That Ain't Funny

As a boy on the ranch there were certain talents that you needed to survive. We were lucky enough to have a very long stretch of the Colorado River that bordered the land that we lived on. So that meant that of course you needed to know how to fish.

Now there are different ways to fish. You can sit on the bank of the river with a single pole, attach a grasshopper, or a worm recently un-earth from behind the pig pen (best place around the house to find the biggest worms) and hurl the bait out into the deep waters of the river and wait for whatever type of fish decides to come along and nibble on the bait and with a good tug at just the right moment the fight would be on.

My mother enjoyed this way of fishing. She could sit and set a line or two out, not to far away from each other. Then she would watch them while smoking her cigarette and make small talk about what ever seemed appropriate at the time. Now, there was one main rule that Mom had if you choose to go fishing with her. That was, that once your bait entered the water, and by the time its ripples could not longer be distinguished, you could not speak above a whisper. Because..... the fish may hear you....

As for me... that wasn't fishing.... I found it very hard to just sit and watch the end of a rod to see it twitch as the tale-tale sign that something had come my way. It seemed to me that tempting the fish with a glob of worms or drowning a grasshopper just didn't seem sporting. That and it drove me crazy to sit still for that long. Years later, society came up with a name for boys like me. It was called A.D.D , Attention Deficit Disorder. My Mom had another name, she called it H.G.A.I.H.P. "He's Got Ants In His Pants", because I just couldn't sit still.

I felt that a fish needed to be hunted... Sneak up on them with a lure and fool them into attacking the object. I would travel up and down the banks of the river looking, thinking, and figuring out where I thought the fish would be lying in wait watching for something to come within its range. In my mind, that gave the fish a standing chance, and gave me a good reason to keep moving.

I felt also that for a boy to get the advantage over a 'smart' fish I had to practice my casting abilities to be able to place a lure in just the right place in front of the fish to fool him/her into believing that it was something real that had made the mistake of passing it's way. You may ask how I determined which fish were 'smart'? Well that to me was obvious. The smarter the fish, the longer they lived, the longer they lived... the bigger they got... result, a Smart Fish. So when I caught a large fish,well that only meant I was becoming a better fisherman, which in a young boys world, was a claim to fame. Follow me? But of course.

Now, I could not stay all day on the river practicing my casting styles, I also had chores to do and games to play back at home. So in the evenings, when everything else was done, I would venture out into our back yard with my rod and reel and practice casting a small plastic frog with the barb of it's hook embedded deep with it's body. The target was usually a piece of loose leaf paper, no.. not my homework, so that the wind would catch it and move it to another distance from me, thus giving me several angles to practice my casting.

Well, one afternoon the wind was dead still so after a few casts at the paper I became bored, remember, ADD. Looking around the back yard I made up the idea of using the corner of the house to represent a big brush pile along the riverbank. I prepared to cast just past the "brush pile" so that with a couple of tugs on the rod the frog would come hopping past the target and land in the would be fishes domain..

With the first cast. the fake frog landed about six feet past the corner of the house. With one tug it hopped about three feet. I smiled, and though to myself, "dang I'm good" and again popped the tip of the rod slightly bringing the frog right to the corner of the house just as I wanted it to.
That was when I smiled and was about to "mentally" pat myself on the back when Mom's favorite Tomcat which claimed the backyard his domain, came flying (I swear it was two feet in the air) and pounced on the FAKE rubber frog.

Now.... I, being the talented fisherman that I was did and what just about any other fisherman would have done in that scenario, SET THE HOOK... on my now.. CAT fish. For a brief second.. I found this highly funny until I realized that he was headed back around the corner of the house to the opening to the crawlspace that allowed us to go under the house.
 
For the next twenty to thirty minutes my brothers and I crawled and searched for the CAT fish under the house finally catching him ( he wasn't in the best of moods by that time), nor was my Mother who had heard the commotion and came out of the house and found out what I had done.

Finally with Cat, Frog and boys out from under the house safe... Mom proceeded to tell me that Dad was going to hear about this when he got home and I knew what I could expect...

That was when I decided that.... That Ain't Funny....

Side Note: The cat lived a full life with just a small "hair lip" but did seem to disappear every time I came out the backdoor with my rod and reel ever since....

Boys... will be Boys.... What can I say.... Raised Country, Raised Right

Onward Thru The Fog...

Johnny