Methow Creek

Methow Creek

Copyright Catcher78 All rights reserved.

Author's Notes: True story, belongs to me and may not be used without my expressed written permission.

I watched him about the campfire, the creek and forest as the back ground. The big, dented coffee pot to the side of the fire was percolating and blowing off steam with more noise than an organ. There were two high sided cast iron pans with a pound of bacon sizzling off to the side perched on river rocks.

He had on a pair of holey khakis that were over twenty years old, old rubber soled canvas shoes, a denim coat cut like a blazer but with huge pockets covering a sweat shirt that said Washington football. He was well over six feet and big. I did not know but thought two hundred eighty pounds, graceful and efficient with his movements, fly fishing or in a fight, he's seen both.

He took the pans with bacon to a folding card table and put the bacon on torn up paper sacks, there must have been a couple of pounds of bacon. The pans went back to the fire. He put cut up onions and potatoes in one pan and stirred them around and put pepper and salt on them. There was another pot on the table that held a dozen small trout in a corn meal batter, six eggs also sat on the table with two peaches and a lemon.

After a couple of minutes he used a metal spoon with a long handle to turn the potatoes. Returning to the table he grabbed the pot and returned to the fire where he moved the other fry pan on to the fire and put the fish in the pan to a burbling hissing noise.

Back to the table he cut up the lemon in two and the peaches into slices. Back to the fire the pan with potatoes was taken back to the table and split between two large metal pie plates. He put the eggs in his pocket and took the pan back to the fire. Out of his pocket came a cube of butter apparently in storage and it was unwrapped and put in the naked pan, swiftly eggs were cracked into the pan. He grabbed the pan with the trout and carried it to the card table. He put six of them on top of the potatoes in one plate and repeated for the other. He squeezed lemon over both. He retrieved the egg pan and with the spoon put three on each plate atop fish and potatoes.

"Get up, it's breakfast."

"I've been watching."

The cold breeze hit my face and ankles at the same time. It felt good. I had a pair of shorts and a sweat shirt that said Legion Baseball and I put on a very beat up black cowboy hat that had some flies in the crown.

He poured coffee and put condensed milk in mine.

Then he put the peaches in the egg pan where there was some butter still and plenty of heat and they cooked.

I broke the eggs and they ran over everything. The trout were crispy, fresh, lemony and hot. I picked them up and took the meat off the sides and the heads and skeletons I put in the fire. The coffee was so hot that my insides seemed to warm with each drink. The eggs with the onions, potatoes and bacon was hot and with bold flavors and soft all at the same time. It was probably the best thing I'd eaten to that point in my life.

He took a medal four sided wire rigging and put four thick slices of bread on it. It took about two minutes to toast. He ate between toasting. He toasted four more slices. Set all eight pieces on the table, reached and grabbed the pan and put the peaches on each plate. They were hot, soft, sweet and there was brown butter drizzled on them.

He pulled a wax paper roll and ripped off two long pieces of the paper. He put mustard on the toast and split the bacon amongst four pieces of the toast. He went to a medal cooler sitting in the trunk of the car and came back with a large chunk of cheddar and pulling a buck knife from his pocket cut off four slices and put them atop the bacon. He completed the sandwiches with the other toast and stacked two of each on the different pieces of waxed paper, wrapped them up and put rubber bands around each of the bundles.

I finished my coffee and licked my plate. He took the plates and three pans to the creek and washed them out and put them in his trunk.

"Do you want more coffee?"

"No thanks, that was really good."

"I wasn't sure you liked it," he said and chuckled.

"I thought we'd go upriver about five miles, there's some pools and maybe some kokanees and bigger trout. We can come back and catch some more of these little guys."

"Sounds good to me."

"Get a jacket and put your sandwiches and a can of coke in it. You can eat it whenever you want, but that is it until dinner. Do you have a church key?"

"Yep."

"Put your bag in the backseat, we can rig the poles when we get there."

It was six o'clock in the morning.

I was fourteen and baseball was soon to resume, it was the first weekend for river fishing, technically we were supposed to be fishing for steelhead and salmon, but we were way up where the river was not big like it got below.

He said, "We could might see some pinks (pinks are the smallest sub-species of salmon, some rainbows and steelhead are bigger) today, remember you have to clean them immediately and get the blood out of them.

He was driving a 1965 Chrysler New Yorker in those years a significantly, unpopular car, It had a big block 383 cubic inch engine with dual four barrel carburetors. Only one of them worked in normal driving conditions. If you were going sixty or so and put your foot in it, the huge behemoth would shudder, a huge volume of black smoke would blind any vehicle within three hundred feet and soon the car would be hurling down the highway approaching ninety mph. The side effect was that a one quarter of the tank of gasoline was gone.

Up the dirt road we went with a long cheroot clamped in his teeth. We had gone about fifteen miles and turned into a little meadow on the driver's side and turned off the car. It sat there ticking like, the M-3 light tank, ready for battle. There was a Browning automatic twelve gauge shot gun in the trunk and he always had his service revolver from his days in the 15th Air Force in World War II in a holster on right hip. He was an insurance investigator.

He was flying fishing and went about a quarter mile up river. I had a Mitchel 400 reel and a twelve foot pole and some salmon eggs on a single hook.

It was six forty five. The stream was maybe seventy five feet across and there was a little pool and the first cast I had a huge fish on and I waded out to keep away from any of the rocks or overhanging trees. I landed it after six or seven minutes with a net that was over my shoulder. It was a Kokanee, which is non-anadromous sockeye salmon.

All salmon are born in rivers and follow the rivers out to the ocean. During the last ice age, Kokanees were land locked for thousands of years and stopped going out to sea.

This was about sixteen inches and way fatter than a rainbow trout. I cleaned her and there were a bunch of eggs which I put in my creel and tied the creel to a branch along with the fish on some fishing line. By nine I had two more female s and one male Kokanee, all in the same size range and then three twelve inch trout. All cleaned and on a string and quite a few eggs.

I had not heard from Dad and whistled loudly. About fifteen minutes later I heard him talking. I came out of the water with my stuff and he had some fish and two native men, late twenties. Tall and lean. The men were carrying his fish and his forty five was by his side. He looked to have quite a few pinks. They were talking shit.

I had the spare set of keys and opened the trunk and laid my stuff in the shade of the car and pulled out the long barreled browning and purposefully walk towards them.

One of them said, "Put the gun down before you hurt yourself, boy."

"This is a twelve gauge, Browning automatic, "I paused putting the butt against my shoulder, "they have a tight scatter from fifteen feet, might only get you, but might get your son too. What you say Pops?"

Dad the smart mouth tried to talk at the same time and I said, "Do I shoot them dad?"

"Don't shoot, don't shoot, "then the two guy were on the ground.

We got the fish in the car in a cooler, with the eggs. Dad said go kick them in the dead, they jumped me and I need to get to a doctor. Thirty minutes later we made it to Omak. Dad had a concussion and we laid low in a motel with a kitchenette and hate lots of fish and fresh bread from the nearby bakery. I did have my sandwiches during the drive and eggs were all salted up for Christmas day dinner.

End