A fish story

Born on Galveston Island, ten years in Houston, followed by another couple of years in Galveston -- then another three years in La Marque, then another year and a half years as a young man in Clute,Freeport and Lake Jackson, TX (right on the Gulf coast), I was around fish and fishermen a lot.

When I lived in La Marque, with my parents, my dad would occasionally go shrimping, and would return home with a couple of washtubs full of prawns. For those of you who do not 'fathom' (pun), prawns are larger than life shrimp! They are shrimp on steroids---huge, unlike the tiny, frail, sissy 'pinkie-finger' size cocktail shrimp you may be more familiar with, from your bold forays into deep sea fishing at the lobster tank at the Dead Lobster! We would carry the washtubs way back toward the back of our property, where the spare parts from shrimp that we would clean would not stink up the rest of our yard. Turning on the garden hose, dad and I and my brother George would de-vein shrimp for hours, then wash the prawns, drain the excess water and deliver them indoors to my Mom, who had all four burners going on the stove, boiling the prawns on three burners and deep-frying them on the other burner. She made huge containers of cocktail sauce, with lots of horseradish, and we would eat shrimp till we staggered! They were so, so wonderful! We ate them with French fries, cornbread, cole slaw, downing them with iced tea with lemon! The boiled shrimp were carefully drained and we then packed them into round white cardboard containers meant for ice cream. We filled our freezer in the garage with a couple hundred pounds of fresh shrimp, and they would last us until the next year.

Although I was around fish a lot while living on the coast, I never learned to fish. When I arrived at OCC, in the fall of 1964, I eventually --around 1967--became friends with my life-long buddy, Phil Johnson, who knew how to fish. Somewhere around 1968 or 1969, he volunteered to teach me the 'secrets' of successful fishing. Off we went to a local TG&Y store, then located at 15th and Broadway, in Edmond. They had a large quantity of fishing gear....one of everything ever made, it seemed. I was lost. I didn't know one thing about fishing.

The only fishing I had ever done, as a teenager, in the swampy areas around Texas City, Texas, next door to our hometown of La Marque, was flounder-gigging, at night, in the marshy areas, full of jackrabbits, snakes and, yes, flounder! This peculiar fish is flat. Its two eyes are on the top side of the flat fish, and the two eyes, and a faint outline of part of the fish are all that one can see when wading around in the marsh grass, with a flounder gig and a good Coleman lantern. The marsh grasses attract rabbits as well as frogs and the snakes are drawn to the frogs. There is an abundance of snakes in the marshes on the Gulf Coast -- cottonmouths, rattlesnakes, copper heads and coral snakes....all of them eagerly available to facilitate your speedy trips to the ER, if you are not cautious! I did okay with floundering. It's not rocket science. One just has to be careful -- and determined. Flounder-gigging was as close to fishing as I ever got, while growing up. With real fishing, however, I floundered badly!

Back to my buddy, Phil Johnson: He patiently walked me through the fishing gear area of the TG&Y store, and I walked out, some two hours later, with $140 worth of fishing gear...not fancy gear by a real fisherman's standards, but, to a novice, it was a real adventure. Understand, however, this was no Bass Pro Shop. I had lures and fishing line, a cheap rod and reel, waders and one of those fancy inner tubes with pockets to store your gear while you set forth across a farm pond on a mission to bring home the really big ones!

My entrance into the world of fishing was to go with Phil down to 'Vaughn's pond' -- a weed-filled pond full of runoff from the OCC campus. Battery acid and oil, along with fertilizer and pesticides and who knows what else -- made its way down to its eternal destination, into fish that resided in Vaughn's pond.

Phil showed me how to cast. I was dying to try my hand with an irresistible lure, then called 'The HULA POPPER'. It was bright yellow and was named after the hula skirt-looking device that modestly covered the business end of the lure. Man, that lure looked deadly! Before casting it into the pond, I was already envisioning one meal after another, from the huge, healthy fish I would soon be fairly ripping out of the water with my yellow Hula Popper! Wow! Does life get any better than this?
This is probably better than....well, no, not that good, I don't think, but still, very, very good!

The water in Vaughn's pond was murky, and filled with all sorts of sea-weedy things that looked, when one snagged them on a lure and reeled them in --- like great, long gobs of yellow-green cooked spinach. This pond spinach did NOT smell like spinach, however, or any other edible thing. I was a little wary of the pond, because, during my first year at OCC, 1964 to 1965, one of my roommates, a nice, but quiet guy who lived upstairs on the east end of "A" dorm, ran down to the pond one blistering hot day and plunged right into the pond. He drowned, after suffering a heart attack, if memory serves me correctly. Afterwards, I always shuddered a little when I thought of that pond. And now, here we are, tempting fate by venturing into those murderous waters, filled with who-knows how many dangers?

As soon as I cast my line, the Hula Popper landed with a splash and I began reeling it in. In my mind I was transferring images of a wounded bug, seductively scooting across the surface of the pond, in fits and starts -- sudden bursts of movement, followed by short periods of rest. Surely this is what a wounded bug would look and act like! Right? Wrong!

What happened was this: the entire surface of the pond erupted in bubbles! I was puzzled, as this scenario was repeated over and over, while my buddy, Phil, reeled them in, with a smug, self-satisfied look on his face. I finally gave up and just contented myself with 'organizing' my fishing tackle box. I was no good at fishing, and, to make matters worse, I had fouled my line on all the submerged tree limbs and pond spinach. I lost my best lure, the bright yellow Hula Popper, and a couple of other fake-bug-baits, but, by golly, I had an organized tackle box! Second to none! I had hooks from tiny little things that probably wouldn't have snagged a minnow, to monster hooks that would have made the Loch Ness monster become a vegetarian! I had bobbers and lures and lead weights and spinners and fish scalers -- even a fish scale. I even had a stringer to keep my trophy fish all tethered together in a sort of fishy chain gang, while still remaining in the water where they would remain alive and fresh until I took them out to prepare dinner! I had it all! Eventually, I thought, with patience and good observational skills, I too would master the manly art of fishing! I could imagine the newspaper articles, with photos, showing the world-record fish being pulled from the pond while I posed, straining under the weight of so many fish, wearing a decidedly 'no-big-deal-I've-done-this-a-thousand-times' look! Ahhh! Life was indeed sweet! And about to be even sweeter!

I went fishing with Phil several more times, and each time I tried my luck with one of my so-called 'tried and true' baits, I was again greeted with a pond-wide eruption of bubbles. In desperation I hired an icthiologist (fish expert) from NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration)-- a nice man named, Gill, I believe, who witnessed the extremely unusual event at Vaughn's pond when I took him there as a scientific observer. He saw the event with his own eyes and took measurements and samples of the bubbles every time I cast my lure into the water. He was very knowledgeable, exhibiting a vast experience. It did appear to me, however, that with his constant recitation of facts and figures, that he was fishing, as it were, for compliments. His conclusion, after days of testing and computer simulations, was that the curious phenomena -- which he had never seen in all his years as a trained icthiologist-- is that the air bubbles were caused by....mass, simultaneous laughter, among all the various species of fish in the ponds where I had attempted to fish. He advised me to discontinue my attempts at fishing, since the disharmony and wild 'waves' --gales, if you will, of unrestrained laughter among the fish population in these ponds would lead to a decimation of the fish population, as fish would 'scale back' (pardon the pun) --eating and reproductive activities as they eagerly anticipated the next hilarious casting of my line and lure into their watery world. He was not happy with the sight of exhausted fish floating on the surface of the water, near-dead from long and repeated peals of laughter. He further told me that, if I were not compliant in this firm request, that I would be issued a 'cease and defished' order by the local authorities.

I hope that by now I have 'reeled YOU in' with my deceit! While it is true that I am an incompetent fisherman, and have accepted this fact, I will continue to 'cast about', looking for other leisure activities. I am looking for a new diversion, one that will, hopefully, be a 'reel' winner for me and will keep me on the line-- at least as long as I have kept YOU perched on the line!

Please forgive me for the 'bait and switch' story....and the awful puns! As bad as they are, they are, after all, 'trout and true' ('tried and true', maybe?)...and people fall for them every time....hook, line and stinker! :)