Fishing

Before I get around to the topic at hand I want to make clear that my life in the spring of 1972 was far from idyllic. I had no "permanent" home, I'd lost my beloved '66 Charger, my pets, most of my other possessions - and my mother was still terminally ill... When I was down in Argyle it was easy to forget about everything for a while, but when I was up in Denton at the college - not so much...

I'd usually wait until after my last class (Speech) before going to the hospital (after spending the entire day bracing myself for the possibility that mom would be gone). It made for a rough day... Especially that 1 or 2 hour break (when I hung out at the student union) between French and Speech classes... The anxiety became worse with every passing week.

BTW: North Texas had a world class jazz/rock ensemble. One day they were playing some "Blood, Sweat and Tears" style stuff out in front of the union. The musicianship was stunningly good... Then another time someone scheduled an anti-war protest but only 6 people showed up. (Yeah - the school had about the same number of activists as beauty title holders.) But I digress...

Eventually, waiting around until Speech class got to be more than I could handle so I stopped going. (After French I'd head right over to the hospital and then back to Argyle.) ... Sigh... Even the prospect of seeing the redhead "Amazon" teacher in an ultra-short skirt wasn't enough to outweigh the anxiety... I guess I should have dropped the class, but I didn't... I got an "F" - the only one in my 22 years of formal education. I honestly didn't care at the time. I had no idea that someday I'd be applying to engineering and law schools... Yeah, apparently I'm not perfect :-)

Then one day my mom's doctors told her they couldn't do anything more for her (translation: she was a very expensive patient with no money) so they transferred her to Parkland Hospital in Dallas... I'm thinking: "Great idea! ... Move her to the hospital where the president she idolized died..."
As it turns out Karina was living a few miles from Parkland at the time and started visiting mom regularly, so I finally got to take a much needed "sanity break". I only visited there once. It was a miserable place. Mom looked so bad it was hard to believe she was still alive...

Non-sequitur: I mentioned in a much earlier post that Karina had briefly been married to our friend Bernie (the guitarist). I just did a quick record search and they were wed in Dallas on 5/12/71. She had it annulled a few weeks later...

But none of this has anything to do with fishing :-)

Mr. McDaniel had an "old school" cabin cruiser. I don't remember what size, but it was powered by a single large outboard motor and had a small cabin up front plus a couple of bunks along each side. So - it slept six but it was still small enough to be towed by a full-sized Oldsmobile... And although Argyle is only a few miles from Lewisville Lake, Dewitt much preferred heading up Highway 377 to Lake Texoma (on the Oklahoma border).

Now - the only watercraft I had ever been on before were car ferries - some in Missouri and the one across Chesapeake Bay. So that first trip to Lake Texoma was also my first time in a small boat... I have to admit it was kind of cool - but not cool enough to make me want to own one :-)
Sam and Royce also came along (the "usual crew"). Not sure where Stephanie was - maybe staying with friends. Anyway - we launched the boat late on a Friday afternoon and after tooling around the lake for a while we dropped anchor near one of the bridge pylons (apparently fish like to hang out there).

I had never fished before, mainly because of the "sticking a worm on a hook" thing. I simply wouldn't do it :-) So one of the other guys would bait it for me... After a while I (reluctantly) started taking the fish I caught off of the hook and tossing them back in (we were mostly doing catch and release). All in all I caught around 7 fish - mostly drum and bass... We fished until well after dark using a lantern hung over the edge of the boat to attract the fish. (They are rather stupid creatures, aren't they?) And we were eating large quantities of taco chips with bean dip the entire time.
Yeah - apparently Frito bean dip had been in production for a number of years at that point but I had never encountered it before. And we ate a lot of it... Later as we were lying in our bunks trying to go to sleep it got kind of "polluted" in there...Really bad!

The next morning we met up with some other folks at a campsite for breakfast... I wasn't sure if they were friends or relatives or what... I often have no idea what's going on and that rarely bothers me :-)

Then we went back out on the lake to try and catch some "gar"... At first I had no idea what that was, so they explained that a gar is a large prehistoric sort of fish with a pointy nose and a couple of rows of jagged teeth. And you don't catch them with a hook and bait - you use a piece of nylon rope... Yes - you tie a knot in one end of a small piece of rope and shred the other end... The gar (for some reason) thinks the piece of rope looks tasty so it bites down on it, gets it tangled in its teeth and won't let go. In other words, it takes "stupid" to a whole new level (even for a fish)... Yeah - I really can't see being proud of outsmarting something with a brain the size of a peanut. Especially considering how much some people spend on tackle... But I guess that's just me :-)

For some reason the gar just weren't biting. (I swear I actually hit one on the head with my lure once.) That was kind of a bummer because I was really curious to see what they looked like close up. And thus ends another not particularly interesting and relatively pointless story :-)

Boats and fishing? Just not my thing...