would show up just as the daffodils were blooming.


Here's a recent photo. Some of the trees have grown up, and dad's mural has been painted over, but besides that, the house looks very much the same as it did in 1984:



Oddity #3 - Painted Floors

Like most kids, probably, I spent a lot of time on the floor, building with Legos, playing with cars and flipping through books. At some point I realized that everyone in the world (except us) had sweet, glorious carpet. How I loved carpeting! It was so soft and welcoming. I recently told someone that we didn't have carpeting in my childhood home and they responded with something like "Well, hardwoods are nice too..." - yes, I'd agree, but we didn't have hardwoods either. Our floors were painted particle board, baby blue in my room. The kitchen and bathroom had tiles, and the stairs had their little strip of shaggy brown carpet. but everything else was painted particle board. I've since learned that that is called "sub floor" - indeed. It wasn't very resistant to wear. I remember the high-traffic areas being somewhat eroded and having little worn-out depressions. In one place, where Erik spilled a glass of orange juice (he was always spilling orange juice), the floor got soggy, expanded like a sponge and become crumbly and brittle when it dried out. That left quite a pit by the time we were done picking at it. On the plus side, a fresh coat of paint made most of it look brand new.

I still like carpeting probably more than most folks. It always seems like a special treat. I'm quite contented to roll around on the floor. It's like the whole house is wearing pajamas on the inside!




I'll just include this little list to remind myself of other interesting features, so I can write about them in the future:

• Bavarian trim makes for great out-the-window escapes.
• I'm now a permanent toe-stepper thanks to those creaky stairs and dad's light sleeping.

Coyotes Ate My Dog

I remember when we got the puppy. That must be one of my earliest memories, because I think I was only 2 years old at the time. I even remember the house we got him from, on the last curve as you head out of the Crooked Mile. I wanted to call him Trusty, after the hound dog in Lady and the Tramp, but the older siblings prevailed and his name became Tag-along. Tag for short. Tag was a smallish, curly, shaggy little beast, very much like Benji, from the movies, but gray instead of brown. Mom always described him as "half terrier, half cocker-poo." Dad always described him as a Muppet. Whatever you called him, he was the best friend a boy could have, and accompanied me on thousands of adventures in the woods and in the river. There is a LOT that I could say about this dog, but for now, I'll just tell you about the time the coyotes ate him - well, they chewed him up pretty good anyway. He lived.

I don't remember ever leaving him out at night intentionally. He had a wicker bed in the living room that he slept in every night. We called that his "basket." He was always free to come and go, no fence. And he always returned before bed time, scratching at the back door to let us know that he was waiting. One night, I guess, he didn't come back in. I don't know if we just didn't notice that he was missing or what. More likely we called for him and eventually gave up, figuring we'd find him on the porch the next morning. Well that was exactly what happened, but not quite like we expected.

Summer nights the windows were always open. I loved the sound of the river outside. Sometimes you could hear coyotes yapping in the field across the creek. I never gave them much of a thought. I have a vague memory of a vague impression that I had in my head. Something about a circle of wild dogs, running in circles in the middle of the field. Eyes glowing. Always circling. Doing something primal. They sound like a tribe of wild savages dancing a war dance around a fire. Chanting, yapping. Celebrating some kill or ancient pre-battle ritual.

I remember hearing them that night, but I don't remember giving it much thought. When I think back to hearing their cries that night, knowing now what was going on, it makes me sick. I can picture it happening. I heard it.

The next morning, dad reports opening the door to call for the dog. He always did this classic dog whistle at the back door. And Tag usually came running, if he wasn't there already. Dad whistled and waited. Whistled again. Then noticed something at his feet. There was Tag, ripped to shreds, limp like a wet rag, lying at the back door. Dad says that Tag lifted his head, but didn't get up.

We put him in a box and dad drove him to the vet.

I have to admit, I don't remember all the details of his injuries. I know for sure there was at least one broken leg. They had to put a steel pin in it. When I think about what must have happened for his little leg to break as a result... it kills me. There were other injuries, something internal. But the leg was what I remember most. The broken leg and lots of bites. They said he almost died.

Tag got all fixed up and the bill came to $300. Mom had sold our antique dining room table the day before, for $300. She said that's proof positive that God provides. Maybe so.


Here's the mutt in question. That's me holding his neck.

Power & Water Part I: The Well Goes Dry

If we didn't have public electricity and phone, I guess we'd qualify as totally "off the grid". No city water, no sewer, no garbage collection - and certainly no cable TV or internet. I'm not sure if cable TV even existed, probably somewhere. That other stuff did exist (besides the internet, of course) but it wasn't available to us. Our water came from a shallow well.

The well was (and still is) located at the back of the house, very near to the river. The problem with the well is that it dried up every summer. There was always that one day in June when you'd turn on the faucet and hear that obnoxious, sputtering, exploding sound of bubbles getting sucked through the system. A little brown water would sputter into the sink and that was the end of well water for the summer. You might have to haul a bucket of water up from the river to flush the toilet for a day or two, but pretty soon dad would initiate the summer water supply switchover.

This was a process we casually referred to as "switching to river water". Dad would chase the spiders out of his auxiliary water pump, wrestle some large, black pipes down the bank, and pretty soon we were back in business. You don't want to drink river water, for fear of the "beaver fever", so we would only use that for showers, dishes and toilets. Drinking water was served up in a large plastic cooler, on the kitchen counter - the kind you might take camping. Filling that up, in town, was part of the daily summer ritual, and usually the kid's job. We'd hop out of the car and fill the cooler at a hose or spigot, while mom waited in the driver's seat. That thing was heavy. As I got older, thankfully, it became much more manageable.

Dad's auxiliary pump sat on the rocks, down at the river's edge. There were a couple years when an autumn rain storm came sooner than expected and washed dad's fancy pump away in the flood. More than once he hopped out of bed in the night to drag it back up the bank, while I held a flashlight. The river wasn't quite capable of a "flash flood" - but the water would rise pretty quickly, and when it did, it transformed from my peaceful summer fishing hole, to a raging, muddy torrent of doom, complete with downed trees as battering rams. When that happened, the river water was no longer suitable as a water supply - it was too muddy. But that rain/flood was the same water that would fill the well back up again, so we could transition back to well water.

The final step was to check the water level and make sure there was nothing untoward floating in there. Despite dad's attempts do seal the top, sometimes critters would find their way into that well, and I don't believe any ever found their way back out with the breath of life still in them. Dad had a cut-off milk jug wired to the end of a long pole, which he would use to dredge the murky waters. More than once he came up with a drowned rat or frog. Apparently, those things weren't too disturbing to dad. He'd remove any dead floaters, dump a cupful of Clorox bleach in the water and declare it safe to drink. I don't ever recall the whole family becoming ill at the same time, so I guess he was right.

Fish, Fishing and Spear Fishing

There is much, much more to be said about the river. For this installment, I'll focus on the fish, mostly catching and eating them. There always was a more-or-less steady supply of trout. I never had a fishing license for the duration of my entire childhood. You just don't bother with that sort of thing when you have your own river. There was no park, no public access and so no rangers. I grew up believing that fishing licenses were for "city folk" - they same way I felt about dog leashes and poop scooping. We just didn't have those things - as a side note, I have no idea where our dog pooped. My entire life, I swear I never saw any of the stuff. Anyway, about the fish...

Catching 'em
I always had one or two fishing poles, leaning up in the corner of the shed. I would buy the cheapest pole I could find, and even found one or two of them in the river itself. I had a small tackle box with an assortment of rusty hooks, a tangle of lures and assorted lead shot weights. I loved lures. They were not only the most effective for catching trout in that river, but I guess I was sort of attracted to them myself. I probably saw them as a collection. I collected all sorts of junk. My favorite lures were the small Mepps spinners, Rooster Tails, and the Dick Nite spoon - which had a special value to me, because I remember my dad saying that he fished with those when he was a kid. I always latched onto dad's comments like that.

Occasionally, I would find a lure in the river, snagged on a stick or wedged between the rocks. I was always glad to find one, because the river claimed more than it's share of mine, which was always an event that upset me greatly. A snagged fishing line is like a slap in the face. And for some reason, those 99-cents lures seemed expensive, so I usually only had one of my favorite. When it was lost to a snag, your day was over until the next trip to the hardware store. I should say a thing or two about that ahrdware store, by the way. Man, I loved that place! We'll get to that another time.

I also fished with Pautzke's Balls-O-Fire salmon eggs, worms and perrywinkles (caddis fly larva). I seem to recall also thinking that it was silly to buy worms, since there are piles of them under every rock and log in sight. I never used marshmallows, Powerbait or a lot of that other stuff you see in the store. I think Powerbait wasn't even invented until I was in 9th grade or so. I'm not really sure.

Here's me, down at the river, with a couple small trout.


Eating 'em
I could get all poetic about fishing, but that's been done by others. Suffice it to say that walking along the river bed well into the dusk is one of life's great pleasures. Especially when it's right out your back door, and home is just up the river bank. It was probably then that I noticed that the Swainson's Thrush is the last bird to stop singing every day. Their bubbly song still haunts me. It's a mysterious, melodic, echoing sound that is impossible to locate, it just sort of drifts all around you as the sun sets. Magical.

If you've never had pan-fried, fresh trout, you can't even imagine what it tastes like. They look like little salmon, but that's where the similarities end. The meat is white, moist and earthy-tasting. It can't be described. I'm not trying to say that it is the best tasting thing in the world - although it is rather good - I'm just saying that it is like nothing else, and I can't think of a suitable comparison to make.

I'd clean my fish on the back porch, using the hose to wash away guts and scales. Usually, I'd throw the heads and guts into the woods, at the edge of the yard. They would disappear into the foliage and that would be the end of them - except for the times the cats would find the heads and return them to us, as little gifts on the porch. I can't tell you how many times we found a dried up old fish head on the porch cut end down, nose pointing to the sky, with flies buzzing around it. After the fish were cleaned - usually 2 or 3 smallish ones, I'd drop them into a bag with a little flour, pepper and salt, shake 'em up and fry them in a cast iron pan with butter. Gawd, they tasted good. They curl when you cook 'em, the fins get crispy and brown and the meat falls off the bone. You can usually pull the spine and all the ribs right out the back in one motion, leaving sweet, tasty meat behind.


Here's a decent sized one. This is about as big as the trout got in that river. This photo was taken in the back yard, right where I would clean the fish. The river is directly behind me, but you can't see it through all the trees.


At some point I also started cooking up the larger crawdads. I'm surprised I went to all the effort, you get less than a mouthful out of each of them, and I never caught more than 3 at a time, if that. However, dipped in butter, they taste just like fresh crab.

Then I made a smoker. I must have been reading some books about native American survival stuff at the time - I loved books like that. I made cedar bark rope, willow branch arrows, stinging nettle tea and all kinds of stuff based on books like that, but that's another story. For my smoker, I made a box out of scrap plywood and augured some holes in the top. I made two shelves from galvanized wire mesh and a used a cookie tin in the bottom to hold charcoal briquettes. I located a small alder tree somewhere in the woods and chopped it down, preserving the wood chips for my smoker. I'll never forget the sweet, acidic, smoky taste. It's certainly unique. I even smoked a few of those crawdad tails, which, in the heat and smoke, withered to tiny morsels that would have fallen through the screen if they weren't stuck to it. Home-smoked, fresh trout is a special treat. I'll have to do that again one of these days.

Spear Fishing

Chris and me, spear fishing in the river. The photo had "1994" written on the back, so I guess we were 17 years old.

When I said that I found a snorkeling mask in that abandoned trailer... I actually found two. My buddy Chris and I spend quite a lot of time crawling around the river bed, spying on fish. Naturally we wanted to catch them, and made our first attempts with nets, to no avail. The fish always stay just out of arm's reach. So we made spears.

Every sporting goods store has, near the fishing equipment, a "Frog Spear" hanging. That's a small (about 4 inches long), black spearhead, with four thin, barbed prongs. They are cheap. It had always been one of those pieces of gear that I ignored - I can't imagine who is out there spearing frogs or why - but it was suddenly very a relevant and even exciting piece of equipment that we had to have. We purchased our spearheads and hurried home to affix them to the end of some old, aluminum ski poles that were in the shed. A little black electrical tape was plenty to pull it all together and we were back in the river that same night, eagerly spearing fish, like the adventurous, underwater predators we imagined ourselves to be.

In nearby lake Rossiger, we recalled seeing some huge largemouth bass lurking under the docks, and determined that they needed to be speared and eaten as well. I must have been about 14 years old at this point, because I wasn't old enough to drive quite yet, so we had to rely on Chris's older brother Jay to drive us to the lake. We knew that spear fishing from a public park would be frowned upon by the park ranger, so we modified our spears to be collapsable (just like a pool cue) and snuck them down to the water under our towels, where we threaded them together under the water.

Our first attempt resulted in sadness because the bass were so large, strong and thick, that, upon being impaled, immediately wriggled off of our spears and swam away to die. The prongs didn't even penetrate all the way through to the other side of the fish! We felt guilty for killing fish in vain and saddened that we were not able to bring home our much-desired trophies that day. Not to mention that our frog spears were bent to oblivion, even missing prongs. So we remade our spears with home-made prongs - much larger and stronger - I seem to recall sharpening the end of a large bolt on the grinding wheel. We eventually caught our fish, snuck them out of the lake (again, under our towels) and certainly must have eaten them, although I remember nothing of the taste of bass.