"Fifty dollars."
I was so elated at having found a raft that I had it home and half inflated before it occurred to me to feel behind my ears. Sure enough, definite signs of moisture.
What Grogan had sold me was not your ordinary seven-man rubber life raft.
No. Although I couldn't be certain I was reasonably sure this was the very same raft I had once seen in one of those World War II movies set in the South Pacific. It was the one where the bomber crew has had to ditch in the ocean, and the pilot suddenly yells, "Dang it all to heck, men, the last burst from that Zero riddled our life raft!"
I yelled, too, all the time I was patching up the raft, a task just slightly more complicated than performing abdominal surgery on a hippopotamus.
My yells, however, registered a good deal higher than the pilot's on the scale of profanity, and called into question the ancestry of the raft, the War Department, the Zero, and last but not least, Henry P.
Grogan.
By the time the raft was finally repaired it looked like some creature from the lower depths that had died of yellow jaundice, bloated and popped to the surface where it had advanced into one of the later stages of decay. Like my first raft, it was not an attractive vessel.
My friend Retch and I would inflate the raft at home with the blower on my wife's vacuum cleaner and then tie it to the top of Retch's small foreign car to haul to a river. Once we were stopped by two highway patrolmen. One of them said he had thought the reason Retch was exceeding the speed limit in a restricted zone was that we were trying to get away from a giant slug that had grabbed our car. I must say it gives the police a bad image when two officers giggle hysterically while one of them is writing you out a ticket.
The raft rekindled in me my old addiction for floating down creeks and rivers. Every spare minute that we could get away from our jobs, Retch and I were either floating down a river or poring over maps to find a good river to float down. We floated streams just deep enough to call damp. On the other extreme, we floated the Snake and Columbia, both of which had stretches of water that could make a man drunk with fear just looking at photographs of them. Retch and I shot rapids that made our hair stand on end so hard the follicles turned inside out. Sometimes we had to bail the cold sweat out of the raft to keep from swamping.
And we called it a whole lot of fun.
"M-m-man," we would say to each other, "that was f-f-fun!"
As we grew olden-sometimes on the raft we would age a couple of years in just five seconds--we began to prefer relaxing floats down gentle rivers, maybe catching a few fish or spending a couple of days hunting in a remote area. Once in a while we would be surprised to find ourselves bouncing along over what we called "interesting water," but for the most part these floats were without excitement.
One hunting season Retch and I were going over our maps when we found this river that wound through a thirty-mile stretch of uninhabited country.
it looked like just the place for a combined float and deer-hunting trip. On the map the river appeared calm enough, but we decided to ask around and see if we could find someone who had floated it. We talked to several people who had been down the river and they told us about the only thing we had to worry about was that the river would be deep enough to float the raft. "But watch out for the Narrows," they all said, almost as an afterthought. Then they would describe the horrors of the Narrows how the river squeezed between these two rock walls, at the same time dropping over a series of waterfalls and making several right angle turns, boiling over rocks the size of houses standing on end, and ...
"Enough!" we said. "Just tell us where the Narrows are located."
No one seemed exactly sure about their location. "You can't miss 'em, though," one fellow said. "You'll know em when you see 'em."
That was what threw us off.
On the first day of the float, Retch and I left our car at the lower end of the river and hired a local rancher to haul us, Retch's dog Smarts, and our raft and gear up to the jumping-off place. You would have thought the rancher had never been confined in a pickup with two madmen before, he was so nervous.
"What for you fellas wanta float that doughnut down the river?" he asked.
"Wanta do some deer hunting," I said.
"Hell," he said. "You could hunt deer on my ranch. Be glad to get rid of a couple of them. Critters are eatin' me right into the poor house."
"Naw," Retch said, "Hunting' that way is too easy. We like to make it as hard as possible."
The rancher didn't say much after that, no doubt fearing for his ife.
Anyone crazy enough to float a doughnut down a river just to make deer hunting hard might grab you by the throat if you happened to say the wrong thing.
After we had unloaded on the bank of the river, he rolled his window down just enough so that a madman couldn't lunge through and grab a person by the throat. "Watch out for the Narrows," he yelled, and then tore off up the road.
Our first day on the river was pleasant enough, almost without incident.
Then toward evening Smarts, who had been asleep on the pile of rubberized duffle bags, leaped to his feet and sounded a warning.
Shortly, we too could hear the ominous roar of water off in the distance.
"The Narrows!" I said. "We'd better go ashore and have a look at them."
Well, we had to laugh at the way folks tend to exaggerate. The river did squeeze into a narrow channel between these two big rocks all right, then tummble down a modest stair-step fall and finally break into a rapid. "Har, liar, liar!" we laughed. "So that's the infamous Narrows! Har, liar, liar!" The only water we took in the raft was tears from laughing so hard.
"Imagine" Retch said, wiping his eyes. "Grown men chickening out from shooting the Narrows!"
"I hereby name them the Chick-a-nout Narrows!" I yelled, waving my paddle over the river like a scepter. "The Chick-a-nout Narrows!"
From then on we relaxed and just enjoyed ourselves, our former anxiety over the Chick-a-nout Narrows now merely a source of amusement. We laughed every time one of us mentioned them. "Har, liar, liar!"
We spent the next day hunting, without success. we started out with the idea of shooting a couple of trophy bucks and finally settled for the possibility of bagging a couple of hamburgers at a drive-in on our way home.
When we staggered exhausted into camp that evening, Retch said, "Hey, what's say we throw our gear on the raft and float out of here tonight?
After all we don't have to worry about the Chick-a-nout Narrows anymore. Har, liar, liar!"
"Good idea," I said. "Har, liar, liar!"
As the raft bobbed gently along on the moonlit river, we would take turns dozing. Sometimes we would forget who was supposed to be dozing and we would both doze.
On one of these occasions, I awoke with a start and noticed that the momentum of the river had picked up considerably. Also the river was deeper.
The reason the river was deeper was that it was flowing through a channel between two sheer rock walls, and the channel was getting--I hate to think of the word--narrow!
"Hey, the river is getting narrow!" I yelled.
"Har ...?" Retch said, popping up in the raft.
Smarts whimpered. His hair stood out like the quills of a porcupine under attack.
Up ahead the rock walls came together to form a narrow black crack.
Occasionally a big glob of foam would spout up into the crack, sparkle for a moment in the moonlight, then drop back into the darkness. Retch and the dog and I all shouted directions to each other but all we could hear was the sound of thunder emanating from the black crack. The three of us churned the river into a froth trying to paddle back upstream. And then the current sucked us into the Narrows.
I will not attempt to tell what shooting the Narrows in the middle of the night was like--about the paddles snapping in our hands like match sticks, about the river wrapping the raft around us like dough around three frightened wieners, the drop-offs, the drop-ups,
the part where we were walking horizontally around the walls carrying the raft, the part where the raft was on top of us and the river was on top of the raft, and certainly not about the parts where it got bad. It will suffice to say that when we finally emerged from the Narrows, I was paddling with a bolt-action .30-06, Retch was paddling with the dog, and there was no sign to be found of the raft.
Only in recent years has some of the old yearning for rafting returned, but I have no trouble fighting it off. Retch doesn't care much for rafting anymore either, but he has at last reached the point where he can joke about the Chick-a-nout Narrows. He lets on as if he still can't stand the sound of rushing water. If someone turns on a faucet too near him, he pretends to go all white in the face and starts shouting, "Watch out for the Narrows! Watch out for the Narrows!"
The Miracle of the Fish Plate
When I was a kid, my family belonged to the landed aristocracy of northern Idaho: we owned the wall we had our backs to. We were forced to the wall so often that my mother decided she might-as-well buy the thing to have it handy and not always have to be borrowing one.
Part of our standard fare in those days was something my grandmother called gruel, as in "Shut up and eat your gruel!" My theory is that if you called filet mignon "gruel" you couldn't get most people to touch it with a ten-foot pole. They would rather eat the pole. But when you call gruel "gruel," you have a dish that makes starvation look like the easy way out.
My mother shared this opinion. She preferred to call gruel "baked ham" or "roast beef" or "waffles," as in "Shut up and eat your waffles."
One Christmas when we were hunched against the wall, she had the idea of thickening the gruel, carving it, and calling it "turkey." We were saved from this culinary aberration by a pheasant that blithely crashed through one of our windows to provide us with one of the finest Christmas dinners it has ever been my pleasure to partake of--pheasant et gruel. Mom said that God had sent us the pheasant. I figured that if He hadn't actually sent it, He had at least done His best by cursing the pheasant with poor eyesight and a bad sense of direction.
In that time and place, wild game was often looked upon as a sort of divine gift, not just by us but by many of the poor people, too.
Hunting and fishing were a happy blend of sport, religion, and economics, and as a result, game was treated with both respect and reverence. In recent years, my affluence has increased to the point where I can dine out at Taco Tim's or Burger Betty's just about anytime I please, so I must admit that hunting and fishing are no longer economic necessities to me. To the contrary, they are largely the reasons I can't afford to dine out at better places, Smilin' John's Smorgasbord, for example. I still regard the pursuit of game as primarily a mystical, even religious quest. To tie into a lunker trout is to enter into communion with a different dimension, a spiritual realm, something wild and unknown and mysterious. This theory of mine was confirmed by no less an authority than a Catholic priest with whom I occasionally share fishing water.
"Me lad," he said, "whenever yourself catches any fish a-tall 'tis a miracle."
I personally would not go so far as to say that my catching a fish would fall into the category of miracles--except ... well, yes, there was one time.
You might call it The Miracle of the Fish Plate.
When I was nine years old and the only angler in our family, my catching a fish was a matter of considerable rejoicing on the part of not only myself but my mother, sister, and grandmother as well. There was none of that false praise one occasionally sees heaped upon a kid nowadays--"Oh, my goodness, look at the great big fish Johnny caught!
Aren't you just a little man!" No, there was none of that nonsense.
"Hey," my sister, The Troll, would yell. "P. F. Worthless caught a fish!"
"Looks like it's worth about three bites," my grandmother would say by way of appraisal. "But it's a dang sight better than nothin'."
"Put it on the fish plate," my mother would order. "Maybe by Sunday he will have caught enough so we can have fish instead of 'baked ham' for dinner."
The concept of the fish plate may require some explanation. My fishing was confined to a small creek that ran through the back of our place.
In those far-off times, the legal limit was twenty-one trout. Although I had heard people speak of "limiting out," I never really believed them. It was an achievement beyond comprehension, like somebody running a four-minute mile, or walking on the moon. No one had ever fished with greater persistence and dedication than I, day in and day out, and I knew that it was not humanly possible to catch a limit of twenty-one fish. Six or seven maybe, but certainly not twenty-one!
Days would go by when I would not get even a single tiny nibble. I would send a hundred worms into watery oblivion for every solid bite.
But every so often, suddenly, flashing in a silvery arc above my head, would be a caught trout, usually coming to rest suspended by line from a tree branch or flopping forty feet behind me in the brush. The notion of "playing" a fish seemed nearly as ridiculous to me as "limiting out."
Thus, one by one and two by two I would accumulate little six-, sevenand eight-inch trout over a period of several days (reluctantly releasing all fish less than six inches) until there were enough for a fish dinner. The collection place for these fish was a plate we kept for that purpose on the block of ice in the icebox.
It was known as the fish plate.
I can say without any exaggeration whatsoever that our family watched the fish plate as intently as any investor ever watched a stock market ticker tape.
The summer of The Miracle of the Fish Plate was rather typical: we were living- on gruel and greens; the garden was drying up for lack of rain; my mother was out of work; the wall had been mortgaged and the bank was threatening to foreclose. But good fortune can't last forever and we soon fell on hard times. It was then that we received a letter from a wealthy relative by the name of Cousin Edna, informing us that she would be traveling in our part of the country and planned to spend a day visiting with us. That letter struck like a bolt of lightning.
The big question was, "What shall we feed Cousin Edna?" Cousin Edna was a cultured person, a lady who in her whole life had never once sat vis-a-vis a bowl of gruel. Certainly, we would not want her to get the impression we were impoverished. After all, we had a reputation to maintain befitting the landed aristocracy of northern Idaho. After long deliberation, my mother fastened a hard cold eye on me, which I can tell you is just about as disgusting as it sounds. "All we can do is have fish for dinner," she said. "How's the fish plate?"
"It's got two six-inchers on it," I said.
"Pooh!" my grandmother said. "There's no way he's gonna catch enough trout before Cousin Edna gets here. The boy he's just slow. And he's got no patience and is just too damn noisy to catch fish. Why his grandfather used to go to the crick and be back in an hour with a bucketful of the nicest trout you could have ever laid eyes on." As you may have guessed, my grandfather was not one of the country's great conservationists. Although he died before my time, his ghost hovered about, needling me about my angling skills. My grandmother attributed his great fishing success to his patience and silence.
Personally, I figured he probably used half a stick of dynamite as a lure.
"Don't tell me we have to depend on P. F. Worthless!" my sister wailed.
"We'll be humiliated!"
"I'll catch all the fish we need," I yelled. "Shut up," Mom said, soothingly. "If worse comes to worse, we'll let Cousin Edna eat the two fish we have and the rest of us will pretend we prefer 'baked ham."" "It ain't gonna wash," Gram said. "The best we can hope for is another deranged pheasant."
The gauntlet had been hurled in my face. It was up to me to save the family pride, or die trying. I dug my worms with special care, selecting only those that showed qualities of endurance, courage, and a willingness to sacrifice themselves to a great cause. By that time of year, I had fished the creek so thoroughly that I had cataloged almost every fish in
it, knew them all on a first name basis, and was familiar with their every whim and preference. They, on the other hand, knew all my tricks. It would not be easy enticing them to take a hook but I was determined to do it.
And it was not easy. I knew where a nice eight-inch brookie was holed up under a sunken stump. In the grim cold light of first dawn, when he would not be expecting me, I crawled through the wet brush and stinging nettles just above his hideout. I waited, soaked, teeth chattering quietly, passing the time by studying the waves of goosebumps rippling up and down my arms. As the first rays of morning sun began to descend through the pine trees, I lowered a superb worm, one blessed not only with dauntless courage but intellect as well, into the sluggish current that slid beneath the tangle of naked stump roots. I knew that I could not retrieve the hook without snagging it unless the point was covered by the mouth of a trout. Never was a finer bait presented so naturally, with such finesse. The line slackened, the hook drifting with the currents in the labyrinth of roots. A slight tremor came up the line. I whipped the rod back and the fat little eight-incher came flashing out from under the stump. He threw the hook and landed on the bank ten feet from me. I lunged for him, had him in my grasp. He slipped loose and landed in the water, where he circled frantically in an effort to get his bearings. I plunged in after him hoping to capitalize on his momentary confusion. Unfortunately, the water was much deeper than I expected and closed over my head like the clap of doom. As I dog-paddled my way into the shallows, I realized that filling the fish plate might be even more difficult than I had anticipated the chore would be.
A Fine & Pleasant Misery Page 7
