Never sniff a gift fish, p.13
Never Sniff a Gift Fish, page 13
Retch and I honked Finley out of bed at four-thirty in the morning. He staggered out to the car, his gear in his arms, and muttered, “This is an ungodly hour to wake a man!”
“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” I replied.
“The early bird gets the worm,” said Retch, chortling.
Finley’s face brightened. “Who said that?”
“We did,” said Retch. “You see anybody else in the car?”
“He means who said it first,” I explained to Retch. “Those famous quotations are probably both from Ben Franklin. Old Ben thought up about ninety-eight percent of all the famous quotations.”
“I thought he invented kites,” Retch said.
I could only shake my head in disgust. For a man with sixteen years of education, Retch was surprisingly ignorant. True, all sixteen years were spent in grade school, but he should have learned something.
Finley had turned thoughtful, as he does whenever he is contemplating his own immortality. “You know,” he said, “Ben Franklin is probably remembered as much for his sayings as he is for his inventions. But have you ever noticed how few famous sayings have been derived from the outdoor sports?”
“Now that you mention it, I can only think of a couple,” I replied. “There are the ones about a bird in hand being worth two in the bush and a miss being as good as a mile. That’s all I can think of. Anyway, probably the reason there are so few famous quotations derived from the outdoor sports is that old Ben was primarily an indoor sport.”
“You know,” Finley mused aloud, “I bet that a person who thought up a lot of quotations related to the outdoor sports could practically achieve, uh, immortality.”
I was instantly sorry the subject had ever come up and tried to change it by asking Retch if he had found another dry fly like the one he’d had such great luck with the previous weekend. He said he hadn’t and was darn sorry to have lost the fly before having a chance to tie up some duplicates.
Finley, who had continued musing in the back seat, injected himself into the conversation. “For want of a fly, the fish is lost,” he said.
Putting our lives at risk, for I was driving, I twisted around in the seat to turn the full force of my glare on Finley. “That’s horrible,” I cried. “That is truly disgusting!”
“Curve! Curve!” Retch shouted.
“You stay out of this,” I snapped. “This is between Finley and me.”
“I thought it was pretty good,” Finley said. “People probably didn’t care much for Ben Franklin’s ‘early to rise’ quote when they first heard it either.”
“Truck! Truck!” cried Retch, obviously trying to distract me from giving Finley the tongue-lashing he deserved.
“You can’t just think up famous sayings,” I told Finley. “It doesn’t work that way. Anybody knows that.”
“Why not?” said Finley. “Somebody has to think them up.”
“Train! Train!” yelled Retch.
I could tell I wasn’t going to win any argument with Finley, particularly with Retch clowning around, so I calmed my nerves by concentrating totally on driving. I had seen men before who didn’t know how to control their nerves. Retch Sweeney was one of them. Even while driving out for a little fishing and relaxation, he was all pale and twitchy and had even twisted his cap up into a knot. I think he drinks too much coffee.
“Never sniff a gift fish,” said Finley.
I could see then that the situation was hopeless. We would just have to let Finley’s malady run its course.
“Get it?” Finley continued. “That means you shouldn’t be too critical of something that’s given to you.”
I told him I thought that bit of wisdom had been covered by gift horses.
“But how many gift horses have you received lately?” Finley asked, smirking. “That’s right, none. Now, a gift fish, that’s a lot more common and people would identify with it.”
“Well, I’d certainly sniff any fish you gave me, that’s for sure,” I told him.
Finley was quiet all the rest of the way to the river. I thought maybe I had hurt his feelings and discouraged him from thinking up more famous quotations. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. The case was that thinking up famous quotations is more difficult than one might expect.
We set up camp and spent the rest of the day fishing, or, more accurately, practicing our fly casting. Toward evening we picked up a couple of smallish rainbows, which would have been enough for supper with a couple of gift fish thrown in. We drew straws for the trout, and Finley and I had to settle for a supper of canned hash. We set two plates of hash out on a log, ostensibly to cool but actually to let the darkness build up a bit. I knew a man once who tried to eat some canned hash in broad daylight, but his jaw froze up on him and had to be pried open with a spoon. Ever since then I have waited until dark to eat my hash. When the night was ripe enough, I dug in, giving a little shout before each bite to give any insect life a chance to escape. I explained to Finley that this was one of the lesser-known bits of woodlore I had picked up over the years.
“Yes,” he said, “two bugs in the hash are worth one in the mouth.”
“There’s some truth to that one,” I said, “but it’s not particularly memorable.”
“How about this one?” Retch put in. “When all the straws are the same length, the man that holds ’em gets to eat the fish! Har!”
Finley and I stared at him. “Now I’ve got one,” I said. “The man who cheats his fishing partners had better learn to sleep lightly!”
“Listen, you guys, I was only kidding,” Retch said, nervously. “I got the short straw! It wasn’t real short, but it was short.”
“The man who lies to his fishing partners may wake up with hash in his boots,” said Finley.
“I like that one,” I said. “It’s the sort of famous quotation I can remember.”
It was a mistake to offer Finley encouragement. As we lay in our sleeping bags, Retch and I trying to get to sleep, Finley ran off one freshly minted famous outdoor quotation after another:
“The pessimist complains that he just lost a lunker and the optimist brags he just had a great strike.
“What the tourist terms a plague of insects, the fisherman calls a fine hatch.
“No fisherman ever bragged that the huge fish he hooked turned out to be a log.
“What do you think of those?” he asked.
“Shut up and go to sleep is what I think of them,” I growled. “Or to put it another way, how would you like a sock in the mouth?”
“All that’s gruff isn’t tough. Say, that’s a pretty good umph aggh muff—”
It wasn’t one of my clean socks, either.
The next day there was no holding Finley back. From way off down the stream, he shouted at Retch and me, “I got one! I got one!” Naturally, Retch and I rushed off toward him.
When we arrived, too late it appeared, Finley was standing there sorting through his fly box.
“Did you—puff puff—lose it?” I asked.
He looked up and smiled. “A man who fishes in sneakers never gets in over the top of his waders.”
“Wha … ?”
“You’ve got to admit that’s a pretty good one,” he said.
“So, where’s the fish?” Retch gasped, his mental agility having peaked at age six.
“There is no fish,” I explained, plucking a section of devil’s club from my armpit. “There is only another famous outdoor quotation.”
Retch removed a small pine cone from his ear. “Listen, we could say he wandered off into the woods and disappeared. Nobody would know, nobody would care!”
Finley calmly tied on a fly and made a dismal cast that fell a good ten feet short of the pool he was aiming for. Inexplicably, a nice rainbow glommed the fly.
“A cast that reaches a fish is never too short,” he said smugly. “I’d better write that one down.”
Retch and I knew we were beaten and wandered off downstream. “Geez,” Retch muttered. “If famous quotations were fish, he’d be over his limit by now.”
“Don’t you start!” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
On the drive back home, Finley was fairly spewing with famous outdoor quotations:
“The angler who doesn’t look before he leaps will have his next cast made of plaster.
“There is no greater fan of fly fishing than the worm.
“I have never met a fish I didn’t like.
“Who was that fish I seen you with the other night? That was no fish, that was my muddler.
“Even a fish stick once knew the glories of the deep.”
And on and on.
Finally I screamed, “Enough, Finley, enough! You’ve invented enough famous outdoor quotations to compile your own Bartlett’s. Henceforth, no angler will give an after-dinner speech without first perusing his Finley’s. Now stop, before you flood the market.”
“But so far I’ve only covered fishing,” he replied. “There’s still camping and hiking and boating and, of course, hunting.”
“Please, Lord, deliver us!” cried out Retch, who had never before shown much inclination toward religion.
Finley cleared his throat:
“A goose may honk but will not wave.
“It is a foolish hunter who …”
Backseats I Have Known
The backseat of my new compact sedan is so small and cramped we have to grease the children to get them in and out of it. That’s what started me thinking recently about the decline of the backseat in American life, about all the wonderful adventures I’ve had in backseats, about all the backseats I’ve known and loved.
Among the older readers there are probably those who hold nostalgic recollections of the backseat mainly as the trysting place of young love. Indeed, I remember one such incident in my own steamy, R-rated adolescence.
At age sixteen I had already acquired a reputation as a suave and debonair ladies’ man. My first real date, with the scintillating and sizzlingly beautiful Olga Bonemarrow, pretty much established my style as a worldly, dashing young-man-about-town, a person born to the fast lane of life. The only thing that crimped my style was parental reluctance to allow me to get my hands on our new car, a prospect Mom and Hank, my stepfather, equated with an imminent arrival of the apocalypse. Finally, I gave them an ultimatum.
Hank pondered the ultimatum a spell and then said to my mother, “As I understand it, either we let him have the car for a date with Olga Bonemarrow or he runs off and joins the French Foreign Legion and we never see him again. What’s it going to be?”
“Don’t rush me,” Mom said. “I’m still weighing the options.”
Eventually, they gave in and let me have the car. I cruised over to Olga’s house and picked her up. “Neato!” she said. “What a neat car!”
To get Olga into the proper mood, I took her to a movie, a Randolph Scott western, and afterward blew nearly a whole buck on a double order of hamburgers, malts, and French fries. Then I drove her out to the gravel pit and parked. No dummy, Olga sensed right away that I was up to something.
“Whatcha stop here for?” she asked, giggling coyly.
“I dunno,” I said, always quick with a quip. “Say, would you look at that pile of gravel!”
“Neato,” Olga said.
We sat there without talking for a while, listening to the radio and staring out at the pile of gravel. Then, very cool and casual, I made a suggestion.
“Say, Olga,” I said, “how’d you like to get into the backseat? It’s real nice back there.”
Olga giggled. “Neato,” she said, her voice going low and husky, her lovely, thick eyelashes fluttering like a duet of moths. Nevertheless, there was something about her response that made me uneasy. Perhaps it was the way she took out her wad of bubble gum and stuck it on the gearshift knob before vaulting into the backseat.
So there we were, with Gene Autry crooning softly on the airwaves and the light of a full moon illuminating the sensuous curves of the highway department’s gravel pile. I let the mood build, then asked suavely, “How do you like it back there? Lots of leg room, ain’t there?”
“Yeah, neato,” she said, icing up the windows. “Guess what, I just remembered, my folks were expecting me home a half hour ago.”
Perhaps I was too wild and impetuous for Olga, or so I gathered from the fact that it was nearly six months before she again acknowledged my existence. In any case, I had learned a good lesson, namely that there are some women who just don’t like to live life in the fast lane.
The Olga episode aside, my love affair with the backseat has nothing to do with romance or other such nonsense but with the great outdoors. Nowadays, when almost every outdoorsman owns a van, a camper, a trailer, or a motor home, only we old-timers recall that the predecessor of these conveyances was the backseat. The backseat of his car could provide an outdoorsman with emergency shelter, a bed for the night if need be; it was his gun and rod rack, his larder, tool chest, survival kit, closet; his sanctuary from mosquitoes, gnats, and strange sounds in the night; his garbage dump, woodshed, storage room, tackle box, and more. The test of an outdoorsman in the old days was his ability to find in his backseat whatever he needed to survive in the back-road wilds of America.
“We’re done for now,” his partner might say. “There’s a big tree across the road.”
The outdoorsman would shrug and reply: “Not for long. I got a chain saw, a peavey, two splitting wedges, a maul, and a double-bitted ax in the backseat.”
In those days, a man needed only three things to survive for months in the outdoors: a gun, a good knife, and a properly outfitted backseat.
The backseat was not without its dangers. Retch Sweeney and I once ate for two days on a bag of jerky he found in a corner of his backseat. It wasn’t great jerky or even good but still moderately edible, at least until Retch recalled that he had never put any jerky in his backseat.
“Well, if it isn’t jerky, what is it?” I asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Retch said greenly.
Another time, as Retch and I were rounding a curve on a steep mountain road, an avalanche swept down from out of my backseat and engulfed us. Somehow, I managed to bring the car to a stop and dig myself out. Then I went around to the other side of the car and probed the jumbled mass of camp gear with a stick until I found Retch, and just in the nick of time, too. Fortunately, his face was in a small pocket of air between a boot and a coffee pot, and he had been able to breathe. The air probably would have given out, though, if I had had to bring in specially trained search-and-rescue dogs to find him.
Another danger of backseats was that methane gas sometimes arose from decay in the bottom layers. For that reason, most experienced outdoorsmen never allowed an open flame inside the car, particularly after an outing lasting more than three days.
Retch’s wife once accidentally opened a rear door of his camping car and later was found crouched in a corner of the garage, whimpering and sucking her thumb. The doctor sent her to bed under heavy sedation. He said he thought she was suffering from a psychosis of some kind. I think it was probably from a string of crappies mislaid in the backseat on a fishing trip the previous July.
I have long thought that a good horror movie could be made about the backseat of a hunter’s car. These two hunters are driving along way back in the mountains on a dark and stormy night, see, and suddenly the backseat begins to pulsate. Slowly it begins to ooze forward, toward the necks of the unsuspecting hunters. At the end of the film a posse with a pack of dogs pursues the backseat into a swamp where it slips beneath the greenish ooze, burbling evilly. Retch scoffed at my idea.
I was miffed. “Listen,” I told him, “I know for a fact a strange life form can originate in a backseat.”
“Let’s not get personal,” he snapped.
There is a science to packing a backseat prior to a camping trip. Unfortunately, no one has ever discovered a suitable method for repacking it for the return trip. This is because camp gear during the course of the trip expands to half again its original volume and overflows into the front seat. On the way home from one camping trip, I was stopped by a traffic cop who claimed he thought the car was being driven by a water jug and a half-inflated air mattress.
Another reason that repacking the backseat poses problems is that the process always takes place during a thunderous rainstorm. The prescribed method of packing a backseat under that circumstance is to hurl the entire camp blindly and savagely through a rear door of the car. One time we came home from a Forest Service campground with a pine branch, several large rocks, a rest room sign, and a ranger who had stopped by to collect the fee.
One of the most efficient repackings of a backseat I’ve ever seen was accomplished by Retch’s father when we were boys. Mr. Sweeney hated the outdoors and everything in it, but once, during a mellowness brought on by a quart of home brew, he promised to drive little Retch and me out for an overnighter. His wife held him to the promise. Grousing and grumbling, he drove Retch and me out to the first wide spot in the road, which happened to be a logging camp garbage dump. Retch and I set up the tent and stowed the gear in it while Mr. Sweeney sat in the car, frowning at his newspaper. Along about sundown, as Retch and I were frying supper, we looked up to see bears of all sizes, shapes, and colors streaming toward our camp. It was a startling sight, to which Mr. Sweeney responded with the quaint expression, “What the bleep!” He screamed at us to get in the car. Then he wrapped his arms around the umbrella tent, ripped it from its moorings, dragged it complete with contents to the car, and rammed, crammed, and stomped it into the backseat, all the while helping Retch and me expand our vocabularies. I was too shaken up to time him, but I doubt that more than eight seconds elapsed between our spotting the bears and our careening out of the dump at 60 m.p.h. It was a remarkable performance.
Sleeping in a backseat can be something of an art. As much gear as possible is moved to the front seat and the rest is thrown out on the ground to be repacked during a thunderous rainstorm the next day. Then you roll out your sleeping bag and climb into it. Because this step takes half the night, it should be begun early. Next, you tangle your hair, if any, in the door handle; this will prevent you from rolling onto the floor, which can be disastrous, particularly to the other parties who may be sleeping in the backseat with you. (Yes, it is entirely possible for more than one outdoorsman at a time to sleep in a backseat; however, check with your doctor, your minister, and the local health department before attempting to do so.)
