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.