"Man Crippled in Fishing Accident, Nowhere Near Water." The headline flashed across my mind as I reached for the practice lure. The orb hung there, just beyond my grasp, like a defiant Day-Glo orange Christmas ornament. I heard a creaking sound. Whether it was the limb I was standing on or my knees, I couldn"t be sure. But I knew my nearly forty-something, two-hundred-pound body had no business being there. I shot a quick glance through the branches below. Graham and Anders, my five-year-old twins, stood there shoulder-to-shoulder, squinting up at me in awe and with more than a little amusement.
"Maybe we should come up, too?" Anders asked hopefully.
"No, I think I"ve almost got it," I lied.
The cast that sent me up a tree occurred minutes into the boys" first fishing lesson.
"Watch this," Graham said, whipping the rod forward and releasing the button on his tiny new reel. We watched the lure arc from his rod tip, rise and disappear into the foliage. Should have bought more lures, I thought. At the same time, I couldn"t help but admire the distance.
So there I was, thirty feet off the ground, perched on a magnolia limb no thicker than my wrist. Stretching to the brink of shoulder dislocation, I was finally able to grab the lure and snap the line. I stuffed it into my pocket and climbed back down, trying to make it look easy.
Other than climbing trees to untangle a few dozen monofilament bird nests, the practice session went well. I knew of a small stretch of trout stream about an hour away that would be just right for our first real fishing trip. I promised to take them the following weekend.
The big day began at 5:30 a.m. I put coffee on and crept upstairs to confront the first obstacle I"d face with my new fishing buddies; the boys aren"t what you"d call morning people. By the time I"d dressed their somniferous little bodies and strapped them in their booster seats, we were an hour behind schedule. The boys finally woke as I parked on the shoulder of the dirt road that meandered alongside the creek.
I assembled their gear beside the car while they munched bananas and Pop-Tarts. The next order of business was to teach them how to bait live night crawlers. We live in the city, so their experience at handling wild animals of any sort was, shall we say, limited. I assured them that worms were "friendly," but they had absolutely no interest in holding onto the slippery little guys. And the idea of stabbing their new friends to death with a hook was even less appealing, especially over breakfast. I switched them to the default bait, canned yellow corn. We gathered our stuff and headed down the path toward the creek. We"d covered less than twenty yards when I heard a scream behind me.
"Daddeeeeee!"
I whirled and saw Anders, wide-eyed, frozen in place. He was pointing, like a miniature grim reaper, at a fallen tree beside the path.
"Don"t move," I said.
As calmly as I could, I walked back to him, fully expecting a water moccasin or a swarm of hornets. I followed Anders"s stare down the log until my eyes finally rested on the object of his terror; a millipede was inching its way along the tree trunk. To a child who"d never encountered anything more menacing than a cockroach, it must have looked like some horrible interplanetary creature waiting to pounce with all thousand legs on the next small boy who wandered by.
"It"s just a millipede," I said. "It won"t bite."
I leaned down and touched its back to show him, then turned to tell Graham to come over and look. He was already on his way, brandishing a large stone. For some reason, the compassion he felt for earthworms was totally lost on invertebrates with legs.
"Let"s kill it," he said.
"Leave it be," I said. "Let"s go catch some trout."
Unfortunately, while searching for his antimillipede missile, Graham had left his rod and reel in the woods. I had the boys stay on the path while I kicked through piles of leaves and brambles. In the few minutes it took to locate and extract the rod from a bed of poison ivy, the sky darkened considerably. Then it started to rain. Hard. And with that, our planned assault on the trout population of the creek turned into a full-scale amphibious retreat back to the car.
We piled, soaking, into our seats. "Aren"t we going fishing?" they asked in almost perfect unison. Two small chins started to tremble.
"Tell you what," I said. "Let"s go for a ride and see if this lets up." For the next two hours, we cruised through the downpour and a maze of gravel U.S. Forest Service roads, taking careful aim at every puddle. As the boys discussed the morning"s events and needled each other about misplaced tackle and multilegged beasts, their moods lightened considerably. The rain finally stopped, but I knew the creek would be too high and muddy for fishing.
Just as I was about to point our car back toward the highway and break the news, I saw a sign: "Stocked Pond - Rainbow Trout by the Pound." I pulled in. For the avid fisherman, the "stocked pond" isn"t exactly sporting. The pond was about the size of your average backyard pool, and with all of the rippling, flashing and finning, it looked like you could walk straight across it on the backs of all those trout without getting wet. We grabbed our gear and baited up. It took less than ten minutes for each of the boys to hook and land a monster rainbow.
While one brother (with a little help) wrestled his prize into the net, the other slipped and slid on the wet bank, shouting at the top of his lungs, "Reel him faster! Don"t let go! You got him!"
The pond"s owner weighed and cleaned the trout, then put the pink slabs on ice for us. We loaded up and headed for home. By the time we reached the highway, the twins were asleep, each with an arm draped across the cooler that rested between them.
Not the day I"d planned, but I couldn"t have scripted a better ending. A few small adventures, a slight case of poison ivy (mine) and two trophy-sized rainbow trout - much larger than anything I"d ever caught in a stream. The bill was a whopper too, about five times what we"d pay for trout at the market.
Best money I ever spent. (：夏根建)
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