“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I’m fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.” – John Steinbeck
My buddy Ted is the youngest of three brothers.
The brothers and I were, over a period of five or six years, the bulk of the local high school’s track squad two-mile relay team.
There was one year, one particular stellar year, where the four of us constituted the two mile relay team.This was probably attributable to some fraudulent birth certificate, or some other semi-secretive sort of athletic indiscretion. But, it happened.
After running two mile relays, Ted opted for a senior trip to southeast Asia’s Mekong Delta where good men for the I Navy’s brown water fleet of Patrol Boat River (PBRs) were increasingly common to find. My buddy survived his tour and returned home with new found appreciation for beer and round eyed women and some of the more bizarre things in life.
It took Ted three or four meals and as many cases of beer before he was convinced that cooking up king snakes in a stir fry wok just wasn’t what the Good Lord had intended for Tennessee king snakes. King snake culinary failure eventually led Ted to the great rattlesnake hunt, but that’s another story.
We dabbled in parachuting with a local answer to D.B. Cooper. Ted and I both landed in pine trees on our first jump. That too, is another story. I was working on a bridge job that summer, slowly working my way up from shovel toting laborer to the dubious rank of apprentice nailer.
Becoming an apprentice nailer was may best shot at not being crushed by loose bridge timbers. And swinging from three yard carrying buckets of concrete, which had to be seriously caught while straddling, untethered, to forty foot high bridge columns to keep from high dives into sudden death. Ted collected unemployment checks routinely and therefore consistently possessed a cooler of cheap, cold beverage, compliments of Lyndon Johnson’s welfare system.
One hot day at lunch, Ted showed up at the bridge and announced that he was ready to learn to trout fish. He had been talking to his grizzled elderly Grandfather, “Bompo,” who subsisted in a badly weathered Winnebago. The old gentleman was legendary for sailing his motor home around Western states most of the year like a modern day Magellan. As explorers go, Bompo was a veritable Lewis and Clark of an elderly man. He wore a fringed elk skin jacket as if he had just walked out of Buffalo Bill’s last wild west show. Ted declared that Bompo was the only man alive known to save substantial sums of money from the Social Security Administration. As a testament to frugality, Bompo produced onions in a window box on the dash of the motor home in order to save money on groceries. The Winnebago was always parked facing the rising sun in an attempt to make his onions grow with the warmth. He fed his onions from a five gallon bucket of droppings collected from sheep that grazed in Idaho every summer.
The elderly gentleman had pointed Ted west, in the general direction of the Bighorn River. The Bighorn was the best place Bompo could think of for Ted to learn to fish for trout and he had provided an extensive map of the best stretches of the river.
So, that day on the bridge, Ted carried a badly folded map in one hand and a cold Pabst Blue Ribbon in the other. I knew that a river with a name like the Bighorn was probably out of range of Ted’s sky blue, 60’s vintage Rambler, but I was just a little bit surprised to find that this particular learning experience meant somehow getting to the state of Wyoming.
I listened intently as Ted relayed the Bompo’s advice about the best place to trout fish in the entire U.S of A. “BIG” fish, he kept saying BIG fish. I looked at the bridge, looked at the map, looked at the cranes, and the shovels, and the concrete buckets, slowly calculating the distance to Wyoming, and I asked Ted how he planned to get us to the Bighorn. The thought of riding west with Bompo was out of the question since the wind had been blowing out of the West most of the summer. Bompo always used a strong tail wind to propel him and his motor home/schooner. He claimed to save hundreds of gallons of gasoline with a good strong tailwind.
While Ted formulated his answer, I drifted off trying to visualize the snow capped Rockies and BIG trout. He said he’d get his older brother to take us to the Tiftonia exit and then we’d just hitchhike the rest of the way. Bompo had told him the winds were wrong for westward reaches this time of year.
For a minute, there in the shadow of the new bridge, there was one last fleeting gaze at the unfinished work. Looking at the cold PBR, I went over to the bridge boss and told him I was dragging up at dark. He naturally asked why? And after telling him about the Bighorn, and the BIG trout; he just shook his head, cashed me out, and said something like, “What the hell, that I might as well get a head start now.” And, we left in the Rambler to stuff backpacks.
I don’t really remember how long it took us to get to Wyoming that August but there was some remembrance of a rusty pickup truck hurling half empty long neck bottles at us somewhere about the Land Between the lakes. There was a detective from St. Louis that dumped us the Arch. And, there was a 100MPH run through St. Louis rush hour traffic with a pretty young girl, driving a big block Dodge, complete with a hood scoop. She said that she was returning from a party in Oklahoma with Elvis and his entourage. She had been driving all night with the assistance of a bag of little black pills given to her by “Elvis handlers”. King Richard Petty couldn’t have driven any faster than this pretty little chemical kamikaze.
We crossed the fields of wheat that make up the Great Plains and watched the snow covered Rockies at sunset, toasting the view with Coors as we camped in eastern Colorado’s flat fields of stubble. Just out of Denver we connected with a guy from New York in a VW pop-up camper van. He was traveling to Yellowstone with three slobbering, nervous dogs that enjoyed gnawing on handles and knobs inside the van. The New Yorker traveled about 300 miles a day, blaming his slow pace on his German Shorthaired Pointer, BT. It seems that the dog had his tail permanently bent in a smooth 90 degree angle by a door, and the name Bent Tail was shortened to BT. So the name stuck.
BT had also recently discovered a large Mexican rattlesnake attached to his nose while visiting that wonderful country. The driver explained that the snake bite had apparently damaged BT’s kidneys to the point that frequent stops were mandatory. The van pretty well reeked of dog urine and three or four of those little pine tree looking fragrance deodorizers that are so popular at truck stops. The driver explained that the wife and kids had flown home earlier in the Mexican vacation due to BT’s preponderance for incontinence.
We drove from Denver to Yellowstone with this crew. The van slowly climbed out of Cody to the far east portal in a blinding snow storm, narrowly missing a wreck with a huge buffalo in a high mountain pass. The big shaggy was every bit as big as the van and he was layered with a good four inches of wet, August snow on his big hump. A misty cloud of steam was slowly evaporating from his girth when we skidded in the snow to within a foot of saddling him with the VW’s windshield.
As Labor Day fell; Ted and I hiked into the back country to the Pelican River Valley. This long valley is extravagantly centered by a clearly stained, fly rod cast wide, meandering and mesmerizing river full of fish. Bordered on each side by a half mile of treeless grassland. The massively expansive valley is surrounded by gently rolling hills covered in a jungle of deep and dark lodgepole pines.
These majestic trees were frequently scarred by the claws of big bears. Bear and Elk sign were abundant and each night at dusk’s fading light, huge herds of elk would appear from the dark timber. Trophy bulls would bugle up their cows and put on a display of their fighting prowess under towering, sun lit cumulus clouds that made up fierce evening thunder storms.
Wind assisted lightening danced through the trees on our first night. The storm resulted in snapping our weak aluminum tent poles, forcing us to sleep wet, under what was left of our cheap nylon disaster. Bear prints were in evidence every morning in the soft mud. We trod buffalo grass as we floated hoppers for the trout along the edge of the Pelican. This was September sight fishing at its’ best while walking the cool, brown banks and arching flies for the rising Cutthroats. We prospected for only the biggest fish in the clear water, which was as easy as watching the hawks stoop in thousand foot dives for the mice that scattered around the buffalo herds in the valley’s wide grassland. We never saw another fisherman.
Leaving Wyoming after Labor Day via our thumbs was an interesting problem. Almost everyone that owned a vehicle seemed to suddenly opt for some adjoining state. Cars were far and few between and it was not unusual to walk through the Yellowstone country for hours before a vehicle would pass.
One east bound ride was with another recently returned veteran. The cowboy was in a flatbed pickup with a big cooler full of Coors, a years supply of Copenhagen, and a big black lab named Tar. Tar had the run of the flat bed without the aid of any leash or rope. Tar had perfected the fine art of darting around the truck bed while we lurched through the back roads of Wyoming at seventy-five miles an hour.
The cowboy and the dog were headed to Cheyenne to pick up a string of horses to take back to the thoroughfare country east of Yellowstone, where he guided elk hunts and trapped away the winter.
As the miles clicked by, we began to pass huge groups of antelope and I asked the cowboy about their published speed readings. He claimed to have clocked one at neat sixty miles an hour after a long chase on a dirt bike. By this time I had just more than enough Coors in me to rudely claim “BS”. The driver appeared to take some amount of offense at my rudeness and with the next available cluster of roadside pronghorns he slammed on the brakes and launched Tar at the fleeting creatures long before the truck had come close to a complete halt. The big black hound tumbled off of the bed of the truck like he had been shot from a cannon. Clouds of dust were all Tar could retrieve. We off loaded some Coors and waited for the panting dog to return from his mission and I noted out loud that 60 MPH looked about right.
When the smiling dog saddled up, I noticed that he was missing significant patches of skin from his abrupt dismount. We stopped in Thermopolis at a cowboy bar to restock the cooler and the driver had the waitress act as a medic for old bloody Tar. She seemed to be more than fond of the cowboy and his dog, offering us all a place for the night. We motored towards Cheyenne for another three or so hours where Ted and I dismounted into the dry brush to sleep off the ride.
We never made it to the Bighorn. I guess we decided that the Cutthroats on the Pelican were big enough to “learn” on.
When I drive over the finished bridge, I don’t see shovels and the deadly concrete buckets swinging from cranes. I see buffalo and Tar and the antelope dusting his face. I can smell the wet grass on the Pelican at daylight and there in the early hours of September, I can see the random dimples made by big trout in the river as they engulfed the hoppers under the sounds of the hawks dropping from the sunlit thunderheads to feed on the mice.
The days of riding your thumb across the country to learn some new fishing technique is surely a thing of the past and I guess that Tar and BT are by now chasing ghosts. The elk of September are still there, and the Pelican is still there, clearly stained and meandering like some huge liquid snake, oozing slowly into the big cold lake they call the Yellowstone.
A note from the WOMR:
One of my fishing and hunting buddies, the UTC Physics Major, who can apparently read better than I thought, called the other night to announce that he was in fact, not a liar, and that he could read better than I. He pointed out that the email address that I used as a request for comments on my stories contained a typographical error. He had tried to comment, but due to my inability to proof-read, his scathing e-mail message was undeliverable, and worse than that, he had been forced to take time out of his busy daily routine to actually use a phone to call me and point out my inability to PROOF-READ. He also wanted to know if my wife had run me out of the house yet, after the last lusty story about the reality TV woman in Alaska. I immediately apologized for the typo, telling him I would try to do better in the very near future. And, I lied to him about being temporarily housed in the barn.
Let me see if I can get this right this time. Your comments are greatly appreciated. Send them to whiteoakmtnranger@gmail.com. “We hunt and fish because we can. Don’t lose that thought.”
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