In
The Outdoors
Fishing With My Uncles: Hiking at Night in Underwear
- William L. Robinson
In
August 1947 Mutt and Loo invited me to fish with them one
afternoon way up on the Big Onion.* My grandmother made three pasties
for us, we stopped at a gas station and bought some soda pop, and
Loo headed his black Anglia up the Big Bay Road. The plan was to fish
until 6:00 p.m. then return in early evening to Mutt's tiny trailer
he had temporarily parked at Hawk's Nest while he looked for a place
to live. Past the Little Onion we turned off the gravel and onto a
two-track road. We drove across rusty culverts with holes in the tops,
through deep puddles, over the branches of trees downed in a wind
storm sometime in the past year and straddled two-foot deep tire ruts.
I think we were five miles in by the time they decided we were far
enough, and pulled the car off what was left of the road into an opening
in the woods barely wide enough to fit the car without opening the
doors. We crawled out the windows with our tackle and headed in a
direction that Mutt and Loo had decided on by compromise after some
discussion as to which way this stretch of the Big Onion they had
had in mind lay. We left the pasties and pop in the car as we figured
we'd be back for a late supper in a couple of hours.
Ten minutes from the car the sky darkened. In five more
minutes it was filled with lightning and thunder. In three more minutes
we were soaked through and through. We plodded on. The underbrush
was dense and in many places we could not see our feet, nor could
we see downed limbs concealed beneath the joe-pye weeds, thistles
and bedstraw. Every so often, at unpredictable intervals, my shin
would encounter a stout limb and I would lurch forward, sometimes
falling to the muddy ground and sometimes staying upright by running
a few steps to get my legs back beneath my body. The situation of
running a few steps and suddenly encountering another hidden alder
stem among the weeds would enhance the misery as I would remove a
small bit of skin from the front of my shin as I fell hands first
onto the muddy ground among the lush August vegetation. But resting
was not a good idea. Thousands of mosquitoes, programmed to follow
the carbon dioxide gradient to its source—my skin—would
zero in on me within seconds.
So we plodded and stumbled on, looking for this secret
spot on a wonderful trout stream—a place known only to Mutt and
Loo, and not all that well by them, apparently.
An hour after we left the car we had still not found a
stream. Loo and Mutt then agreed on a new direction, but by now the
sun was obscured by large cumulus clouds. I think we headed south,
or maybe east. By about 8:00 p.m. (just guessing on both counts, as
neither watch nor compass was regarded as acceptable equipment) we
finally came across a stream large enough for a trout to swim in.
We fished downstream for an hour and caught no fish, and just before
dark, came out at the Big Bay Road, a revolting development for two
reasons. First, we had been fishing the Little Onion, not the Big
Onion, in a place where dozens of people had already fished during
the season (although we saw none of them), and second, we were probably
three miles from the car and the pasties, and it was now nearly dark.
The good points were that we knew where we were and it had stopped
raining.
A short way along the woods road toward the car Mutt and
Loo figured there was no point in all three of us walking in, so they
left me by one of the rickety bridges over a puddle. I was hungry,
and now it was dark. I waited and waited. How long does it take for
two men to walk three miles and then drive three miles on a rough
road? Maybe two hours? How long has it been? There was no moon, but
the sky had cleared and the stars were out. A few frogs near a puddle
made noises and plopped about. The mosquitoes were almost intolerable.
I waited, pacing up and down the road. (A moving target is not quite
as vulnerable to biting insects as a stationary one.) Perhaps three
hours later I heard voices. Mutt and Loo were approaching on foot.
They handed me a pasty and a six-ounce brown corrugated bottle of
Orange Crush, and tried to explain why they couldn't drive the car
and that we now had to walk. (In their efforts to turn the car around
they had broken a tie rod, thus making steering impossible.) I sat
down and ate the delicious pasty and swigged the sweet but scanty
Orange crush.
Then we set out for Mutt's trailer at Hawk's Nest, about
four miles back south down the Big Bay Road. Mutt and Loo's wet pants
were binding their legs, so they took them off and carried them. A
few cars passed us headed north. I wondered what the occupants of
those cars thought when their headlights revealed three pedestrians—one
boy fully dressed, and two men in their underpants—walking purposely
down the road at midnight. I felt lucky that no cars came south. I
did not want to be picked up under those circumstances. But would
anyone have picked us up anyhow?
At about 1:00 a.m. we strolled into Mutt's. Loo's wife
Ruth, Mutt's wife Violet, and my mother were there enjoying the night
sitting by a fire, eating popcorn and planning tomorrow's search for
us. We told about the day's adventures and misadventures to their
great amusement. At one point Ruth asked, "Mutt, are you planning
to join a nudist colony?"
"Why's that?" he asked.
"You don't have your pants on."
"Oh Jeez," he said, and quickly disappeared
into his trailer.
The next day, Mutt and Loo drove back up and into the
woods with a few wrenches and a new tie rod and rescued the Anglia.
I had found something else to do.
—William L. Robinson
From a book in progress, Fishing with My Uncles.
* Names of locations have been changed, as any good
fisherman never reveals a choice fishing spot (even if it's never
found).
