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10/04/2007: "Night Fishing" by Walter King
A week after I returned from Argentina my wife and I packed the truck for a week at her Aunt’s house in Northern Arkansas. We own property there. I should say her family still owns property in the Ozarks. It is a small acreage up in the hill near Bull Shoals Lake. Her parents used to own a small fishing resort with about 9 cabins on the lake. We spent what could be called our honeymoon painting the cabins back in 1975.They also owned a general store up on the main road with about 45 acres surrounding the store and gas station. It was an old Sinclair station with the big green dinosaur logo above the pumps and yucca plants in the island garden in front by the mailbox.
Being the only store for some 20 miles in any direction we got to meet all the locals many of whom lived up in the hills and down in the hollers who were rarely caught out in public. Many still hunted and fished and farmed garden plots for their sustenance. Every pickup truck was graced with a 30.0 six rifle and a shotgun in the EZ Rider rifle rack in the back window. About the only thing these down home snuff dippin good old boys didn’t grow was their own tobacco. We couldn’t sell beer or wine cause it was a dry county back then. That changed just recently. Used to be you had to drive down to the lake to catch the ferry over to the Missouri side of the lake to by liquor about 12 miles up the road. There were about 4 places to work in the area. A family man either worked for the Ranger Boat company making bass boats, the Levi’s shirt factory about 30 miles away, piloted or manned the ferry or worked for the government. Back then there were really only two government jobs…Sheriff or Postman. The local sheriff at the time also owned the big boat dock down on the peninsula. He was a rough character known for his womanizing and hard drinking. But he ran a good dock, usually had everything you needed and wasn’t adverse to making a deal for locals as it might help get re-elected next go round.
The Postman, actually he was the Postmaster because he was the only one working in the small 30 x 30 post office about a mile up the road from my in-laws store, was Dick Smith. I remember the first time I saw him driving his little Postal colored Chevette with his left arm from the passenger seat stopping at every box or set of boxes for the various hollers and coves the road serviced. He looked drunk. I said so to my wife. “Who is that? I’ve never seen him before.” She smiled and said he called himself ‘Dy-yuck Smy-uth’ and yeah he’s usually soused. She proceeded to tell me stories about his escapades. Once, supposedly he fell asleep in the little post office drunk as a skunk with his feet propped up on the wood stove to stay warm He was wearing those plastic composite soled work boots you used to get cheap made in China and the soles melted on the stove till he got a hot foot and he woke up yelling “my feet are on fire!” Now I don’t know how the story got out if he was the only one working in the office at the time but I’ve heard it since from several other locals.
There were only between 200 and 500 people living in the small town and coves, hills and hollers at the time. There was another small town about 20 miles to the north towards the Missouri border. 20 miles if you took the main road but only about 12 if you took the muddy dirt road, really a couple of ruts and mud holes, called Locust Road. But you were just as likely to get stuck as make it through. My father-in-law bought us an old 1955 Willys Jeep as a wedding gift. We were driving an old Rambler American that burned more oil than it did gasoline. It was a mess. One day this guy pulls up in a big tandem axle pickup with this jeep on a trailer with a 4-sale sign on it. Roger went out to fill up his huge gas tanks, a good sale probably more than he’d sold in a week. He got to talking with the guy and I guess he had to give up the jeep cause he was having heart problems and couldn’t deer hunt any more. He only wanted a thousand for it and that was too good a deal for my thrifty father-in-law to pass on. So he wrote him a check and handed me the keys. The first thing I did was head for Locust Road. After that I never took the main road again. We drove that jeep all over those hills. At the time we were living in Tulsa Oklahoma. Me and my little brother would throw his little 8’ john boat ( a rectangular flat bottom shallow hulled aluminum job designed for fishing in rivers) on top of the jeep and head for some ponds up on one of the hills surrounding Tulsa. We could go anywhere and never get stuck. I put retreaded mud and snow tires on it. I used to laugh at the new jeeps with their oversized Boondocker tires and their big V-8’s when they’d get stuck in the mud. I’d pull up behind and ask if they needed help. “You got a tow chain? You’ll get stuck too if you try to push me out.” I’d chuckle, rev up my little deep stroke 4 cylinder ford motor and drive right in behind and push em out without any trouble.
In ‘76 I got a small scholarship to study art at the Columbus College of Art and Design about 16 hours away to the east in Ohio. We had to sell the jeep and buy something a little more city and highway worthy. It was a sad day to be sure. It was a great car. The first SUV. But we bought a relatively new Dodge pickup with a camper on top and we drove to Ohio and lived in the back of the truck for about a month until we found an apartment downtown near the college.
We drove home once, sometimes twice a year to Tulsa. On our way home we’d usually stop for an equal time in the Ozarks. After the two boys were born we would leave them their in Arkansas with Gramma and Grampa Bauer sometimes for a month at a time so we could get things done during the summer. The boys had a great time driving the little tractor mower and working at the store and resort. Eventually Roger and Bea had to sell the resort. It was just too much work for the two of them to run along with the general store. So they moved from the lake up onto the hilltop by the store. Eventually, after living in several ratty little house trailers they put up a nice clean modern double wide. Property taxes in Arkansas are almost nothing on a trailer house and a double wide is still considered a trailer. The boys had the 40 acre woods surrounding the house to play in. They built tree houses and wicki-ups, pretended to hunt or played cowboys and Indians, hunted arrow heads, caught crawdads in the creeks, made friends with some of the local boys and other kids who came to visit their grandparents and generally had a summer camp experience without the summer camp price tag. And it gave us a reason to make several trips a year to visit mom and dad.
It wasn’t all honey and roses though. My father-in-law had a hard time with the fact that his ‘princess’ had married a tattered bohemian with no job prospects. He was a business man,. He’d been a super sales man his whole career working for Hech’s in Maryland and later for Ampex in Chicago. Then started his own floppy disk sales company called K-tronics later in Richardson Texas near Dallas. And even though he still worked his butt off running the general store, a storage space and a general hardware and parts service out of his barn he said he’d retired to the country when he moved the family to Arkansas. So, as I said, he had a hard time with the fact that I was an artist, an occupation he considered to be a hobby. To him it just wasn’t real work, not what a real man does. But he tried not to show it. He put a good face on it. Eventually I finished my BFA and applied for grad schools. I got an interview at Yale. All of a sudden his whole attitude changed. His son-in-law might go to Yale. I’m sure he had visions of me hanging out with the likes of Bill Clinton and George Bush in the Skull and Bones Society, rubbing shoulders with all sorts of big wigs and puffed up be-spectacled professors and the like for a little while as I waited to hear if I’d gotten in it made life a little easier. Ultimately I didn’t get into Yale. I went to the University of Wichita in Kansas instead. But because of financial reasons had to drop out after a semester to work for an ad agency in Tulsa. I eventually got my MFA from Boston University. I had to remind Roger that Martin Luther King went to B.U. and Isaak Azimov taught biology there. He loved science fiction and Popular Mechanics. He had Asimov’s Analog magazines by the box stored out in the barn. So he eventually settled for seconds after that. I was still the only one in the family with a masters degree. When I got my teaching job he was pleased and once said to me “so it all paid off huh?” I took that to be a kind of acknowledgement that I had done good. When he was dying, my wife asked me to take the boys to Tulsa because she feared it would be painful and traumatic for them to see him go. As I was loading up the truck for the 5 hour drive over to Oklahoma he’d managed to get out to a chair on the front porch. As I came out to go he grabbed my hand and said “promise me you’ll take me fishing with the boys when you get back” in a slow painful harsh whisper. It killed me cause I knew he wouldn’t be there when we got back. The boys were next to me and I could see that they were excited by the idea of Grampa taking them fishing. It had been a while since he’d been out on the lake. I smiled, gently squeezed his frail hand and said I promise. He’d always been a big burly barrel chested guy. Now he was just a thin fragile whisp of a figure. I turned away quick cause I had tears in my eyes. He died a couple days later. Tami called me to tell me. I had to tell the boys.
The fishing on Bull Shoals lake is tough because it’s big, deep and clear. You can sometimes see 20 feet down. That means light is passing through 40 feet of water down and back up again. Bass, (large and small mouth), crappie, walleye, blue gills and trout are frequently caught. They introduced Striped Bass sometime back and later a white bass/striped bass hybrid called wipers. Catfish, especially channel cat, are often caught especially on the flatter shoreline in the summer at night. Night fishing is an amazing thing in August with its dog days and hot still clear nights. It is a mystical experience. Ron Ply, one of the local boys, sometimes takes me out when I visit if he needs company. The first time he took me out was to go night fishing. I met him down at the boat launch in the campgrounds at the end of the peninsula. He drove up in his big black ¾ ton chevy pickup with his 17 foot shiny black bass boat in tow. We maneuvered it into the water, slid it off the trailer, parked the truck and we were off. The sky was clear with the milky way so bright it lit the whole lake up with starlight. We didn’t have to go far, just across to the bluffs about a mile across the lake just on the edge of the Missouri side. It always makes me think of that line from the Joni Mitchell song…the night is a starry dome. We shut down the motor and drifted up to the bluff. Ron climbed out of the boat and rooted around on shore for a couple of big rocks to use as anchors. He tied them onto the end of this long fabric strapping he had on rolls and we pushed back out about 40 feet from shore. We lowered our natural anchors about 60 feet down, one in front and one in back. He hardly said a word. At first I thought maybe he didn’t like me much. Really, we fished in silence almost the whole night. He’d dropped a couple of fishing lights down about 10 or 15 feet below the boat on either side which made this mystical aura, a ring of aqua marine glowing in a circle around the boat. We were anchored just beneath a big notch in the bluffs and from the V up near the top of the bluff you could see the full moon rising with Venus just to the lower right side. You could see maybe 30 feet down. The light began to attract smaller bait fish, minnows and shad, a few freshwater herring and once in a while a big needle nosed gar. Sometimes the smaller silver slivers would zip around like meteors. After a while the bluegills began to gather. They slowly formed themselves around us radiating out from the boat in all directions facing us as if we were some kind of gods and they were paying homage. That night was like breathing rarified air. I felt transformed somehow into a larger spirit. There will never be a night to compare.
This was a bit of a sad visit though. We are trying to sell the property on the hill. There are new huge turkey farms that have sprung up and on a hot day with the wind coming down from the north west the air smells so foul you can hardly breath. The guy who owns the junk yard on both sides of the road just bought the general store from the old hippies who bought from my mother-in-law after her husband died of cancer about 10 years ago. They ran a dive shop and a pizza parlor out of it but could never really make much of a living since the Government made Roger dig up the gas tanks cause they were old and leaking, for fear it would leech into the ground water. The junk yard guy, he calls his collection of old harvesters, dead pickups and tractors and trailer houses a museum, eventually will continue his collection right up to our front yard.
We stayed with Tami’s aunt Chris about 6 miles down the road down one of the dirt and gravel spurs that took you into the hollers and eventually to the lake. You could see the lake from her back yard down the hill. I could see the coves Ron Ply had taken me to catch walleye when the water was up into the little willows that grow along the shoreline. We would drift with the breeze just above and along the edge of the tops about 6 feet beneath us with shallow diving plugs. There’s nothing more exciting than feeling the vibrating plug suddenly stop with a vengeance and knowing you had a fish on. We have renters in the doublewide. He’s a carpenter and the huge metal barn my father-in-law built back in the early 70’s is perfect for his business. Roger designed the barn with a half basement. It was half underground and half at the back of the small incline it was built on emerged with the angle of the ground to make a façade with windows and a back door. He wanted to live in the basement but Bea wouldn’t hear of it. They eventually want to buy the place and we still had some stuff stored in the basement of the barn we needed to retrieve so he could use the space he was renting. They wanted to use the basement as a show room and office area.
One night I was standing out back in the dark smoking and watching the Leonid meteor shower. Out of the corner of my eye I sensed a movement about 10 feet away from me. I slowly turned and saw what I thought at first was a large house cat slinking in the grass behind me. It passed by no more than 6 feet to my right towards the back of the house, across the driveway and into the grass overlooking the lake. It stopped. Turned and faced me looking right at me. I could see its eyes glowing in the dark. Then it turned sideways and that’s when I knew it was a small fox. Maybe a young silver fox. It worked its way across the yard sniffing in the grass and once in a while it would catch something, a grasshopper maybe or a mouse and throw its head up and shake the little critter. I thought I could hear crunching sounds as it chewed whatever it had caught with his head down in that dog like manner protecting its food. Its back hunched up in the middle and its head moved forward and backwards as it swallowed. Eventually it worked its way to the other side of the back yard and disappeared into the woods. I ran in to tell everyone what I‘d seen. But of course she was gone by that time. But a few minutes later it appeared again coming back across further down the back of the lot so I grabbed my wife and my camera. It was just too dark, even with the flash to get a picture so we just watched. It came every night for 3 nights and did pretty much the same thing. On the last night after working its way back and forth across the yard catching, playing with and eventually eating its little moving morsels it kind of did a dance in the middle of the yard. It pranced back and forth leaning down on its front legs with its rear end up in the air and then it did a back flip. It repeated the same jig again and ended with another back flip and then it disappeared as if that was the climax of its performance.
We left the next morning. As we drove off the gravel road onto the asphalt of the main road we saw it there in the middle of the road where someone had hit it the night before. So it was a final performance after all.
