Gone Fishin'

Punsutawney Phil saw his shadow again this week.

Of course he did... Which means, it's nearly time for the Weather Games here in western Pennsylvania. In fact, they kicked off two weeks ago, with barely a dusting of snow all season, followed by eight inches in two days. Then a week later, frigid cold that shatters your hair strands when you pull up your hood rolls in. That gets chased away in another week (so yesterday, basically) by ten more inches of snow in under twelve hours.

We never paid attention to Phil when I lived near his homebase. Nor did we consult the Farmer’s Almanac, or check the morning paper. We already knew our teeth would chatter on the first day of trout season as we trudged through the snow-dotted woods, hauling our poles, a tackle box and a cooler without ice.

During cold weather, we couldn’t pluck nightcrawlers from the grass after a pounding rain. Instead, we’d stop by the moldy-smelling bait shop, where a hunched old man with missing teeth peered out from beneath a straw hat with greasy fingerprints on its brim. Dull florescent lights hummed overhead, muffling the old man's wheezy voice.  Twelve ‘crawlers fer fifty cents, mister.  Forever the optimist, my dear old Pops always got three dozen.

And he always brought a steaming thermos of Chase & Sanborn coffee, the smell (wet dog? musty wallpaper? not sure anymore) of which I despised. And he never forgot a bag of crumbly Archway Orange-frosted cookies, my favorite. Since I was too young for coffee, we jumped in his old white pickup - with its floorboards rotted out to where so we could see the road rushing beneath us - and we drove to a mom & pop store across from where my grandfather worked in the mines for decades. Pops let me choose my own pint of milk from the dairy case, and he lifted me up so I could reach down in to grab it.

As we settled in along the banks of Rattlesnake Creek, Pops splashed some of my milk into that smelly coffee. He'd be astounded that I became deathly allergic to it as an adult.

He & I would sit for hours, shivering, singing goofy kiddie songs that he’d heard blaring from my pink plastic Snow White record player. Sometimes he’d make up little challenges to pass the time. One involved me guessing which animal he was imitating. Neither one of us were very skilled at it; his attempt at squirrel noises sounded more like a cat having metal grating across its butt.

Once during particularly damp & mild afternoon, he told me the day’s challenge was to stand as still as I possibly could. Now that game, I knew I could win! Although curious as to why he crept past me with a pinched expression on his normally serene face, I remained a statue. (I WAS WINNING!)

Pops let out all his breath with a powerful grunt as his boot smashed down on a rotting stump. I broke my pose, just in time to see him kick aside the biggest snake I’d ever seen, about a foot and a half from where I stood. It was still quivering. He explained it was a reaction of the dead snake’s nervous system. I had a fantastic story for my first grade class back at school Monday.

After Pops moved out later that year, my grandfather and my baby sister became my new fishing pals. Grandpa (whom we always called Paw) took us to the five & dime store downtown and bought us bamboo rods with his coalminer’s pension check. And he taught us the proper way to bait a hook. The three of us piled into his old Chrysler, clutching waxed-paper-wrapped peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, and a bag of plums and bananas for him (he wasn't supposed to eat Reese cups with diabetes, but we never told on him when he did). A quarter-mile past my great-grandparents' house on a dirt road hemmed with Queen Ann’s Lace, violets and scrubgrass, a small pond teeming with crappies was the area’s best-kept secret. Paw himself fished there as a child.

Once we arrived, he angled the car forward at the pond’s edge and climbed on the hood, removing his twill bucket hat to tan his shiny scalp. Eventually, he laid back onto the windshield and sipped from a brown paper bag, which he told us was bottled orange juice. And we never told on him for nursing that sweaty quart of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer either. He basked in the warm rays like a happy child, listening to the Pirates game on his transistor radio. Willie Stargell was his hero.

Sister and I sat with our poles in the shallow water, eating sandwiches (tossing our crusts away to the sparrows hopping around nearby) while Paw dozed off. The more he drank, the less important it was to conceal that brown bottleneck in the crumpled bag. Like Pops, our grandfather never volunteered for fishing because of the sport factor.  It was all about the relaxation. And forget the first day of trout - a sunny day in any month was perfect for fishing with his girls, slugging a wee bit too much "orange juice", and smiling as Willie rounded the bases again.

As Sis and I got older and could drive ourselves, we searched out other fishing spots. Our favorite quickly became the biggest regional lake, a mile or so off a state route on the outskirts of the county. You'd never suspect from its serene beauty that two teenagers disappeared from there the year before, leaving only their poles and tackle box behind as proof they'd ever been there.

This lake had a boating dock and public restrooms that, from the outside, resembled a log cabin. We’d arrive in early morning with a cooler full of Doritos, Mello Yellow, and Slim Jims, always somehow underdressed for the weather.

On a particularly frigid April morning - another "first day of trout season" - we left our houses freshly showered with sopping-wet hair. We both had wild, springy curls – perms were all the rage in the mid-eighties. By the time we had the car unpacked, our long tresses were heavy-gauge wire encased in glass, frozen into evil corkscrews. Had either of us gotten too close to the other, we could have easily lost an eye.

My sister was an enthusiastic caster, the undisputed champion of hooking the highest tree branch along the lake bed. Several grueling years of softball practice had fortified her spindly arm into a whip. After our first trip out together, we learned to stop at Murphy Mart the night before for spare hooks and spools of nylon line. She quickly learned to tie new hooks on like a pro.

When the fish weren’t biting, we’d sit Indian-style on a tattered pink blanket, watching the waves sparkle, enjoying the clouds moving gracefully in the pale sky, their reflection gliding across the water like ghosts. Sometimes we’d just watch tadpoles darting over partially-submerged beer can tabs, swollen cheese curls, and little gray sinkers clamped over snippets of nylon line at the shoreline. We would chatter and giggle, about everything, about nothing. And the times we didn’t say a word were good too. I glanced at her and wondered what she was thinking. More often than not, I figured I probably knew.

Sis and I got older and our domestic responsibilities grew. Fishing was a luxury that time didn’t permit. As the years passed, I moved to a different part of the state before I picked up another pole.

That time I trudged through the brush with my then-boyfriend (now Husband of 28 years). I was homesick in this new town, and being laid up from recent foot surgery was stoking my depression. Husband thought some fresh air might help cheer me up.

He was right - on that sunny, temperate day, my mood lifted almost immediately as I gimped to his truck. My foot was stitched up and casted, protected by an obnoxiously large blue & white rubber boot with Velcro closures.

We found an idyllic spot to set up. Husband had tossed an empty plaster bucket in the truck bed, and turned it upside down for me to sit on close to the shoreline. With my bad foot pointed skyward, resting on the thick polyurethane boot heel, I cast my line in. Husband walked to the forest's edge to find a branch to hold my pole.

He was no longer in sight when a small boat approached from downstream. Two men in it wore khaki green uniforms. I spotted a badge gleaming in the sun, and wished I could bolt, even though I wasn’t doing anything illegal. As a former (spirited) teenager, I couldn't shake the feeling that the old days would catch up with me someday. Unlike when we were fifteen, running from the authorities was not an option that day.

The game warden and his partner stopped their boat directly in front of me. The one with the gun told me to show him my license. I tried to balance on my one healthy foot while unclipping my license holder from my belt loop. My foot throbbed, and my cheap sunglasses slid down my nose as I teetered to stay upright. But I pulled it off. I thought they'd want to get close enough to actually see and read the license...  Turned out, they just wanted to harass a lame woman who was all by herself.

Several minutes later I'd convinced them that I wasn’t a dangerous criminal, indiscriminately slaughtering wildlife without the proper state-issued permit to do so.

And as they sailed away, Husband was in a full trot back to me and my plastic bucket. He’d seen them leaving, but missed everything else. He chuckled when I filled him in.

I didn’t even get a nibble that day. And I haven’t been fishing since.

I wonder what my sister thought of when Phil saw his shadow again this year?