Why I Hate Fishing - Pt.1

I hate fishing.
- Myself

I have oft quoted the above quotation, through suffering and sunburn, on many a disastrous fishing excursion. I never really liked fishing to begin with - why spoil a beautiful sunset or a nice waterfall with work when you can just relax and enjoy nature?

But maybe I delve into all that stuff later. At any rate, I have decided to chronicle, in no particular order, some of my "life-events" that led me from a somewhat dislike of fishing, to a severe, "don't even ask me to go" dislike. The most recent event occurred this past Saturday/Sunday, which I will share with you now. I must give you fair warning that this story doesn't involve me actually fishing. But how can it be a fishing story if I didn't do any fishing? Read on...

It all began late at night, when all the kiddies were safely in bed, the house was quiet, and I decided to steal a few minutes online to check my email and "piddle about" before turning in. At the precise moment that I thought to myself, "I am tired. It is time for bed now", the phone began to ring.

Normally at that time of night I just let it ring, but for some inexplicable reason I decided I would at least go see what ye olde caller-id had to say for itself, so I scurried downstairs to check. A name I didn't recognize appeared in the display. I most definitely do not take calls from strangers at night, except this time, for no particular reason, I answered.

"Hello?"

"Hey Bob! [Expression of joy and relief.] It's Ben!"

Ben is my brother, you see, but that is not why he was happy. I was immediately wary given the tone in his voice: he obviously was in need of some form of rescue. I listened intently, and the first thing that became clear was that Ben wanted me to call a taxi. After even more concentration, I was able to deduce that he and some other brothers from church had kayaked down the Hooch, and when they got to car #2, realized they had left the car keys in car #1. They were able to borrow some nice gentleman's cell phone who just happened to be there at 10:00 at night, showing his girlfriend where he had jumped off the bridge.

"Where are you?"

"[Such and such, close to yadda yadda blah.]"

"Um... I think I can drive over there and pick you up."

Google Maps said they were only 13 miles away, so hey, I would just run over and give them a ride, and be back before 11:00! Easy as pie! Right! Right?

Except... they had been fishing. In fact, they had caught some actual fish, which they still had in their actual possession. Had I paused to reflect on the situation, I might not have naively and hastily rushed out the door without taking the following fishing disaster rescue related items:

1. Flashlight
2. Water
3. Bungee cords, or at least a good bit of rope
4. Plastic bags, or any container into which lots of nasty can be placed. The exact type of nasty is rarely known in advance, but rest assured that there will be some.
5. Cell Phone
6. Brain, or at least half of one

If you like to fish, you should probably just keep this stuff in your vehicle at all times. This might be difficult, because as the experienced fisher-person knows, you will lose 4 out of 6 of these items after each expedition, so a bit of work is involved to make sure these necessaries are always handy. Of course, one of these items can be considered missing as soon as you embark. Exactly which one I will leave as an exercise for the reader to discover.

Aside from these rescue essentials, I recommend the following additional necessaries for any fishing trip:

1. Money, to pay all the fines you will get from park rangers
2. Life jacket, which you will forget to wear, hence all those fines
3. Change of clothes, for when you fall in the ice cold water coming out of the bottom of the Dam (haha)

I was thinking about none of these as I drove slowly down the haunted looking dirt road leading to the rescue spot. The woods echoed with that crazy screeching sound cicadas make just after dusk, that is very likely nature's way of saying "umm... you really should be home in bed now". My headlights barely made a dent in the darkness before me, and I began to think crazy thoughts like, "This would sho 'nuff be a bad place to have a flat tire!" As I rounded a bend my headlights covered a few figures up ahead that lurched eerily out of the gloom toward my car. A shudder rippled down my spine.

"Fishermen", I thought warily to myself. I'd better be on my guard, or I'd find myself reaping the "rewards" of this night for days after.

I rolled down my window and they all looked in. Nobody spoke, so, having forgotten item #6 (naturally), I said the first thing that came to mind.

"Y'all look hongry."

I don't think anybody for miles around thought that was funny.

Ben jumped in the car and we went searching for his truck, which would contain the keys to the other car. This would have been exceedingly simple, except for the teeny-tiny-eensy-weensy fact that Ben forgot where he parked. So we drove all over North Georgia looking for something vaguely resembling the place where he had left his truck.

Finally, we found it. But the gate was locked, illuminated quite directly by a big light. We plotted and schemed, and decided to "just" run down the road to the truck, grab the keys, and then at least we would have access to the other vehicle until the next morning. I didn't know how far we would have to walk through the night, but I was ready to get this over with.

I stepped out of the car just as a police cruiser rolled by, shining his spot light directly on my little round head. We were clearly parked in a very odd location, but thankfully he didn't turn around. We darted like concentration camp escapees through the lights into the shadows, and began a quick, easy jog down the mountainside, through the darkness.

It was quite dark, except for the occasional crack of lightning. We had already seen a couple of deer, rabbits, and my mind naturally began playing a special on North Georgia Wildlife Disasters, starring yours truly, alongside a supporting cast of coyotes and bobcats. We ran a mile or so, all downhill, and finally I could see light up ahead. Still we ran, until the road came out of the trees and took a turn in front of a huge dirt construction - there was probably a lake at the top. A bat swooped down over my head, and I could see a few more swooping around above. I felt like I had run for my whole life. And it was all downhill.

"This isn't it."

The words didn't register. There was a parking area just up ahead. His truck was there. It had to be. We needed to just go a little farther and surely he would remember.

"Man, this isn't it."

I could detect a bit of panic in his voice, and through the blood pounding in my temples it started to dawn on me that maybe he really did know, for sure, that this wasn't it.

So we started running back. At this time I would like to reservedly describe the gradation as "a mite steeper" than it had seemed on the way down. After a few steps I was wishing I hadn't been sipping so heavily on that monster PowerAde right before we got out of the car. I was still getting over a minor cold bug, and a few minutes of slogging up the hill caused my head to feel like a giant PowerAde bottle. I coughed and gagged and sputtered like an engine that won't crank, and began to care less about being mauled by a rabid coyote and more about getting to the top of that nasty road, hopefully without running into a cop beaming his searchlight all over the place.

We finally made it, collapsed into the car, and decided to go enlist the help of Bro. Jeremy and Bro. Daniel. We had gone about an hour, so imagine at this time, if you would, their plight of sitting alone on a log, deep in the woods, guarding the kayaks as deer and other wildlife frolicked in the night around them. Watching the second hands on their watches tick away, wondering where in the world we were.

They were sitting there side by side as I tore down the road and pulled up next to their log. I rolled down the window and took a strange, macabre delight in their expressions as they realized we were both in one car, not two. The truck was obviously nowhere to be found. I laughed a silly laugh and stated the obvious:

"We couldn't find it!"

They stared blankly at us. Then Jeremy spoke, "You're joking. You're joking."

"No man, we really couldn't find it."

Finally Ben decided to speak up.

"I forgot where I parked the truck!"

Jeremy had to repeat "you're joking" a few more times before it finally sunk in. It was really a sad moment for us all.

So we all piled into the car and went hunting for the truck, which we found shortly thereafter. It appears that Ben was deep in conversation when he parked the truck right next to the biggest (and only) dam in North Georgia. The dam that holds back Lake Lanier.

Anyway.

The gate was locked, as we had arrived an hour too late (they lock up at 10:00). I sat in the car with Daniel while Ben and Jeremy started walking down the road (which I would later discover went to the bottom of the dam, a very very long way away) to get the keys from Ben's truck. Daniel was knocked out, fast asleep. He probably doesn't remember anything that happened after we picked them up at "the log".

A bit later Ben's truck came roaring up the road, stopping at the (locked) gate. More discussion was made. The trailer was unhitched and concealed, and I learn that we would be leaving the trailer near the gate in the bushes, and returning with the other car to tow it (and later the kayaks) back to my house. The truck left again, back down the mountain. Daniel was still comatose in the back seat, and I was alone again.

I decided now would be a good time to go to the bathroom, so I snuck away into the darkness. Just as I'm getting fixed, up roars a Park Ranger in a little unmarked car. He squeals to a halt next to my car, jumps out, and starts yelling past the locked gate and down the dirt road, "You had better get back to your car RIGHT NOW or it WILL BE TOWED!!"

He apparently thought the car was unoccupied. I was making my way out of the darkness and around the rear of my car just as the word "TOWED!" escaped his lips, and he snapped his head around. I think I scared the living daylights out of him. I just smiled and made a little wave with my hand.

He snapped his head back around towards the direction of the dirt road, never to look at me again, and said, loudly, "You had better call to your friends RIGHT NOW and tell them to GET BACK TO THEIR VEHICLE RIGHT NOW!"

Believe it or not, I yelled, "Beeyun! Come back to the car!", before I said, "Um... they're actually walking back up the road right now."

"Well their car has BEEN TOWED! This gate is LOCKED AT EXACTLY 10:00 PM EVERY NIGHT and ALL CARS ARE TOWED!"

"Their car wasn't towed."

"Oh... oh... I SEE. Did they have a truck with a trailer?"

"Yes."

"OK, I'M STARTING TO SEE [sputter], TO UNDERSTAND, TO GET A BETTER PICTURE IDEA OF WHAT IS GOING ON HERE! I'M STARTING TO SEE WHAT IS HAPPENING! Well they better be glad they had a trailer or it WOULD HAVE BEEN TOWED! And THEY CAN COME BACK TOMORROW MORNING at 8:00 AM IF THEY WANT TO GET IT!"

"Ok. You know, they kayaked down the river and left their keys..."

"I SEE, WELL THEY CAN COME BACK TOMORROW..."

"Yes, well, it's just been a bad day for us today."

"NOT AS BAD AS THOSE EIGHTY ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS WE PULLED OFF THE LAKE TODAY! AND ONE OF THEM WAS DRIVING HIS BOSSES' MERCEDES BENZ! IT WAS PRETTY BAD FOR THEM!"

"Wow, yeah, that is pretty bad."

He pulled his head back in his car and pulled away. He had never looked directly at me the entire time he was rambling, which freaked me out a little. In retrospect, I probably scared the living daylights out of him when I suddenly manifested out of the darkness. I leaned on the hood of the car and reflected for a bit. Wow, eighty illegal aliens arrested on the lake in one day. By this guy. Just wow.

In another hour or so we had driven back to the other car, then driven that back to the dam, pulled the trailer out of the bushes and hooked it up (I didn't have a hitch on my car), and then driven back to the kayaks. It took another 40 minutes or so to load them up, get everything tied down, and be on our way to my house, where we arrived around 2:30 in the morning. Ben spent the night.

But Jeremy and Daniel did not - they had to be at their church the next morning (in Alabama). Bro. Jeremy's family was staying at Ben's house an hour away, so onward they rode through the night until they pulled up in the driveway and realized that they didn't have a cell phone to call and alert the ladies to let them inside. So they slept in the car another two hours, and then drove the family on to church. I suspect Bro. Jeremy got zero (0) hours of sleep.

I know that was hard. I, myself, got a grand total of 4 hours of sleep and was having trouble keeping my eyes from crossing the next morning in church. And I could see Ben's head bobbing across the way.

Yesterday I was so sore from that crazy midnight run up and down the mountain that I could barely bend my legs. But hey, we survived, and hopefully there was some character building in there somewhere.

But if you think this story alone is why I don't like fishing, boy are you mistaken. And boy have I got some stories for you. But those most wait for another day.