Another Adventure Begins

In August 1975 I moved to California.  I left my job with the company where I had worked for many years, picked up and just moved.  My parents had been transferred around the country for a few years and ended up about 50 miles east of Los Angeles, and they invited me to join them and return to college.  I took them up on the offer.

 

I didn’t quite know how to settle down after so many years of travel and adventure, but I gave it a try.  I enrolled in a local college, made a few friends, and spent most nights in a coffee shop or two or three.  Years of meetings in different cities across the country, often several cities in a single day, left me with a huge case of jet-lag and an insatiable desire for caffeine.  My new friends would join me for a few hours, but eventually they couldn’t keep up with my schedule.

 

For years I had rarely slept more than an hour or two per night, and often I would go many nights without ever seeing a bed.  Dallas meeting this morning, Chicago this afternoon, Cleveland tonight, Los Angeles tomorrow morning, New York City tomorrow evening, Denver the next morning.  Such was my life.  Whenever I got a bit of time off, I took advantage of every moment.  After years of this routine, I found I was extremely addicted to coffee, and I just couldn’t sleep.  Thus the all night coffee shops.

 

My college classes were centered on geology, and this fed my lust for the outdoors, but college keeps one close to home most of the time.  And this was another reason for the coffee shops every night.  I just couldn’t afford the time to travel.  Like it or not, classes started at 8am five days a week.

 

My friends and I would grab a big booth at the local Bob’s Big Boy about 9 every evening where we would have coffee, dinner, coffee, desserts, coffee, snacks, and coffee for a few hours.  The waitresses began to join us when their shifts ended, and the group would grow and then shrink as some people had to go elsewhere (home).  Usually the last ones there when the coffee shop closed would go as a group to another coffee shop nearby to continue the fun.  I was always one of that second group.  And so was Rachael.

 

Rachael was the cashier at Bob’s when I started going there, but soon she became a waitress.  It always made me happy when she joined the group at the big booth, and before very long we became the last two to leave each night.

 

We were married April 30, 1977 at the Chapel in the Wildwood in the foothills above Upland, California.  And within a few hours we were on a road trip up the coast.  We stopped in many great little towns and cities on the journey, but mostly we stopped for cows.

 

Rachael had never seen a cow before and was absolutely fascinated by them.  Our photo album of the trip is mostly of cows.  Yes, there are a few shots of the ocean and other sights along the way, but if you ever get the opportunity to see this album, well, expect to see cows.

 

We stayed in a variety of places and some were better than others.  One of the most expensive places we stayed was in a town north of San Francisco and, believe me, it still ranks as one of the worst places I’ve ever been.  When we travel today, this is still one of the three places we compare all others to (the other two are in Flagstaff and Albuquerque, and they are a story of their own).

 

When we arrived at the motel’s office, we were not happy with what we saw.  The photos we had seen before making our reservation were not even of the same buildings.  We had seen a series of individual brick houses with carports.  We arrived at a large wooden structure with boards falling off the side.  And we parked in a dirt yard.  With mudholes.

 

We drove around for about an hour looking for another place to spend the night, but “No Vacancy” signs were everywhere, so we reluctantly drove back to the building.  We didn’t recognize it at first, but after looking at it for a few minutes, we realized the building was now leaning to the west instead of the east as it had been earlier in the day.  It changed the entire look of the building.  We checked in.  We should have spent the night in the car.  At least they had a restaurant at one end.  Another mistake on our part.  The only thing I can say was that the gasoline flavored martini was served in the correct glass.

 

The next morning we drove a few miles to another town where we immediately checked into a motel just to shower and use the laundry to get rid of the fleas.  Then on to Sonoma and Napa, and other great places.  But soon we had to turn back toward southern California.  At least we could take a route through the Sierra Nevada to get there.

 

After leaving Yosemite we took a side trip up into the Sequoia/Kings Canyon area.  About halfway up into the mountains, a gentle white substance began to fall.  Rachael, who grew up in So.Cal., naturally thought a forest fire was in the area and we were being covered by ash, but I had seen snow before.  She began to worry, so I pulled over to the side of the road to let her take a closer look.  I wish I could describe her excitement at this discovery.

 

We spent only a couple of hours in the snow, but the size of the trees made the side trip worthwhile.  Even though I had been in California many times, these trees were something I had never seen before.  No picture could do them justice.  True, the photographs accurately showed their size, but the real life physical experience is indescribable as one stands at the base of one of these giants.  Now I truly know how a Chihuahua must feel when standing beside a person.  Actually the difference is much greater.

 

After driving back into the Los Angeles area, but still a couple of hours from home, we stopped at a restaurant for dinner and noticed a sign for the annual Renaissance Faire out west of the city.  We found a motel for the night and spent the next day in the late 1500’s.  It couldn’t have been a better week.  And I couldn’t have asked for a better life.

Canoe

I discovered the joy of canoeing at a summer camp when I was thirteen years old, and for about thirteen more years the canoe remained my favorite watercraft.  As a fisherman, the canoe provided me with access to areas a more conventional craft couldn’t reach.  It was easier to transport, and it was just too much work for most fisherman wannabes.

 

In reality, I’ll give anyone fishing lessons, but sometimes I just want to give someone a lesson about fishing.  Anyone wanting to learn to fish has a place in my heart.  I remember when my Uncle Sam taught me how to fish.  Although I was already a decent fisherman, Sam was an expert, and I wanted to learn anything he could teach me.  I was an eager and willing student—well, maybe not so much at first, but the circumstances were a bit unique.  When Sam and I went fishing we would take one of the motored boats from the family compound and concentrate on fishing and the techniques involved.  And I would do the same for anyone desiring to learn to fish from me, but there was the occasional know-it-all.  That’s the one who went into the bow of my canoe.

 

Jerry was a wannabe and a know-it-all at the same time.  He lived about a quarter of a mile from me, and we had gone to the same schools from about the fifth grade until high school graduation.  He knew I liked to fish, and for years I heard about his exploits at this lake or that river.  His family took frequent vacations to places I could only read about in books, and he would talk endlessly about catching exotic fish in Mexico, Canada, and all over the United States.  There were times I went to the library to look up some of the fish he caught, and they were listed and illustrated, but they weren’t necessarily found where he found them.  I wondered about that, but I never said anything.

 

After graduating high school I purchased a used aluminum canoe from a summer camp when they were selling off the ones they deemed unfloatable.  I patched a couple of holes in it, and it served me well for many years.

 

Two or three years later I had a chance meeting with Jerry while picking up some fishing tackle at Buddie’s Hardware.  He was looking at the plastic floats trying to figure out the reason some were red on the bottom and white on the top and some were white on the bottom and red on the top.  I just let him keep working on that one.

 

We, rather, he began talking about his latest adventure with a trotline on Yellowstone Lake.  I knew that one didn’t happen, so I invited him to join me at my grandparent’s lake house in a couple of weeks, and we could spend the day fishing on Eagle Mountain Lake.  He thought that was a great idea.  He had a ‘new’ fishing pole he wanted to try out.

 

I noticed Robbin the sales clerk was keeping an ear toward our conversation, and she was trying hard not to smirk.  Now that girl knew fishing.  Her husband was a long time friend of mine, and he was a very good fisherman.  When he met Robbin, their first date was a group fishing trip to Grapevine Lake where she took the prize for the most fish.  Robbin looked over at me, and I gave her a wink.  When she came over to see if she could help us, I just let her handle Jerry, and I left the store.  About an hour later I came back.

 

“David, I don’t think he’s ever been fishing before.”  Robbin was almost laughing.

 

I told her of my years of suspicion, but that he confirmed it with the story of the trotline on Yellowstone Lake.  I then asked what she had sold him.  Oh boy.  Jerry had spent a small fortune.  Well, if he had any intention of ever fishing all those places he had spent years telling me about, he would be well equipped.

 

I picked up Jerry early on a Saturday morning and before the sun was creating shadows, we were in the canoe paddling across the lake.  Needless to say, I was doing the paddling, and Jerry was doing the complaining.  He was switching sides with that paddle on every stroke, and every stroke was just a water splash.  With a degree of regularity, we had to retrieve his paddle.  Finally we reached the far side of the lake where the cattails were growing and where I had caught many fish over the years.

 

Slowly I lowered the weight I used as an anchor and began to set up one of the two rods I brought along.  Jerry watched with great interest before doing something similar.  Similar but not the same.  I’m not an expert on knots, but I do know when something isn’t a knot.  I don’t know what he tied, but it wasn’t a knot; however, it really didn’t matter.  I skewered a worm on my hook, and so did Jerry.  I placed a float (white bottom, red top) about eight feet from the hook, and so did Jerry.  I tossed my line in the water, and so did Jerry—along with his rod and reel.

 

The only indication where the rod was located was the float on the surface of the water.  We retrieved his float, and he began to pull up the line as it unwound from the reel.  I estimated about two hundred fifty yards of line on the reel so Jerry was going to be busy for a while.  I had time.  Besides, I was fishing.

 

Sometime later Jerry asked me if I thought the line was tied onto the reel.  I assured him that if Robbin set it up for him, it was well tied.  He kept pulling up line.  As I pulled in my fourth fish, Jerry pulled up his rod and reel.  Now he had a choice.  He could try to rewind the line on the reel, or he could cut it off, stuff the tangle in a bag, grab another one of his four rods, and fish.  He chose to rewind.

 

It took Jerry about three quarters of an hour to realize that it was fruitless to rewind that line.  Finally he stripped off the three or four feet he had managed to get back onto the reel, cut it loose, and stuffed it into a bag.  Fifteen minutes later he had a line in the water, but I still couldn’t figure out his method of attaching the hook to the line.  A fish figured it out for me.  It wasn’t a knot.

 

Jerry needed help, but he was a self-professed expert at fishing, and there is no way he would ask.  And I didn’t offer.  I now had nine fish in the nine to fourteen inch range on my stringers (I separated bass, catfish, and crappie to different stringers—I don’t know why I did that except Sam taught me to do it), and Jerry was still trying to catch his first fish. 

 

About midday Jerry began to squirm.  He was feeling the confines of the canoe, and I admit a canoe is never very comfortable under the best of circumstances.  The need to stretch the legs is something only experience can overcome.  Jerry stood up.  Jerry fell overboard.  There are times I’m glad I require passengers to wear a life jacket, and then there was Jerry.  But he was wearing one.  I didn’t count him as my tenth fish, but I fished him out of the water and back into the canoe.  He crawled back to the bow and sat down.  At least he didn’t loose his rod this time.

 

To me midday means lunch.  I knew Jerry would not think far enough ahead to prepare a lunch, so I packed plenty.  Out of a bit of pity, I paddled to the nearest bank and let Jerry walk around on shore and stretch his legs while we were eating.

 

“Rough day, huh?”

 

“Yeah.  I never fished from a canoe before.”

 

Or from anywhere else I thought.  “It takes some getting used to.  I’ve been doing it a while.”

 

After an hour or so we climbed back into the canoe and paddled to another nearby spot where the crappie and bream tended to hang out.  I caught a few more fish, and somehow, someway, Jerry caught one.  It was a catfish a full two feet long.  A fish to be proud of.  The way he hooted and hollered, one would have thought he had never caught a fish before.

 

I paddled and Jerry splashed his way back across the lake to the old wooden dock near my grandparent’s house.  We set everything up on the dock and I steadied the canoe while Jerry climbed up on the dock, tripped, and fell back into the water on the other side.  Well, he had on the life jacket.

 

We carried the fish to the cleaning station where Jerry (to his credit) actually helped.  He threw up only once.  Then we packed the fish into my ice chest and carried it to the car.  We retrieved the canoe, cleaned it up, and loaded it on the racks on the top of my car.  Jerry slept all the way home.

 

I went out of town on business for a few weeks, and when I got home I was invited to have dinner with my friends Karl and Robbin.  Apparently Jerry had a great time on our outing.  Robbin said he had been into Buddie’s Hardware several times talking about the fish he caught.  When I mentioned falling out of the canoe, dropping his rod and reel overboard, and even falling off the dock, Robbin was quite surprised since there had been no mentioned of this.  However, he had purchased a canoe.