How I Learned That Fish Are Everywhere

"Hello?"
"Is Troy there?"
"He's down seinin' at the end of the road."
"Oh.  Okay.  Well, thanks."
I hung up the phone.  Mrs. McGaugh had recognized my voice and knew who I was.  Probably nobody else would have been calling for Troy anyway.  I went outside and got on my bike and rode down to the end of the road to the highway.  I didn't know where Troy'd be seining, but the culvert where our road met the highway was the only place it could have been.  Besides, I knew that to Mrs. McGaugh "the end of the road" meant down by the highway because they lived at the other end. 

There had been a hard rain a couple of days before and the ditches were still full of water.  When I got to the highway I could see Troy and some kid I didn't know down in the concrete culvert off to the left of our road about fifty yards up the highway.  I could only see their heads as the culvert dropped low below the road.  I looked for cars then pedaled over to where they were.  They were intent on what they were doing and didn't notice me when I rode up.  Troy was shirtless and in jeans wading in the waist deep muddy water in the ditch.  He held a wooden pole of one end of a seine and the kid I didn't know had the other pole.  Troy looked up when I got to the edge of the culvert.

"Whatch'all doin'?" I asked.
"Seinin' for catfish," Troy said.
"There's catfish in there?" I asked.
"Yeah.  There's a bunch of 'em."

There was a white five gallon bucket at the edge of the water and I laid my bike over in the grass and went to have a look.  Down in the bucket was about a foot of muddy water and every now and then a little catfish about three inches long would swim near enough to the top so I could see it.

"James said he'd give us a dollar for each one we caught to put in his stock tank."

I was impressed.  James Moeller was Troy's neighbor at the end of the road and he had a small tank dug into the pasture behind his house.

"How many d' y'all got?" I asked, calculating how many catfish I'd have to catch to make it worth it to get into that dirty water and get all wet and muddy.

"Coupla dozen."
"Where'd they come from?" I asked.
"When it floods fish from the pond and ever'where get into the ditches."

And that's how I learned that there were fish everywhere.

Where we lived there was a pond in the pasture across the street.  It was dug to get fill to make the base for our road.  It was probably thirty yards across and circular.  The pond was eight to ten feet deep in the center with shallow edges all around.  It had always been fenced off and I had never been that interested in it.  Besides, the man who owned the land with the pond on it was out tending his cows pretty often and even at that age I knew that trespassing would probably get me in trouble.

There were a couple of other small ponds around where we lived.  They were really stock tanks dug for cattle, but I really didn't understand that concept at the time.  One of them was James Moeller's.  It was really small; no more than a mud hole really.  Rumor was that James had caught some big catfish in the river and threw them in his tank, but I had seen the small tank and it was hard for me to believe that a fish of any size could live in there, much less several of them.  The other tank was back behind James' pasture and another half mile or so through the brush and more pasture.  Whoever owned that land rarely visited, or so I thought because I'd never seen them.

After I learned that there were fish everywhere I asked Troy if he thought there were fish in that back tank.  Even though Troy said there were, it was sort of a rhetorical question because I was already convinced there were.  My imagination took off and I began to think that there must be some really big fish in that tank.  I asked Troy if he wanted to try fishing in that back tank and if he thought James would pay us two dollars apiece for big ones.  Troy seemed pretty sure that he would.  But, Troy said, the man who owned that land had cattle out there and he was always driving his truck in the pasture tending to his cows.  Troy's house was closer to it so he would have seen the man's truck more than I could've.  "Well what if we went at night?" I asked.  Troy said night fishing for catfish was good and he thought we could probably catch a few, so we made a pla.

It was going to have to be secret because our parents couldn't find out we were trespassing.  Troy's younger cousin Jeff was spending the night with him on the night we wanted to try it, so we were going to have to take him too.  That worked out fine, though, because we needed an excuse to camp out.  We couldn't stay in one of our houses because our parents would hear us leave the house late at night when we left to go to the tank.  We could explain the camping by saying we wanted to take Jeff.  So it was all set. 

Jeff's mom dropped him off that evening and just before dark we took our small tent out to the back of the McGaugh's pasture behind Troy's house.  It was only about seventy-five yards from his house, but it was far enough.  We set up the tent and rolled out our sleeping bags.  Then I needed to take a shit, but it was already dark and I didn't want to walk back up to the house just for that purpose.  I decided to shit outside the tent in the weeds.  Besides, I could show off to the younger Jeff that I was a tough guy who could shit out in the wilderness.  So, for the second time in my life, up to that point, I shit outdoors.  (The first time I'd been about three.)

We laid down in the tent with the idea that we'd let some time pass for Troy's parents and the Moellers to go to sleep.  I must have dozed off and Troy must have too, but I woke up to Troy yelling at Jeff in a hushed tone, "Jeff, stop that!  Stop it!"  When I woke up I could sense Jeff making some kind of fast movements, but it was dark and I could barely see.  I would put it together later, much later, that Jeff had been masturbating.  The kid couldn't have been more than nine or ten years old.  (Several years later Jeff accidentally strangled himself and died in an autoerotic ashphyxiation jerkoff session.  I guess he had it pretty bad.)

We were awake now and at least an hour had passed so we figured now was a good time to go.  We gathered up the fishing poles and bait that we had brought out with the tent and headed out across the pasture.  We had to cross a couple of barbed wire fences, which was hard in the dark.  We had a flashlight, but we were afraid to use it close to the houses for fear of giving ourselves away.  Once we got far enough away, though, we turned on the flashlight and made our way through the brush toward the tank.  It was hard to see where it was and I had never been walking out there at night, so I was a little disoriented.  The tank had a hill on one side where all of the dirt was stacked when they dug the tank out.  I could make out the hill when we got close enough, so I knew we were there.

We set our tackle box down at the base of the hill, rigged our poles and baited our hooks.  We cast the lines into the water.   Just then we realized we'd miscalculated a bit.  We had bobbers on the lines, but it was too dark to see them.  There was no way to tell if we were getting a bite.  We thought we might be able to feel them if we couldn't see the bobber.  I cast my line out again and let it sit.  A little while later I heard a splash out by where my bobber should be and I though I felt something with the line.  I got excited hearing the splash and I reeled in, but there was nothing there.  We did that a couple of times and it was the same every time.  There would be a splash out by the bobber that we couldn't see but we'd reel in and there would be nothing there.  We decided that the problem was that we couldn't see the bobber so we cast one of the lines in close to the edge where we could shine the flashlight on it and watch it.  We waited for a while, watching the bobber.  Pretty soon, we saw the bobber move up and down like something was nibbling on the bait.  But the bobber never went all the way under.  We kept at it for a while, but we were having no luck.  We became convinced that all of the big fish were out deeper but we were going to have to be able to see the bobber go under to catch them.  We decided that we were just going to have to come back during the day.

So, we set off back across the pasture and through the brush back to our tent where we laid down and went to sleep 'til morning.

Comments

[PC]

Is this to be continued?

[Ojo Rojo]

No. The ending is my attempt at being "artsy."

[allbilly]

I thought the part about you shitting outside was artsy until i read that your buddy was wackin' it....and him dying..then i couldn't stop thinking you had been part of some broke back fishing thing...please go back to posting about football and stuff. You're disturbing me!

And Happy Thanksgiving!

[Snake Diggity]

Good story.

[allbilly]

I'm waiting on the BCS rant. I am a playoff guy so you're preaching to the choir with me...and I'd love to see 'Bama, Texas, OU, Florida, USC and Penn State in a playoff. That would be must see TV.

Oh...and the Muschamp side bump knock down thing was funny.