We always went to a promising, well-stocked lake on opening day and then hit various lakes every week or two while the lake season was open. I wasn't often included on Steelhead [1] fishing because of inclement weather, the treacherous stretches of the river, and my uncanny ability to fall into any proximate body of water. We didn't fish saltwater, unless you count crab pots and clamguns.
On a Serious Fishing Trip, you needed men, mountains, fly-fishing gear, canned food, and a good load of John Barleycorn. For serious fishing, we headed east, to the Bumping River. We drove far south in the Green River Valley, and then cut up into the mountain foothills and circled around Mount Rainier, to the Cougar Flats campground. The closest towns were Goose Prairie [2] and the little town of Naches.
The fishing expedition included me, my dad, and at various times, Al Sorenson, his son Jack and his friend, Sonny, Bill Cavanaugh (a notoriously besotted bartender), Big Bob Hansen, Al Simms, my Uncle Romey (Raw' mee), his son Jimmy, a couple of station wagons, a jeep, and a pickup. The men were salt of the earth, blue-collar, Democratic, card carrying Teamsters. Not a one of them graduated from high school, or even completed junior high. Most of them lied about their age to get into the service during The Depression. They were now furnace repairmen, sheetrockers, drivers, mechanics, and cabinet makers in their mid-thirties.
We headed into the mountains after a stop in Auburn or Puyallup at the state Liquor Store. We bought whiskey (Four Roses or Seagram's Seven Crown), and cases of Olympia Beer and Honeydew or Shasta soda for the kids.
One whiskey mishap is seared into my brain--a senseless outrage I committed upon an innocent jug of Four Roses. We hit a rest stop. As I opened the door, I smurfed a half gallon jug of whiskey onto the sidewalk. It broke. Five men raced into action. One guy held the bottom of the jug upright to prevent any further diminution of its contents, another one tried to dam up the little brown river. Someone might have licked the concrete downstream of the disaster. I almost remember some misty eyes. I was in the doghouse and, henceforth, the jug was stored wherever I wouldn't be, preferably in another vehicle entirely. I don't know how many miles we backtracked to replenish the Four Roses, but I do remember Bill Cavanaugh telling me I "was about as handy as a cub bear handling his p**ck."
In the grand scheme of things, I merely postponed our arrival, and cocktail hour, at Cougar Flats. It's not like any lines were going to be wetted the first day of the trip. There was plenty of time to get the Seven and Sevens [3] poured, and to feed the kids, and themselves, cooking dinner on a Coleman Stove and over the campfire.
There was Dinty Moore Beef Stew waiting, and Chef Boy R Dee's Ravioli, Bar-S Hot Dogs, Vienna Sausages, Franco-American Spaghetti-O's , Rice-A-Roni, Chili con Carne, Tang[tm], the space age Kool-Aid, Honeydew Strawberry, Olympia beer chilling in a fishing net in the river, Spam, Pork and Beans, Canned Tamales, hot cocoa, candy bars, and beef jerky.
Even at the age of seven, the excitement of the road trip was infectious. There was swearing, farting, loud laughter, and a general relaxation of all rules of decorum. The place names were magical: The Bumping River, Cougar Flats (I don't remember ever hearing a bobcat/mountain lion/cougar), Goose Prarie, and Naches. Mount Rainier was another magical name, and we were so close, you could almost touch it. There were deer, fox, beaver, raccoon, coyotes, squirrels, bear, crows, woodpeckers, owls, badgers, marmots and river otters.
We camped among thick stands of Douglas Fir, in old oiled canvas tents with a fine tang of mildew. The woods were lush with salal, Oregon Grape, nettles, strange mushrooms, ferns, banana slugs, and moss. Rainbow and Cutthroat Trout were our quarry. At least in theory; I don't much remember the fishing part of the trip. I remember hikes to see the bears, seeing men in the middle of the river in their khaki-colored waders, fried baloney sandwiches, hot cocoa, beer pancakes and chili with oyster crackers for dinner. I remember the stories that were spun as the adult beverages made the rounds.
Around the campfire, they told endless, improbable stories punctuated with guffaws and snorts of disbelief. They spun World War II yarns of army and navy shenanigans, being on a thirty day run of KP for fighting, or breaking into the supply huts to make off with the torpedo juice [4]. They didn't talk about fighting the Germans and the Japanese. They told shaggy-dog stories of run-ins with the Military Police while on shore leave, and being put in the brig for some minor offense or "misunderstanding." There were elaborate tales of the German Girls, the French Girls, the Australian girls, the Philllipine girls, and the Japanense girls, none of which made sense to me. Tales of outwitting the sociopath drill sargeant, or pulling pranks on their entire army company were favorites.
Every night, we secured the camp against the bears and even the squirrels by hoisting the food up in bags and dangling the bags far out on a tree limb (or locking it in cars). We kept the campsite far cleaner than we kept ourselves. A pan of grease poured onto the ground injudiciously could easily attract a momma bear and her two cubs. We often heard the bears rummaging around outside the tents at night. More than once, we would wake up to find a loaf of bread we had forgotten with a neat squirrel hole burrowed straight through the middle. The bears mostly kept their distance since the fishing was good and there was a garbage dump a couple of miles away.
In the morning, after bacon, beer pancakes hot cocoa and coffee, we would fish. I was usually tied up on the bank, just like when I "fished" for Steelhead on the Green River [5]. I was tethered to a tree so they could keep track of me, and because if there was a body of water nearby, I would invariably fall in.
There must have been dozens, but my only memory of seeing a fish was when Jack Sorenson and his friend, Sonny (they were about 15 or 16), jumped in the river and grabbed a couple of cutthroats. They had been fishing all day and finally gave up and snagged the fish with their bare hands.
On the return trip, back to the west side of the mountains, I was given strict instructions to watch my language and not tell any tales. It was an early lesson in the motto "what you see here, stays here."
I went fishing with my dad many more times. Usually we fished the nearby lakes for trout, and sometimes on the Green River for the elusive Steelhead Trout. My father's desire for me to excel at fishing ran head-on into my utter inability to sit quietly and fish. Sitting in his pram on a lake, it was very difficult to sit still, and even more difficult to remain quiet.
No matter how many times they told me, I never really believed the fish could hear me, and even if they could, that the babbling of a seven year old would seriously disturb them or prevent them from lunging for the eggs on our hooks.
I drove my old man nuts when we fished. In the boat on the lake, his pole would most often sit unattended as he cussed and attempted to either untangle my fishing line, fix my fishing reel, or rig a new leader, sinker, hook and bait when I tore mine off in snags at the bottom of the lake. When my line wasn't twisted around the anchor, I was talking, and if I wasn't talking I wanted lunch, and if I'd had lunch, I needed to take a pee, and if I didn't have to pee, I got my fishing line hopelessly entangled in his.
Despite hectoring him with demands, and preventing him from ever actually fishing, he brought me along every chance he had[6] . All he wanted to do was drop a line in the water and wait for the fish to bite. All he wanted to hear was the slow lapping of the lake against the boat. But his spawn was a hopeless motormouth, utterly uncoordinated and tempermentally unsuited to the fishing life. He got it.
After returning from one of my earliest trips (I was in kindergarten or the first grade), I landed in hot water at school. The fishing story I told during "Show And Tell" was peppered with C***sucker, sonofabitch, and other choice scatalogical references. I must have learned to keep my mouth shut after that. I do not believe the men mended their ways.
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[1] Steelhead Trout are an ocean going rainbow trout, considered to be one of the great sport fish. They are extremely tasty.
[2] Home of the great Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who wrote about the area in his bestseller Of Men and Mountains.
[3] One part Seagram's Seven and one part 7-Up, over ice. Mmmm.
[4] An alcoholic beverage in World War II, made from the high grain alcohol fuel used in torpedo motors. The poisons in these liquids were passed through makeshift filters (e.g., they poured it through a loaf of bread).
[5] Yes. That Green River. I grew up two blocks from the river where Gary "The Green River Killer" Ridgeway dumped the bodies of his 50+ victims many years later.
[6] John Newton Brummet II died six months after JFK, on May 19, 1964.
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