One day in the middle of January, Mom looked up from her bowl of gruel at breakfast, as we jokingly referred to it, and announced, “Well, we’ve finally hit rock bottom. Things just can’t get any worse.” We soon discovered that Mom lacked the gift of prophecy.

  Within hours, the mercury was rattling about like a dried pea in the bulb of the thermometer, and the wind came blasting out of the north. Strangely, Dad seemed delighted by the onset of a blizzard. Even now, four decades later, I can still see him bending over, rubbing a hole in the window frost with his fist and peering out at the billowing snow.

  “Let her blow!” he shouted. “We’ve got plenty of firewood and enough grub to last until spring if we have to! By gosh, we’ll just make some fudge, pop corn, and play Monopoly until she blows herself out! It’ll be like a little adventure, like we’re shipwrecked!”

  The rest of the family was instantly perked up by his enthusiasm and defiance of the blizzard. Mom started making fudge and popping corn, while my sister and I rushed to set up the Monopoly game.

  The blizzard lasted nearly two weeks, give or take a century. By the third day my sister and I were forbidden even to mention Monopoly, fudge, or popcorn. And Dad no longer regarded the blizzard as a little adventure.

  “Why are you making that noise with your nose?” he would snarl at me.

  “I’m just breathing.”

  “Well, stop it!”

  “Whose idea was that calendar?” he’d snap at my mother.

  “What’s wrong with it, dear?”

  “That stupid mountain goat watches every move I make, that’s what! Look how its eyes follow me!”

  A day or two later, as Dad himself admitted at the time, he became irritable.

  Shortly after that, he came down with cabin fever.

  Spending several days trapped in close quarters with a person who had cabin fever toughened me up a lot psychologically. A couple of years later, when I saw the movie Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, I thought it was a comedy. At the peak of his cabin fever, Dad could have played both leads in the film simultaneously and sent audiences screaming into the streets.

  The only good thing about cabin fever is that it vanishes the instant the victim is released from enforced confinement. When the county snowplow finally opened the road and came rumbling into our yard, Dad strolled out to greet and thank the driver.

  “Snowed in fer a spell, weren’t ya?” the driver said. “Bet you got yerself a good case of the cabin fever.”

  “Naw,” Dad said. “It wasn’t bad. We just made fudge and popped corn and played a few games of Monop … Monop … played a few games.”

  “Well, you certainly seem normal enough,” the driver said. Then he pointed to Mom, Sis, and me. “That your family?”

  It seemed like an odd question, but I suppose the driver wondered why a normal man like my father would have a family consisting of three white-haired gnomes.

  There are numerous kinds of fever brought on by the boredom of enforced confinement over long periods. I myself have contracted some of the lesser strains—coldwater-Hat fever, mobile-home fever, and split-level fever, to name but a few. I have never been able to afford the more exotic and expensive fevers, like those of my wealthy friend Quagmire. In addition to his villa fever, he will occasionally run a continent fever, one of the symptoms of which is the sensation that the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines are closing in on him. The treatment, as I understand it, is to take two aspirin and a Caribbean cruise.

  Of all such fevers, by far the most deadly is two-man-tent fever, which, in its severity, surpasses even the cabin variety.

  I had the opportunity of studying two-man-tent fever close-up a few years ago, when Parker Whitney and I spent nearly twenty hours in his tiny tent waiting for a storm to blow over. Parker is a calm, quiet chap normally, and it was terrible to see him go to pieces the way he did, after the fever overtook him.

  For a while, during the first few hours of the storm, we were entertained by the prospect that we might momentarily be using the tent as a hang glider. After the wind died down to a modest gale, we were able to devote our whole attention to the rippling of the orange ripstop nylon that enveloped us. Fascinating as this was, its power to distract was limited to a few hours. By then, I was formulating a geological theory that a major earth fault lay directly beneath, and crossed at right angles to, my half-inch Ensolite pad. While several of my more adventuresome vertebrae were testing this theory, I gradually became aware that Parker was beginning to exhibit certain signs of neurotic behavior.

  “I hate to ask this, old chap,” I said, kindly enough, “but would you mind not chewing that gum quite so loud?”

  Parker replied with uncharacteristic snappishness. “For the fourteenth time, I’m not chewing gum!”

  Mild hallucination is one of the early symptoms of two-man-tent fever. Not only did Parker fail to realize that he was chomping and popping his gum in a hideous manner, but he clearly was of the impression that I had mentioned the matter to him numerous times previously. Since hallucinations do not yield readily to logical argument, I thought that confronting him with the empirical evidence might work. Unfortunately, Parker was now in the grip of paranoia and responded to my effort by shouting out that I had “gone mad.” I suppose he was referring to the manner in which I had grabbed him by the nose and chin and forced his mouth open, a maneuver that proved ineffective, since he had somehow managed to hide the gum from my vision and probing thumb, possibly by lodging it behind his tonsils. Such deception, I might add, is not at all unusual among victims of two-man-tent fever.

  Parker remained quiet for some time, although I could tell from the look in his eyes that the paranoia was tightening its hold on him, and I began to wonder if my life might not be in danger. I warned him not to try anything.

  “Why don’t you get some sleep?” Parker replied. “Just try to get some sleep!”

  “Ha!” I said, not without a trace of sarcasm. “Do you really think I’m going to fall for that old one?”

  I twisted around in my bag and propped up on an elbow so I could watch Parker more closely. It was easy to see that the two-man-tent fever was taking its toll on him. He was pale and trembling, and stared back at me with wide, unblinking eyes. He looked pitiful, even though posing no less a threat to my life.

  Then, as if our situation were not perilous enough already, I noticed that Parker had dandruff. Under normal circumstances, I can take dandruff or leave it alone, but not in a two-man tent. It wasn’t the unsightly appearance of the dandruff that bothered me, but the little plip plip plip sounds it made falling on his sleeping bag. I soon deduced that Parker had contrived this irritation for the sole purpose of annoying me, a sort of Chinese dandruff torture, although I hadn’t realized until then that Parker was Chinese. Informing him that I was on to his little game, I told Parker to get his dandruff under control or suffer the consequences. Not surprisingly, he denied any knowledge of his dandruff or its activities. I therefore retaliated by doing my impression of Richard Widmark’s maniacal laugh every time I heard a plip. Parker countered by doing his impression of a man paralyzed by fear. It wasn’t that good, as impressions go, but I withheld criticism of the poor devil’s performance, since it seemed to take his mind off the fever.

  At the first break in the storm, Parker shot out of the tent, stuffed his gear into his pack, and took off down the trail, leaving me with the chore of folding up the tent and policing camp. Before I was finished, a ranger came riding up the trail on a horse. We exchanged pleasantries, and I asked him if he had happened to pass my partner on the trail.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Is he a white-haired gnome?”

  Fish Poles, and Other Useful Terminology

  I have long held the opinion that a person should know the jargon of any activity in which he professes some expertise. A writer, for example, should not refer to quotation marks as “those itty-bitty ears.” It is unsettling to hear the carpenter you have just hired refer to his hammer as “a pounder.” A mechanic tinkering in the innards of your car arouses anxiety by speaking of a pair of pliers as his “squeezer.” Similarly, it would be disconcerting to have a doctor tell you he had detected an irregularity in your “thingamajig.” (If you’re like me, you’re composed almost entirely of thingamajigs, some of which you value a good deal more than others.) Ignorance of proper terminology often leads to confusion, alarm, and panic, especially when one talks about the sport of fishing.

  I recently met a man and his son out bass fishing. The father was making superb casts with what was obviously a new rod.

  “Is that a boron you’ve got there?” I asked.

  The man turned and looked at his son. “Well, he ain’t too bright, that’s for sure,” he said.

  Here was a case where a man had mastered the art of fishing, but had failed to keep up on recent nomenclature. I could hardly blame him. I now spend so much time learning all the new fishing terms that I scarcely have time to fish.

  Non-anglers think fishing is easy. Well, just let them spend a day poring over one of the new fishing catalogs and memorizing the terms. One 1982 catalog, for example, contains such terms and phrases as “fiberglass integrated with unidirectional graphite,” “silicone carbide guides with diamond polished silicone carbide guide rings,” “Uni bent butt,” that sort of thing. I’m just lucky I didn’t ask the man fishing with his son if he had a Uni bent butt. I might have come home with a Uni bent head.

  Consider just a few of the terms you now must learn in order to go out and catch a few bass: structure, isolated structure, sanctuary, stragglers, breakline, suspended fish, pattern, holding area, riprap, point, scatter point, contact point, cheater hook, buzz bait, Texas rig, crank bait, triggering, flippin’, pH, jig and pig, spinnerbait, fly ’n’ rind. The aerospace industry requires less technical jargon than the average bass fisherman.

  When I was a youngster, my friends and I could get by on fewer than a dozen fishing terms. No doubt we could have expanded our angling vocabulary by going to the county library and checking out a book on fishing techniques. The problem was that if one of the gang showed up at the library to check out a book, Miss Phelps, the librarian, might have suffered a heart attack on the spot. Enlarging our fishing vocabularies didn’t seem worth the risk of taking a life. We chose to get by on the few fishing terms we knew.

  Although our fishing terminology was limited, it was not without its own peculiar complexity. Take the word keeper for example. The first fish you caught was always a “keeper.” This was not the result of outrageous coincidence, but of definition. The first fish was interpreted as a “keeper” merely by having a mouth big enough to stretch over the barb of a hook.

  There were several advantages to this definition of keeper applying to the first fish. Suppose the first fish you caught during the day was also the only fish, and you had released it. That would mean you would have to go home skunked, an angling term every bit as signif icant then as it is today. Calling the first fish a “keeper” often prevented the emotional damage which resulted from going home “skunked.”

  Furthermore, if someone later asked you if you had caught any fish, you could reply, in reference to a fish no longer than a pocketknife, “Just one keeper.” The phrase just one keeper implied, of course, that you had caught and released numerous small fish, thereby contributing to one’s reputation as a “sportsman.”

  If the first fish was particularly small, it did not always remain a “keeper.” A larger fish, when caught, became a “keeper” and the small first fish became a badly hooked one. You always explained, with a note of regret in your voice, that you had kept the “badly hooked” fish because it would have “died anyway.” Proper fishing terminology even in the time of my youth was extremely important, both socially and psychologically.

  Although some of our terms might seem simple by today’s standards, they were not without their subtle shades of meaning. Take the word mess for instance, which was the word used to denote your catch while telling someone about your day of fishing. Mess used without modifiers usually meant two fish—a “keeper” and a “badly hooked.” A small mess referred to a single “keeper.” A nice mess meant three fish, excluding any “badly hooked.” Any number of fish over three was, naturally, a big mess. To ask for specific numbers was considered rude when someone told you he had caught a “big mess” of fish.

  Today, the phrase a mess of fish is seldom heard, probably because anyone uttering it would instantly be identifying himself as a fish glutton. Quantity of the catch is now always referred to by specific numbers, although a certain element of deception is still retained. An angler who has spent twelve hours flailing a trout stream, and managed to land a total of three fish, responds to a question about the number of fish caught by saying “I only kept three.” If asked exactly how many he caught and released, he will be overcome by a coughing fit and have to rush from the room. Now, as always, it is considered poor form to lie about the number of fish caught, unless, of course, the angler has not mastered the technique of the coughing fit.

  It took me fifteen minutes the other day to memorize the name of my new casting rod, and I’ve already forgotten it. When I was younger, we didn’t have to memorize the names of our rods because we didn’t have any. We had what were called “fish poles.” Even now, after nearly forty years, I will still occasionally refer to a three-hundred-dollar custom-built fly rod as a “fish pole.”

  “That’s a nice fish pole you’ve got there,” I’ll say to the owner of the rod.

  He will go white in the face, shudder, twitch, gurgle, clench his hands, and lurch toward me. “Wha-what d-did you s-say? F-fish pole? FISH POLE! Y-you called my three-hundred-dollar rod a FISH POLE?”

  I will back away, hands raised to fend him off, and explain that I have never shaken a bad habit picked up in my childhood.

  Fish pole, in the old days, was a generic term for any elongated instrument intended for the purpose of propelling hook, line, sinker, and worm in the general direction of fish-holding water, and then wrenching an unlucky fish to the bank with as little fuss as possible. Some fish poles were made from cedar trees that had been rejected as too short or too slender for use as telephone poles. A few fortunate kids owned metal telescoping fish poles. My first fish pole was a single-piece, stiff metal tube about six feet long. There was a wire that could be pulled out of the tip if you wanted “action.” I never pulled the wire out. Action, in my fishing circles, was not considered a desirable characteristic in a fish pole. It merely complicated the process of wrenching the fish from the water, or landing it.

  Landing, by the way, consisted of whipping the fish in a long, high arc over your head and into the branches of a tree, which you usually had to climb in order to disengage both line and fish. Sometimes the fish would come off the line right at the peak of the arc and whiz away toward the state line like a stone loosed from a sling. These fish were later referred to as “badly hooked.”

  Forked stick is a term seldom heard among anglers nowadays, which is too bad, because the forked stick once served to enrich both fishing and conversations about fishing.

  “I prefer the forked stick to a creel for carrying fish,” a kid would say. “The creel is too bulky and keeps catching on brush. It gets in your way when you’re casting, too. Most creels are too small for a really big fish anyway. Give me a forked stick to a creel any time.” This statement actually meant “Give me a forked stick any time until someone gives me a creel. Then I’ll prefer a creel.”

  There was much discussion about the kind of tree or bush that produced the best forked sticks for carrying fish. In theory, the way you selected a forked stick was to seek out a good specimen from the preferred species of bush or tree, cut it off with your pocketknife, and neatly trim it to appropriate and aesthetically pleasing dimensions. Ideally, there would be a fork at both ends, one to keep the fish from sliding off and the other to be hooked under your belt, thus freeing both hands for the business of catching fish.

  The theory of the forked stick didn’t work out in practice, because the kid never even thought about cutting a forked stick until he had caught his first fish. To cut a forked stick prior to catching a fish would have been presumptuous and probably bad luck to boot. (Also, few things look more ridiculous than an angler walking around with an empty forked stick.) Once a fish had been caught, the youngster, in his excitement, would instantly forget the aesthetically pleasing proportions prescribed for the forked stick. He would twist off the nearest branch with a fork on it, gnaw away any obstructing foliage with his teeth, thread the fish onto it, and get back to his fishing. When you were catching fish, you didn’t have time to mess with aesthetics.

  The forked stick contributed much excitement to our fishing. Since a double-forked branch or willow was almost never available when needed, the forked stick could not be hooked under your belt but had to be laid down somewhere while you fished. Once or twice every hour, a panicky search would begin for a string of fish left on a log or rock “Just around that last bend.” Approximately thirty percent of your fishing time was spent trying to catch fish and seventy percent looking for fish you had already caught.

  Thus, the term forked stick denoted not merely a device for carrying your catch, but a whole mode of fishing that the boy who grows up owning a creel can never come to know or appreciate. He should consider himself damn lucky for it, too.

  There were a few other terms that filled out our fishing vocabulary. Game warden is one that comes to mind. I don’t know if any state still has game wardens. Most have Wildlife Conservation Officers or persons of similar sterile title to enforce fishing regulations. Somehow it doesn’t seem to me that “Wildlife Conservation Officer” has the same power to jolt a boy’s nervous system as does “game warden.” How well I remember a fishing pal once exclaiming, “Geez, here comes the game warden!” We jerked our lines from the creek, sprinted up the side of a steep, brush-covered hill, threw our fish poles and forked sticks under a log, and tore off across the countryside. And we hadn’t even been violating any of the fishing regulations. The term game warden just had that sort of effect on you.

 

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