Dinner Belle (Some of the most Quizzical Road Trips Are Only 42 Miles Away)

Marsha is 47, has seven children, and was homeless when I met her.
Last year I worked at the shelter. My duties were answering the phones (mostly to give directions as to where we were located) and handing out cups of coffee, juice for the children, and various sandwich spread sandwiches. I would return the next morning to help with the laundry. I still haven’t figured out why so many of the sheets had pee on them. My guess is that the people didn’t want to get up in the night and leave their stuff while they went to the bathroom. Thief does happen in shelters. Actually it was more prevalent than I imagined.
When you work with people some of them open up and like to tell you their stories. Marsha was like that. She had a big brood, seven children sired by two boyfriends and two husbands. Her last boyfriend, Ely, was divorced with four children. Ely owned his own business and worked as a rock hauler on the side. His wife was described as a troublemaking crazy person, but I think all ex-wives are called that.
Marsha thought she had found the perfect man, for her. A man not only with a job but a business. She overlooked the fact that he spent two hours every night in the bar before coming home. They ate at six and were in bed by eight. She worked as a part-time dog groomer while the children (Mick and Britnee) and Ely’s (Kirna and LeeAnn) were in school. She said she was done selling cocaine.
Everything had gone reasonably well until early December. Ely was laid off his rock-hauling job and his gypo construction business was dead slow during the winter months. He couldn’t afford his Zoloft and he raged and had so much anxiety there was no peace in the house.
Marsha talked lovingly, not of her children, but of her pets. She was also subject to mysterious illnesses.
Two weeks ago I was surprised to see her in the local grocery store. Last I heard she had moved to Indiana.
She walked up and was all happy and told me she had rented a beautiful house in Wellsburg and asked if I would please please please come to a party she was giving on Saturday, 4 o’clock. Bring a friend.
I didn’t dare say no. I only had some errands to run in the morning and a Mexican cake to pick up from Lee for a brunch at Sam and Adyta’s on Sunday. Fahrenheit 9/11 could wait.
The drive over was perfect, a sunny not-too-hot, not-too-cold day, with my pal Michael riding next to me in the passenger seat. I spied Marsha’s blue Honda Accord in a u-shaped driveway that lead up to a huge Victorian house, the biggest place on a block of small ranches.
Even though it was almost 5, (I was running a bit late because the cake hadn’t been frosted.) there were no other cars.
The house was beautiful. An original section from the early 1900s was made of red brick, then over the years other additions had been added but in a way that blended with the original architecture.
I walked up to the porch and a huge oak sprung out of the center, nice touch! This was a house that had seen a lot of living, some gracious, some scrapbag.
Marsha and two yippy black and white longhair Chihuahuas met us at the door. The dogs had a lot of bark for being so tiny. I wasn’t even afraid.
Marsha was glad we were late. She had to rush one of her dogs to the vet to get a thorn removed from it’s foot, and drop off her children to their father’s for Christmas in July.
The huge wood-floored living room was airy and delightful. To the left was an oak dining set with a little aquarium on the table, inside was a naked fledgling, a conure, pronounced c-o-n-y-o-r by Marsha. He was sleeping under the warming light, head tucked inward.
Two huge birds, a pure white cockatiel and a brightly-colored macaw, fluttered around in a large floor-standing cage.
A tall dark-haired man entered from another room. Marsha introduced us to Ely. Following him was a gray toy poodle sporting a crazy Mohawk. This is Chump.
We all sat on the couches next to the open windows. The dogs, little Roxanne and Monster, the Chihuahuas, and Chump bounced up and down and on us and did it all again and again all while being disciplined by both Ely and Marsha.
I had a plate full of shrimp tails and leftover crudités’, mostly celery. Marsha said the dogs would eat the tails, but when I gave them some, they licked and spit them out.
Ely talked about Zoloft and how it made him better, but he disliked taking it. It left him limp.
On my way out to the porch to get a soda out of the cooler we brought, I spied an herb garden. Upon closer inspection I noticed the herbs were old large plants, most in flower, an impressive collection. I snapped off a few lavender stems and sucked in the aroma.
Indoors I suggested to Ely that he gather a bunch of lavender and sniff it, aromatherapy, instantly relaxing, take some to bed with you to sleep more restfully. He smirked and said he would rather sniff at a pair of Marsha’s panties. Touché’
We ate dinner at the dining room table. The baby bird right next to me. No light other than one candle. The grilled filets were tasty and the pasta al fredo was creamy, although the pet store smell kind of made it a little unusual. Dinner at Petland.
In the kitchen were two more caged dogs and a loose mastiff as big as a Shetland pony. Her name’s Belle. She was drooling. Not just a little spittle. I am talking 1” wide rivers of drool puddling onto the floor in front of the stove where we made up our plates. Marsha said Mastiffs were bred for killing lions and people. Good to know.
After dinner Ely made a fire outside. The men went there while Marsha showed me the glass side porch. Here was a full-grown iguana, a baby iggy, a box turtle, an albino catfish in an enormous aquarium (which needed to be moved into the living space, according to Marsha.) and two snakes.
Marsha filled the dishwasher, a full-size rainbow-colored conure squawking on her shoulder, while she told me of her new-found happiness with Ely. She placed the cookpot of pasta on the floor and Belle was sucking up the leftovers. Yikes! Almost made me puke. She also reviewed all of her illnesses. Most of which I have never heard of…a herniated vagina? She said her father was a hypochondriac, but she would never be. Her wish is to use the settlement money from a car accident to buy this house so she would never have to move again.
We made up plates of coconut cream pie and took them out to the men. Hypnotic fires in pure blackness bring out strange stories. Ely told us about flashes of unexplained light and his siting of glowing orange orbs in the sky. His priest told him they were either aliens or ghosts.
Marsha is really trying. I hope she gets her happiness. Right now she’s working on getting back her other seven birds from a woman who kept them while she was homeless. I hear a scarlet is quite a priceless bird.

Ultimate USA Road Trips

New Orleans/Memphis Music TourBeal Street, blues, jazz, cajun, French Quarter

Labor Day...Road Trip Minnesota cheese curds, croquet, hot dish, Prince, Mary Tyler Moore, Oldenburg Spoon

Beep, Beep, You Drive Me CrazyAsheville, NC, Tom Wolf, grits, Caesar's Head, hot tub

Chasing The Northern SunSeattle, Portland, South Dakota, Colorado's Front Range, traveling meat,road trip patch jacket

Vintage Lake Geneva A pictorial

Miniature Golf: It Saved America and It Can Save You Too! vintage midwest courses

more on the way...

The Road Trip Collection

4th of July at the Cottage gonzo trip mute

The Great Northwoods reclaiming dad's hideout

Canadian/Eastern Seaboard Tour poe and kerouac, soup and a donut bought with two bears and loonies, niagara falls, lobster at mickey D's

Add It Up...The Abortion

I will be collecting my other stories here so I have them all in one spot. Watch for Links.
Here is a travel piece from a month ago....

The Abortion

He called at 12:30. “Are you almost here?” Ha. We hadn’t even left yet. Staying up to 6 a.m. probably wasn’t the best idea, but when you’re chatting and goofballing the time thing just disappears.

By 1 we were on the road. Ten minutes in and we ran into rain. Not regular splish-splash, a full-on torrential downpour, one of those rains where you turn the wipers on full blast and have to drive by the sight of the white line to keep you vehicle in the correct lane.

Then it stopped, perfectly dry. Wham! Another downpour. The change was abrupt…monsoon/bone dry.

After an hour I was worn to bits. Hydroplaning, then hitting dry pavement. It was too much, so when we hit Harvard I turned east.

“You’re going the wrong way.” My 4^th-of-July roadtrip pal said, the one that forgot the Smokey Joe and the charcoal to grill up the corn and rib eyes.

“I’m done.”

We were on the way to the Mississippi bluffs. Now we were on the way back home taking a big 3-hour loop.

My pal, who is cranky about a lot of things in life, doesn’t give a damn if we are here or there or anywhere when we travel.

We drove down the snaky lake road to college camp. Pal worked here a long time ago during a college summer cleaning the cafeteria, feeding raccoons bowls of milk and bread, kissing campergirls in the moonlight.

I learned to sail here. We didn’t know each other back then, different years.

Aurora University has acquired the camp, erected many new old-looking buildings, and has a well-respected Music-on-the-Lake program now.

I didn’t kiss boys back then (I was only 12) instead I hung out at the art & craft building where I made coiled pottery and paintings of overturned boats-sail boats and speed boats and even the mail boats and the prestigious Lady of the Lake paddlewheel.

We ran through the rain and escaped into a building that displayed a black and white sign that said “Gallery Show.”

Inside, out of the downpour, we said lots of oil-touched abstracted photographs of…boats. The work was done by a Madison artist most likely influenced by the sailboats on Lake Mendota and Monona, the lakes where my father would go for the annual regatta. The work was nice…professional, tight, calming. I liked the life preserver covered with a collage of magazine torn bits about 1” square. It was entitled, “Life Savor.” The artist’s bio stated that she was going through chemo treatments for cancer. Life Savor, tasting those fleeting moments of the crystalline beauty of our planet Earth, perfect.

From there we drove by Kokoska house, an owner-built boulder house that I had dreamed upon when I was a young girl, 20. The building was abandoned and in disrepair. I found out how to find the owner by going to the courthouse and looking in the real estate records and I contacted the owner, a man in Oak Park, Illinois. He said it was a family house but no one when there any more. But it wasn’t actually available for sale. It was tied up among a number of family members who didn’t see things the same way.

Each week I would go there, walk around the property, sometimes taking a blanket and sitting in the long grass, dreaming or reading or drawing.

On one of my “housedates” I noticed that someone broke a back window and two stained glass windows were near the opening. It looked like an interrupted burglary. I saved the house…maybe. Immediately I called the owner. He asked me to all a repairman to board up the window and suggested that I go on in and take a look at the house before the repair was done.

Whee-ho! The house was magical. It was as if a family had just disappeared. Everything was still there, even clothes in the closets. The two fireplaces were made of the same boulders as the outside of the building and I adored the pressed-flower pictures. For a burglar this was a goldmine of antiques. For me it was a comforting, albeit musty, fantasy.

A few days later I called the owner and told him the repair had been finished, and I told him about my house tour and asked if he would be interested in selling the black wicker set, a Heywood Wakefield loveseat and chair, located on the front porch. It was very beautiful, no curlicues, just nice softly curved lines with a small diamond pattern woven into the top edge.

He arranged to meet me at the house a week later, “Bring a pickup truck.”

For that whole week I was going crazy. But I had some trepedation...would I be able to afford the wicker?

The man was tall, elegant, around 60. He loaded the wicker on my friend’s truck. Still he wouldn’t tell me the price and I was getting all-anxious.

The wicker had been a wedding present that his parents received in 1931. The man GAVE the set to me. I am not kidding. I was soooooo happy, still am. The wicker is upstairs in my second studio. I nap there on occasion.

Back to the road trip!

After a brief stop at the cemetery to see if the bench base, done last week, had set properly, pal and I wanted food.

In a little border town, 10 miles south, we stopped at Poncho’s for Mexican. The torrential downpour began again whipping twigs into the air and the rain came down on an angle with puffs of white rain that looked like demonic clouds. I have never seen this before.

Glass shattered in the vestibule sending long daggers of glass into the opposite wall. A man that had just picked up a to-go order had just escaped the danger. Yikes! That was scary. I drank another margarita in a cactus glass decorated with a cherry.

Back home, among upturned trees and broken limbs, I went to sleep waking at 8:30 to the racket of explosions. 4^th of July! Let Freedom Ring! The neighborhood was loud, colorful, erupting, and just exciting. We did pinwheels, spinning globes, and fountains. Pal had bought a bottle of coconut rum, something a pretty girl had offered him in the grocery store tasting section, and we had a drink I dubbed cocotikis. The torches flamed in the backyard and people wandered, drink in hand in the streets, oohing and aahing at the colorful bursts over the river.

Sometimes you don’t even need to roadtrip to have fun.

Although I later found out that Kerry had been on a Mississippi River tour with skeet shooting in Holman just north of LaCrosse and fireworks in Dubuque. He traveled 35. I just by accident caught the Bush tour out there in May. So I was sorry to have missed that part, oh, and family and friends and more fireworks and the food and of course the beauty that is the bluffs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Great Mississippi River Fishing Caper, Road Trip 2004

You can read this piece in it's entirety (complete with photographs) at HERE

The Great Mississippi River Fishing Caper, Road Trip 2004...part 6

There is a section where fish species are noted in two categories. You can eat one fish a week from each section. Pollution.
Good-bye Mississippi River. I put Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited in and started singing back homeward.
Jared flew back on the expressway, going so fast I could barely keep up. In Janesville he missed the Rte 14 detour and we ended up in a minimansion area, then on a rural road, back to a four-lane, up onto I-90, down on a six-lane, and finally back to 14.
Three hours later we arrive at his place and he says, “I think that was the fastest I ever drove that stretch.” I told him he was a maniac and thanked him before I left for Grayson City. Jeff was going home with me and he needed clean clothes. I met his new dog, Snoopy, a gorgeous short hair, mostly white with black spots. It had worms. All puppies do?
I called my honey and told him Jeff was coming home with me and that man, after doing a 12-hour workday, had a surprise hot wing dinner with potato babies and honeydew chunks ready for us when we arrived shortly before 11 p.m.
We were famished and very tired. What a man. What a mighty good man. How lucky I am!
Great adventure. Fun caper. A one-time shot and we did it!

The Great Mississippi River Fishing Caper, Road Trip 2004...part 5

move forward. That visual of the man stomping the snake is still too vivid. I am wearing sandals. If I were to see one, the people in Des Moines would hear my scream.
Plus I have heard too much. I was chatting with the man that had a beautiful chocolate lab riding on the prow of his fishing boat. He told me about the 4 species of Asian carp that were accidentally introduced to the river. The silver carp when aroused by a boat, fly into the air and have been responsible for breaking legs, and arms of boaters. Some unfortunate fisherman suffered from concussions. Damn! Then there was that other story about a down-river practice called noodling. You jam your bare hands under the bank of the river and catch fish with your hands. Ohmigod. Sounds horrible. Plus there are animals like mink and otters, and snakes that live under there. Way too risky.
At Cold Spring I picked up a discarded fishing pole. It is very old and short, about 3’ long, and instead of a reel it has two screws sunk into the cork handle for your line. Jeff called it a poor-man pole, and said I should leave it for the next desperate person, but I took it as an outstanding example of river RealLife.
I’m taking pictures (huge barges are bringing goods up river, the train is going by every 15 minutes or so), chatting up fishermen, most from the cities in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, not one local. And I spy my other souvenir, a beautiful dried lotus pod.
The water lilies in the shallow ponds next to the river are blooming now. Giant white flowers tinged with pink and those flat oval deep green leaves, right out of a Degas painting.
The fish have stopped biting. Jared is done and I tell Jeff 10 minutes and we are out of here. He casts and wowOwow he catches the biggest fish so far! It is 2 ½’ long, silvery with a bright red tail. Yippee!
He removes the hook and the fish goes deep. Bye bye. On the way back to the cabin my brother pulls over. I come up alongside. “Hey your boyfriend is here.” I smirk, “Which one would that be?” “Dubya. Well, he’s not here. He’s over in Waukesha. (The other side of the state, near Milwaukee.) But he is in the same state with you.”
“Brat.”
He races away roaring.
God I love my brother. He called me a “happy nutball” when I donned the camo mask while fishing, but he is the champion of illusion and tricksterness.
Our big catfish dinner is sizzling in the cast iron skillet…platters of catfish, dipped in milk, then breaded, big chunky fries, and rolling balls of hush puppy dough. It looks good. Smells good too. The fries…tasty; the hush puppies…southern and oniony, the catfish….um, well, let’s see…if you took a piece of fish and spread some mud on it and cooked it up all golden brown, well that’s what it would taste like, musty. Ack.
We all decided catfish sucks and the people who rave about it probably had it when they were children and since it was mother-love food, they like it. I recall father saying not to eat bottom dwellers and a catfish is a mudfish. But I was very happy to experience it because otherwise I wouldn’t know if I liked it or not. Jared’s cooking wasn’t wasted.
Mark Twain published Huckleberry Finn over 110 years ago. I imagine the River was a different animal then…cleaner, wilder, and far narrower, at least in the northern region, prelocks. When I received my fishing license I was given a fishing regulations booklet.*

The Great Mississippi River Fishing Caper, Road Trip 2004...part 4

to come into shore. Jared and Jeff are catching lots of fish…blue gills, drum, perch, sheepshead, and some other fish we don’t know the names of. Jared especially like these soft silvery fish and started using them for bait. That’s the way real fishermen do it: catch small fish and use them as bait for bigger fish. Jared said there is everything in the Mississippi, even eels and clamshells with real cultured pearls inside.
On this sunny evening the water is grayish brown and teeming with life. Schools of tiny fish flit about, weird worm larva wiggle in on a wave, occasionally a bloated 2’ carp comes by, dragonflies skim the surface, and in the distance egrets and heron scoop up dinner then make a fretful squawking sound. Strange, since the birds are silent waders along the Fox River where I live.
I confess. I am not really a good fisherperson mostly because I make noise when I get a bite and try to set the hook. Jared called me Curly as in The Three Stooges. But when I try to control myself I am concentrating so much on being quiet that I lose my focus on fish and another one gets away. The funniest thing was that all of my noise attracted the fishermen in boats and although they could go anywhere on the river, they would pull up near the pier because they thought we were catching the big ones. Ha! We were surrounded by a flotilla.
We ended up fishing rather late into the evening…with that soft billowy breeze and the sun warming our skin and the fish biting like crazy you forget about time and about being in a remote area where the stores close at 7. Heck, the whole county only has 17,000 people.
We had to drive 25 miles south to Prairie where civilization would still be awake. Jared had promised to make us a big catfish dinner no matter what. Now don’t laugh, we bought farm-raised catfish at K-mart. We bought hush puppy mix too, although earlier in the day I had purchased all of the ingredients (using a recipe I printed out off the Catfish Institute website the night before we left) at Michelson’s, and 3 choice russets for fries. Still I suggested Chinese at a restaurant I noticed on the way down since it would be about 11 if we drove back to the cabin and cooked.
Everyone liked that idea.
It was sweet driving back up the coast, a brilliant gigantic orange sunset and the vast river sparkled a beautiful robin’s egg blue, just the same color as my nail polish. What a splendid night, swinging up and down and curving left and right through the bluffs. Back at the cabin, Jared put on music (volume 22 is his fav) and we danced and ate Chinese and leaned on the balcony with giant moths hitting us and bats zooming around our heads and the whole aliveness of the forest coming at us. New moon, very dark. It was spooky. It was beautiful. I could just imagine the deer deep in the forest arm-in-arm dancing like the Rockettes to Crystal Method…left kick, right kick…mouths open…aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhaaaaah…secret transmission coming to you…we got it
Locked in some hazy dreamstate I saw a man coming down a loooooooong hallway. He asked, “Where are your keys?” I pointed to my backpack. He left quickly doing backward hand sprints down that same narrow hall.
I awoke at 7:30. It was cool. The air was still on. Jared wasn’t around. Upon further inspection I noticed his truck was gone. I rustled Jeff out of his sleeping bag. “Let’s go to breakfast. We scrambled down the mountain, grabbed the keys off the floor of my car, open the cattle gate and zoomed toward the Red Apple Inn. ****

The Great Mississippi River Fishing Caper, Road Trip 2004...part 3

The person that did the barn wasn’t home or just didn’t come out. If we would have had more time I certainly would like to talk to him, if for no other reason than to clear up where he caught them. My brother concluded they were from the Wisconsin River since that is the closest body of water; I say the Mississippi. So that part is still open to discussion.
After a quick stop in Fennimore for fried cheese curds (wowOwow), burgers with everything and bottled water, we arrived at the cabin. I couldn’t drive up the bluff because of the severe erosion from the spring rains. Jeff and I jumped on the tailgate of Jared’s 4-wheel drive and rode up that way. Thank God I had my feet up on the bed. At one point, on a hairpin turn, the tailgate hit the ground. My legs would have been crushed.
I curled up on the futon, stuck my leopard travel pillow under my head, and escaped off to dreamland as Jared said something about meeting with the septic man and shooting guns with Jeff. Bye bye.
An hour later was reveille. Time to go fishing.
At the gas station in Gays, Jared bought a sport’s license about three feet long. I went for a 4-day out-of-state fishing license, a two-inch square. There was a problem. They said my social security number didn’t match my birthdate. C’mon. I was born in Wisconsin. I just acquired a new passport. How critical is a fishing license? An hour later, after showing every I.D. in my possession, we were finally on our way.
We came out to the Mississippi, Hwy 35…the Great River Road, and hit a desolate bait shop with two placards “Business For Sale” and “Vote BUSH.” I didn’t really want to buy anything there but my eye caught a camo facemask half-price, so I bought it. I was thinking about my deer back home. (Another story I won’t bore you with now, later though.)
I wanted to go to the jetty north of Ferryville, Jared had other ideas and turned south ending in Lynxville.
As we pulled up there was a thirtysomething man dancing on a big snake. Ohmigod. A boy in a brown van next to the man was yelping “Dad! Dad!” I looked in my rearview mirror and saw the man pick up the limp snake and throw it in his van. I hate snakes.
The river was empty except for 3 boats. The fishing pier was totally ours. We think most people were scared off by the weather report. Even Jacob the fur trapper had warned us away. He told us that one year a sudden fierce storm came up, smashed boats and tossed people, in one fell swoop.
It is hot, sunny, perfect blue skies, even low humidity despite the heat, and no mosquitoes. We are here to fish.
The pier is a series of 10’ x 15’ 55-gallon drum rafts wired together. It is like standing in a small boat. You feel every wave. I hook my leg onto the loop of a metal ladder (like the kind you find on pools). I can see the last raft ripping off the rest, Jim with his long pole and Huck squinting into the sunlight. (With only 3 ½ hours of sleep you will imagine many things.)
The worms suck. They are small, dehydrated, and even a few have sores. Still I have nibbles right from the beginning. I caught a beautiful blue gill, my favorite eating fish, although we were doing catch and release, and mostly waiting for one of the huge cats**part 4 rushing toward you

The Great Mississippi River Fishing Caper, Road Trip 2004...part 2

Right before the Monfort Wind Farm with the dancing white windmills, we veer off to the right. After a series of curves and small bluff inclines we turn right and stop at a stop sign guarding a railroad track. A spotted deer lunges in front of Jared’s truck. We wiggle up a winding road to a new ranch house, very long, almost Frank Lloyd Wrightian in character.
A man, about 65 with ½” whiskers wearing an A & W Root Beer ballcap, is carrying a teevee to his pickup. Jared gets out and gives him a hand. Jeff and I are waiting in my car. I have no idea where we are or why we stopped. Although both Jared and I have cell phones, this is remote country, not many towers; connections can be made only at the top of the bluffs. It is sunny, 90 degrees, no storm in site.
The man turns out to be Jacob the fur trapper. He invites us into his home. It is quite modern and extremely tidy. The furs draped over the back of his couch are beautiful beyond compare. He brings out albums of pictures. Some show his driveway filled with rows of dead animals. Racoon, red fox, coyote, and some I don’t even know, stacked. A day’s bounty. He has limits and a special license. He takes us out to an outbuilding. This is where the blood and guts fly, although there is no trace of either. He shows us a machine and explains how the feet are clamped in and the body is uprighted and the skin peeled off in one swoop. I kind of finish what he is saying because he is a bit shy to say the skinned part. All of the finished furs are shipped to Alaska. There they are tagged and put into lots. The individual furs are mixed with other trapper’s bounty and a huge auction begins. Buyers from all over the world gather and buy what will in due course reside on the backs of hoity-toity society women. So say Jacob has one red fox in a lot of 7 furs. Whatever that lot goes for he will receive 1/7 of the price.
I hope you aren’t going ISH. This is RealLife. It’s how our ancestors ate and kept themselves warm so they could survive. Do you wince when you travel through Nebraska and go past those trucks full of crying steer that will eventually be a silent guest at your next barbecue?
As an interesting side note I should tell you how my brother met Jacob. When Jared was a teenager he and a group of his pals went gold panning in Montana. That’s where he first met Jared. Then about five years later in a dumpy blues bar in an Illinois border town they met again. And earlier this year when my brother bought his Mississippi River cabin, he remet Jared at the local grocery store. Three different states! Odd coincidences. Although I must say that my brother is even more curious than I am and will chat up anybody he thinks is even slightly interesting. Mostly that is old men, I guess because our dad is gone.
I love the way a man keeps his eye on the prize and goes for it.
Next stop is 17 miles the other direction. It is the BARN, the flathead fish head barn. Ohmigod it is amazing! Now when I first read the passage in Huckleberry Finn about the 6’ catfish that could throw you all the way into Illinois, well I was giving dramatic license to Mark Twain. Fiction is full of hyperbole. And even when Jared told me about the elusive black-skinned monster fish, I took it as a bit of a made-up fish story, but here right before my eyes was proof. Giant flatheads had been nailed all over the side of a barn and yes they were twice the size of a man’s head and yes even though the body wasn’t there you knew it could easily be 6’ long! I am snapping pictures like a fool. Trying to capture the right angle. Photographing the beaver tails and the deer antlers. Oh man it was a site I have yet to recover from. The fish do exist.***********part 3 pronto

The Great Mississippi River Fishing Caper, Road Trip 2004

 
I arrived in Grayson City at 6:33 a. m. He was sitting in the garage on a stool with his camo backpack between his legs.
I’m running 33 minutes late, dragging on 2 ½ hours of sleep, tossing and turning and burping Taco Bell all night long. A gigantic stress pimple on my right cheek from trying to do too many things before embarking on this Huckleberry Finn replay.
Jeff, my 15-year-old nephew, is beaming and sleepy at the same time as he slogs his gear into my car. He’s running on 4 hours of sleep. Pretrip exhaustion, excitement…the great fishing trip we have talked about for months begins now.
A half hour farther north we meet up at brother Jared’s. He’s the one with the newly-purchased cabin out in Mississippi bluff country. And he’s the one that has far-reaching knowledge of fish and guns even though he is a suburban cat. Most of his info is from books although he did go on an African safari a few years back ad we did grow up in a family of skeet-shooters.
When I pulled in his driveway I am very happy to see no canoe strapped to the top of his 4-wheel drive truck. First he was taking his boat, then the canoe, but he didn’t have time to go out on the river and scout out a route free of snags and other underwater dangers.
He said he doesn’t want to kill us. That is nice. I’ve been having dreammares of Jeff and I roiling around in an eddy of eels and walleye and giant catfish, slamming into one of the locks and coming out the other end, pureed.
My brother, who has never had any interest in gardening before he bought this big house on 4 acres in Elk Horn, takes a moment to show me a flowering hen & chicks. It is remarkable. I didn’t even know they bloomed, a series of small white flowers in random clusters. It is the first picture of the trip.
We’re on the road by 7 despite the urgent call from Jared as I was leaving my house. “Turn on the weather channel...the whole state of Wisconsin is solid red…severe thunderstorms, tornado ripe.” “Doesn’t matter.” I tell him. “We aren’t camping, we’ll be in your house.”  I am not going to let this road trip of a lifetime slip away. This trip was to be for a week, then it became 3 ½ days and now because of business dealings, Jared has to be back Thursday morning. The door of opportunity is barely ajar. We are slipping through it no matter what. The hunt for the elusive 6’ long flathead catfish with a head twice the size of a man’s will be short and intense…a mere 2 days.
We manage a detour through Janesville, Jared making up his own alternative route. We get past that knaggy M, MM, PB route, past Oregon Correctional Center for Bad Girls (Wales, the Bad Boy School, is toward the other side of Wisconsin), and Jared pulls over at a BP for gas. I pull in right behind him. I don’t need gas so I pull over on the side near a pasture and get out to stretch. It is summer, July 12th, the rich rolling farmlands of Wisconsin are verdant, almost a fluorescent green. Jeff spies a piece of tree stuck in the barbed-wire fence. The wire was stuck right in the middle of the trunk. How did that happen? Picture # 2.
Jared pulls over and informs us that there is no way that we can go to meet the fur trapper Jacob. It’s 25 miles out of the way and well, no time. Okay. There were only 3 things we wanted to do: meet the trapper, see an outsider artist barn full of fish heads, and try to land one of those monster flatheads. One down.**********part 2 on the way