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Yeah!!! We STOLE The Fish!! Take Us To Jail!
Shoot, we didn't get a TV until I was in junior high, and even then the radio was better as we listened to Roy Rogers, The Shadow, The Lone Ranger, ... Zoro! Being the oldest, my older brother (duh) got to sit closest to the radio to get the "wall of sound." Summers in Oklahoma are hot, and our butts were usually kicked out of the water-cooled air! I mean OUT!! If we wanted water, we had to pump it up ourselves. But we had something that was always up our sleeves; we had a pond about 2 blocks away, open to anyone with a hook.
Back then, we had this nylon, no-see through line, and even with it, we could catch pan fish bass, perch, or even channel cat. When I went out by myself, if I caught a fish, I'd put it on a stringer and put it in the water. If, by the time I decided to go home, I didn't have a "mess," I let the few I had, go, ... for another day. But one day, something else happened that we never told our parents about.
My older brother, Ray, and I went down to the pond, and there was a trotline, ... that was tied down on one side of the bank, dipped into the water and came out on the other side, tied to a limb hanging over the acre size pond. We didn't know such a line was illegal, but as my brother examined it, he gave it a pull and was nearly pulled back into the water.
"Did you see that, Dale! There is something big on this trotline. Let's get in the boat and check it out."
An instant check told us there was absolutely nothing or nobody around to spot us illegally checking an illegal trotline. So we laid our fishing rods down, fetched the boat and oar and started down the line.
The first creature we find is a big water snake hooked by the line. But then we went two or my baitless hooks down, and Ray pulls and is almost pulled overboard. We managed to pull a 6 or 7 lb catfish out. Ray put the fish in the boat and cuts the hook line. Then we proceeded on, 3 more hooks down ..., and we find a hook that was even tougher than the last. We finely fight the 9 lb channel into the boat. Nothing pulled on the rest of the line, so we turned around and, left the boat just like it was, hid the trotline hooks, and changed our method of fishing to grasshoppers and sinkers and headed, victoriously home!
Our dad and mother were astounded with the size of the catch that we made that day in only 20 minutes. Suddenly, out of no where, we caught two large catfish. As Dad described it, " ... fish big enough to cut fish cakes off of." The word went around our virtually "person-less" town within moments. When our milk man delivered the next day, he grabbed his rod and reel and took some time off fishing.
One evening a man was a fishing in our hole.
"Well, did you boys hear about some big catfish getting caught out of this pond?"
"Yeah, we did, and we can prove it because we still have the heads. It was us."
The man's eyes squinted a bit and he said, "I have an idea that you boys didn't catch those with a rod and reel."
"Not true!" said Ray. "Your looking at the fishing reels that we caught them with!" You gotta check those lines.
Now, I can tell this, safely, because Dad is long dead and so is that man, and my son, well, he's taken my place. When it's time to hang up your placard, you'll know it. Back then, we knew nothing about laws regarding fish, trot-lines, and limb-lines.
It's sad that we have troops in Iraq who have never had the chance to fish out of a plain old farm pond. Just ask the owner, and who knows what we can catch in that pond; and ... how we are able to catch it. Limb-lines, yes! Trot-lines, No!
Sadly, we've had too many of our soldiers die in the mote outside Baghdad. That is evidenced by the excellent, CNN report on casualties. (CNN+casualties!)
Water is deadly. I had the fire fighters come to our elementary school every year and talk about safety during a fire. Guiltily, we spent little time on how deadly water can be.
I had a little kindergarten girl who would come down to my office, that year, when time for her in her classroom had become constraining. After school one day, her sister and she were on the bridge above a 10 foot body of water in the park. Her sister accidentally lost one of her sneakers. Without fear, my girl jumped in to get it. I attended her funeral. Like this little girl, we've had too many of our soldiers lost in that Baghdad mote. I counted once. The dead, sadly, don't come back to tell their story.
Like our soldiers, how many of us would have thought about drowning in the desert? This is probably the only thing that Bush's crack team, hadn't planned for. God doesn't hold fishing time against you when HE/SHE opens the Book Of Life! Did I tell you that I'm the greatest fisherman in Fort Cobb Lake, but that's another time and another story? You can catch my fish on <http://www.dalehill.us>, if you look close enough! No PhotoShopping here.
