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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
September 25, 2005
Published as Family History
in a WIP dated November 13, 2001.
© 2001 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Moonrise (Blue), 1973
© 1973 by Bud Grossmann
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TROUT STREAM
(OF CONSCIOUSNESS)
Three trout. Three trout stand out (if “stand” is the correct word for what fish do) in my memories of fish and fishing. Let’s start with the freshest, the most recent one that made a meal.
Must have been six or seven summers ago. A family vacation, a visit to Aunties Katharine and Janet’s home near Portland, Oregon. Katharine took us on a day’s drive up to Mount Hood. On the way back again, we stopped at a trout farm. Keep All You Catch, Pay By the Inch—that was the deal. Tackle, bait, and cleaning were provided. Elizabeth was, what, seven or eight years old? David must have been thirteen or fourteen and in a wheelchair. An electric three-wheel scooter, actually, that Katharine rented for our visit.
How much fun could taking tame trout be, I wondered, before we started. I imagined shooting ducks in a barrel (a sport I have not yet tried). But the fact was, it was wonderful. Quiet and cool, in the shade of big spruces and fragrant pines. Wide trails for Dave to roll on. The fish fought with fervent fanaticism, even the little ones. Liz caught several okay trout, and Dave brought in a monster.
That evening, back in Portland, I gave our catch a good second scaling, on the grass under an apple tree. Fran put the smaller fish in the refrigerator but slathered mayonnaise on the big one, wrapped it in foil, and baked it for our supper. Katharine cooked rice and steamed some zucchini from her garden. She served fresh lettuce, tomatoes, and, for those of us of legal age and with the inclination, cold brown-bottled beer.
That one trout served six. Sweetest fish I ever ate, that’s how I’ve remembered it ever since.
But here’s another, almost as sweet, a trout that’s made me smile for forty years. I was twelve years old, on my grandparents’ Wisconsin farm.
Two streams run through the place; in those days both were stocked with rainbows by the DNR. But the trout, tame in name, were hard to catch. The little crick was shallow and twisty; if you let your line out very far, the current would tangle it in roots beneath the overhang of the bank.
The big crick was full of rubbish fish—chubs and suckers—which were much more likely than the trout to show an interest in our bait. Grampa claimed he’d taught us kids all his secrets, but he caught more trout, far quicker, than we youngsters ever did. Rainbows, almost always, were what he caught, but sometimes he’d hook a wild trout, too—a brook or a German brown.
One summer morning, under a sky of heavy gray, my brother Bruce and I were trying for trout below the bridge on Town Line Road, which marks the west boundary of the farm. We used spinning gear: eight-pound mono, hooks No. 8 or 10, no sinker. For bait we had energetic angle worms, fresh-forked from the chicken yard. We went an hour without a nibble.
Mosquitoes raised welts on all our exposed surfaces. I was thinking we might as well head back to the house, when suddenly the wind swirled through old oak leaves on the ground and began whipping popple trees back and forth. Swallows swooped into their nests on the bridge’s concrete underside. Lightning flashed; thunder boomed an instant later. The moment raindrops began to plop onto the surface of the stream, I felt a tug and then a yank. The rod doubled over, and I flipped the bail off the spool to let line leave my reel. I thought I had a sucker, a carp, but it turned out to be a German brown trout, fifteen inches by the tape. Bruce and I hadn’t brought a net, but the line held, and when the fish was willing to come to shore, I eased it up-and-out at a place where muskrats had smoothed a slide.
Couldn’t get the darn thing unhooked; had to lug it back to the house still attached, and ask Grampa to apply his pliers. My father took a photo, and Gramma fried the fish for our noontime meal.
Back then I wasn’t usually fond of any food more bony than tuna on Wonder Bread. I have, however, always recalled that particular German brown trout as entirely delectable.
Now, one final story for today: possibly my earliest memory of fish as food. I suppose I was about nine years old, and my brother Bruce was six. Dad was in the Army, stationed in Japan. We boys went along one time on a weekend trip with Mom and Dad, to a resort on the slopes of Mt. Fuji. The younger kids stayed home, in Tokyo, with our maid. The fish that made an impression on me was served as breakfast. I was used to eggs-and-bacon, but what I found instead upon my plate that day was a slender, sad-eyed, speckled trout, reclining on a bed of vegetables and rice. I believe that was the first time anyone offered me a fish who hadn’t been beheaded. I don’t recall how much of it I devoured. I’m sure I left the eyes, to the puzzlement of our hosts.
There’s more I remember of that place, of mountain hot springs and a huge communal bath. I recall my mother’s imperiled modesty ... but I don’t think she wants me to speak of that. She’d rather I stick to trout. ♦
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