VACATION AND RAINBOW TROUT – 1975 STYLE
I bought Sandra a Centennial Edition T-bird for her birthday and we were really looking forward to taking a vacation to visit our friends that had moved from Corpus Christi to Enid, Oklahoma because of his job transfer.
School let out and we were packed and heading out. The bird would really eat up the highway and that was before the ids in D.C. put the double nickel speed limit on us to generate more local revenue. Stupid feds anyway, if they cared about lives they would have kept our ass out of Viet Nam.
We pulled into Enid about eight or so hours later and started partying into the night. The next day Victor and I went carousing all the pawn shops, one was a gun shop/pawn shop and I found a Belgium Browning 3" magnum with the goose barrel on it. The price tag I think said $59.95. I told the guy I would take it, but he said someone had made a layaway payment on it and he had to wait. I told him I would give him a hundred dollars for it and he said ok. The gun is still in cosmoline, I've never assembled it to this day.
The next day we took off and went touring through Arkansas, looking at all the lakes, rivers, tourist things and wound up in Branson, Missouri to spend the night. The next day saw us touring the local rainbow trout hatchery. They showed us the spawning tanks and the different grow-out ponds. Then they showed us the tailrace to the hatchery where they let the trout out into the White River for stocking. It was full of fish wanting to get back to the hatchery for their free meal ticket. There were some very nice ones in it. There was a park area where this stream was so we went to have picnic there and I wandered over to the tailrace to watch the trout. Didn't take long and I went to town and got a can of corn. Took me a ten or twelve foot long piece of monofilament line with a little snelled hook on it and sat down on the rocks to check things out. I flipped a kernel out and it was rushed by a hoard of trout. I knew I was in business.
I got Victor and Henrietta's three boys, they were small then, and showed them how to put the trout in their pants and take them to the ice chests in the back of the cars so no one would know what we were doing. I just sat there flipping the kernels out and gently easing the trout into the rocks where I would stun them and the boys would slip them to the cars.
Sixteen trout later the game warden came rushing up in a cloud of dust, jumped out of his car and ran over to me saying he saw me fishing and where were the fish.
Sandra and the rest were sure we were all going to prison and just stayed away watching, keeping the boys occupied. The warden said he had been watching me catch fish with his binoculars and demanded to know where they were. I just told him he needed to clean his lenses and looked at him like he had three eyes and was smoking a suspicious kind of grass or weed. He tore those rocks up, turned all of them over and saw the corn I was feeding them. He said, "YOU WERE FEEDING THE FISH," to which I said, "Yes, but so were other people. The sign says
’No Fishing’, not ‘No Feeding’,” to which I thought he was going to blow a gasket. The kids were all huddled up to their parents and looking at him like he was nuts. He looked at them with a glare and left in a huff. Later that night in our kitchenette we dined on fresh rainbows and camp spuds. What a day. We had rainbows and sunny-sides for breakfast this morning, I have to have reminders like that to get this stuff out.
Mark Crider, picarescue heteroclite ©1997