Why I Hate Fishing - Pt. 2

What a beautiful day! Sitting on the front porch of my friend's home in Arkansas, watching  a dozen or so hummingbird's fight over the feeder hanging just two feet away. I was there visiting with Ben and another Bro. from Texas - four of us in all.

It was nice and relaxing until somebody decided that relaxing wasn't good enough. We must go fishing.

But where?

Across the way was a cow pasture. And in that cow pasture was a small bowl where a small lake of stanky water had pooled. And around that cow pasture pond, even lining the edges thereof, and contributing to its contents, was a veritable minefield of cow patties. A plethora, even.

The fishermen, having spotted said water, ran to get their fishing gear, and were off, with me tagging along as the observer.

My first observation was that our approach was going to be a bit precarious. At every step or two there was a 2 or 3 foot wide cow pie, many quite fresh and still shakily coming to terms with the pull of gravity. As I carefully made my way past each obstacle, I was somewhat disheartened to look ahead to the goal of my labors, still ever so far away across the field.

Allow me to describe our destination, quite reservedly, as a giant cow toilet. A cow toilet decorated in the style one might call retro cow, by a random configuration of cow pies, strewn haphazardly and obviously without much planning over the countryside. I imagined the last rainfall washing hundreds, perhaps thousands of these gloriously enormous pancakes of defecation down into the nasty bog in which we were about to fish.

Alas, I was even more disheartened when I was able to observe the true nature of our little fishin' hole's nastiness close up and personal. The entire perimeter thereof was made up of 5 to 10 feet of black sludge that any fish would have to be pulled, scraped and dragged through before it came into reach.

Many questions came to mind, such as...

Y'all gonna keep any fish you catch?

and also...

Are there any fish alive in there?

In the droll half-eyed, detached way that all fishermen seem to be able to turn on when things get "unpleasant", they responded with a question of their own...

You gonna fish?

Um... no, I thought I would just watch. The sun was burning hot. It's always burning hot when you go fishing (unless it's sleeting, raining, snowing, or the wind is bending the trees horizontal), which many fishermen (I am convinced) believe heightens the level of enjoyment somehow. And of course there wasn't a tree around for miles. Maybe a cow would let me rest in its shadow. Unfortunately they had all gone over the next hill.

It didn't take long before Ben had a bite. My neck lay like a side of bacon roasting in the sun as I stood by watching carefully. As far as I was concerned, anything could happen. He pulled the fish slowly towards him, closer and closer to the black sludge, until it began to drag through, pulling its gills, mouth, and other essentials through the quagmire. By the time he got the fish up to him a thick layer of gunk hung like a sail from his line.

But he, being a true fisherman, was undeterred. He reached into the fish's mouth, worked his way around all the cow feces, removed the hook, and let it go! Whew. At least he wasn't going to eat it. On second thought, nobody had brought an ice filled cooler along, so I guess that was a given. But you never know with fishermen.

There was no place to sit without sitting on a large, wet, pancake shaped pile of yuck, so I stood there for a couple of hours while they had their share of fishing. It was quite miserable, indeed a refined state of misery I could only describe as fishin' out of a cow toilet while the sun baked away the outer layer of your skin and then not havin' nuthin' to show for it when you went home.

But any good fisherman would call it, simply, "good fishin'".

P.S. The saga is far from over.