eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781938486760 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fulcrum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 12/14/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 39 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 10 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Tales of a River Rat
Adventures Along the Wild Mississippi
By Kenny Salwey
Fulcrum Publishing
Copyright © 2012 Kenny SalweyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-938486-76-0
CHAPTER 1
The Spring That Runs Forever
It was a hot, humid Sunday afternoon back in July 1959. My future wife Faye went inside to help her mother prepare supper while I joined the rest of her family in back of the little red house. A small group — Faye's father, brother, grandmother, and uncle — drank cold beer and chatted under the old elm and box elder trees.
"Hi, Kenny," the uncle said, sticking out his hand and grinning. "My name's Johnny."
We shook hands, and I took a seat next to Grandma Sommers. The group resumed its conversation. I sized up Johnny, as was my habit. He was a small man, perhaps five foot seven or eight. His build was solid and stocky. He weighed maybe 185 or 190 pounds. His clothes were made of khaki, the long-sleeved shirt open a couple buttons at the top. His shoes were black string loafers. I noticed he addressed my future father-in-law as Brother Bill. He wasn't talkative, but he had a firm handshake and was quick to laugh — good attributes of which I took note.
"Have any luck this morning?" Bill asked.
Johnny grinned. "Yah, I got a few. They're in the little Scotch cooler over there," he said, pointing toward the back of the house.
Johnny got up, walked over to the cooler, and brought it back to us. Carefully, he laid out eight of the most beautiful German brown trout I'd ever seen. Their sleek, silvery-brown bodies were flecked with red and yellow spots and tipped with white fins. Against the background of dark green grass, they looked spectacular. My eyes bugged out, my mouth fell slack, and my heart jumped a beat. It wasn't the size that boggled my mind — the largest was maybe sixteen inches, the smallest about eleven — it was their beauty, their magnificence, that captivated me.
I had cut my trout-fishing eyeteeth in the slow-moving, clay-bottom streams of west-central Wisconsin. The brown trout from those waters looked like streamlined carp. I would not have thought the trout of my boyhood fishing days and those lying at my feet were of the same species.
When I recovered my composure, I asked Johnny where he'd gotten them.
"Oh, over across the river," Johnny replied.
Across the river meant southeastern Minnesota, across the Mississippi from where we were in western Wisconsin. Johnny, who had never married, lived over there with Grandma Sommers, in the river city of Winona. I should have expected a vague answer to such a stupid question, knowing how secretive trout fishermen are about their favorite cricks. I dropped the subject.
Grandma Sommers told me how she sprinkles salt and lemon juice over the trout, puts a slice of onion in the head, wraps them in a damp cloth, and puts them on ice for twenty-four hours before frying them. It sounded mouthwatering good and only made me admire those fish more.
Later that afternoon, I overheard Bill and Johnny talking quietly. I caught parts of phrases, like "Sandstone Hole ... Willow Tree Hole ... the old mill foundation still there ... that big one still living in the second log hole in the woods?" My curiosity was whetted, to say the least!
* * *
Over the next several years, I saw Johnny occasionally at Brother Bill's house or at a family gathering. Our conversation usually turned to trout fishing, but Johnny never disclosed any specific cricks or tricks of the trade. In my mind's eye, I never forgot those sparkling beauties lying in the summer grass.
The time was April 1963. It was one of those early spring days when, for the first time since winter, the air felt warm and inviting. I went down to Bill's house on a Sunday morning. The two of us sat on the front porch looking out at the beautiful day, each of us suffering from a bad case of cabin fever.
"By God," Bill said suddenly. "Kenny, let's you and I take a couple of pistols, load up old King, go across the river and get Johnny, and go for a ride. How about it?"
I was already halfway out the door. I shouted, "I'll go get old King!" King was half German shepherd and half black Lab, weighing in at maybe 110 pounds of solid muscle. Around the back of the house,
King was jumping up and down, making his chain sing like a fiddle string. His eyes were beginning to fail, but he was still a tremendous specimen of a dog. I untied him. He bounded around the yard, then up to the old Packard, where Bill waited with the back door open. King lunged into the backseat.
Bill grinned. "All set, son?"
"You bet," I answered, and we were off.
We stopped in Winona at the Sommers' family home. By now, Grandma Sommers had been dead a couple of years, and Johnny lived there alone.
"Brother Bill, Kenny, come on in," Johnny greeted us at the door. "I see you've got old King in the car. What's up? Gonna take a hike?"
"Yeah, it's too nice to sit in the house today," Bill answered. "Thought we'd go down in Hidden Valley, see how the Sandstone Hole and the rest of it looks this year."
Sandstone Hole? Where have I heard that before? My mind raced back. Yes! Yes! That's where Johnny caught those trout!
We loaded up, Bill and Johnny in the front, me and King in the back. The ride to Hidden Valley took perhaps half an hour but seemed like an eternity. Finally, we were there. We parked in a little grassy opening alongside an old gravel road. After putting on our rubber boots, we found some walking sticks and began our springtime odyssey.
A dry wash full of rocks ran under an old twisted-iron bridge. We crossed the bridge, then followed a foot trail downstream along the crick bed. The wooded hills on each side seemed to crowd the wash into a zigzag pattern. Our pace was slow and easy. The early spring air was a sweet, heady perfume.
The wash ran alongside a small, rock-faced cliff. Here, Bill and Johnny set up a couple chunks of driftwood, then tried their hand at hitting them with their pistols, while I sat to the rear on a sandstone rock. As the shots rang out, old King's ears perked up. I held on to his collar to quiet him as he recalled days spent hunting in the duck marshes, when gunshots meant work.
Once again, we took up our walking sticks and headed down the valley. The valley floor here was about two hundred yards across, with hills on either side. At the base of the north hillside, a trickle of water appeared. Within the next five hundred yards, a profusion of springs flowed, crystal clear, bubbling and gurgling along the valley floor. Watercress grew in the springs like I had never seen it grow before. Great green water gardens lined the path of the sparkling spring waters. Everywhere was rock and gravel interspersed with small grassy meadows filled with wild violets. Huge basswood trees shaded the valley floor like a great awning.
We sat down on a big log. King cast to and fro, smelling and peeing at will. Johnny and Bill explained how this was the head end and fall spawning ground for all the valley's trout. We had walked at least a mile from the car. No wonder this crick was hard to find.
We sat, talking and laughing, sometimes all of us still as we listened to the spring birds sing their songs of joy. A red-tailed hawk glided above the hills, turning one way and then another, like a kite on gentle breezes. We shared some sandwiches with King, then knelt and drank heartily from the springs. The water was sweet and pure.
"We'd better get going," Johnny murmured. He stood and stretched his back. "We've got a long way to go."
The trail crossed the crick, then a stretch of woods, then back across the crick. We traveled in a fairly straight line, while the crick wound back and forth from one hill to another, as if the hills were a magnet drawing the water first to one hill, then to the other. The sandstone cliff rose thirty feet above the crick, then sloped away and up the bluff.
We reached a pool that stretched lazily downstream for forty feet with little current. Johnny told me to go downstream, below the pool, cross the crick, then work my way slowly upstream until I could sit on a flat sandstone ledge hanging over the pool.
I reached the ledge and sat down. From the ledge upstream, perhaps thirty feet, several half-submerged sandstone boulders created a heavy riffle. The water depth varied from about three feet at the head to around five feet below the ledge, then flattened out to a couple feet toward the bottom end.
Sitting there quietly, I saw trout moving in the clear water. Their bright colors startled me, yet at times blended in with the gravel and rock bottom. As I was about to leave, I noticed a large, squarish tail protruding from under the sandstone ledge.
Johnny called out, "Any good ones in there?"
"Looks like there's one for sure."
"There usually is." Johnny and Bill chuckled.
Downstream from the Sandstone Hole, the woods thickened. Several larger springs fed the crick. This stretch was composed of riffle–log–hole, riffle–log–hole for a half mile or more. The ancient trees had fallen this way and that, creating dark, cool pools with plenty of feed and cover. We saw few trout. Most, I imagined, were hiding under the logs. I ached to drift a line under the shadows. The soil in the Big Woods was rich, dark, and moist. We found several patches of skunk cabbage. I pinched off a leaf and inhaled the pungent odor of plant and soil.
A barbed-wire fence separated the wild part of the valley from the tame part. Downstream from the fence was a cow pasture.
Farther downstream, the valley floor widened considerably. Here, the crick banks were higher, the crick wider and shallower. Strangely enough, the crick bottom was still solid gravel. Half a mile downstream from the fence, a long, sweeping bend in the stream arched the water toward the eastern hillside. Here we found part of an old stone building foundation and the remnants of a grinding wheel.
We sat down to rest in the afternoon sun, and Johnny and Bill filled me in on the history of the Old Mill. Many years ago, settlers built a water-powered mill here to grind their grain and corn into flour and cattle feed. A rough-hewn road ran down the steep bluffs to the mill. The farms were located on the blufftops because the valley floor was too narrow and rocky to cultivate. When the farmers drove their horsedrawn wagons down to the mill to grind feed, they most likely filled their water barrels as well. Then, one spring day in the early 1900s, a great flood rushed down the valley, causing the stream to change its course. The farmers had no choice but to build another mill on the opposite side of the valley.
We looked across the valley and saw part of another foundation. Bill said a couple of grinding wheels were lying there too.
The sun felt good as we sat by the mill ruins. My eyes grew heavy as I listened to the rushing water. My mind filled with visions of men wearing straw hats and bib overalls, perched on wagon seats and driving teams of horses down the bluff road. In the wagon was cob corn, sacks of grain, and several wooden water barrels jostling about. A couple of dogs loped behind the wagon. The horses' leather harnesses creaked, and the wooden wheels squeaked and clunked over the rocky road. Now and then, the man talked to his horses: "Easy now, Queenie. Hup there, Belle."
The bark of a dog, far atop the hills, woke me from my dream.
"Let's go down to the Willow Tree Hole," Johnny said.
Another ten-minute walk and we were there. Along one side of the hole ran a steep, eroded bank about five feet high. On the other side, the bank gradually merged with the water. We approached from the gentle side. A fast riffle fed in upstream. The hole was deep and bluish black. From the center, where it was deepest, emerged a huge root, willow branches splayed out to all sides. We sat at the edge of the water, watching a few small trout rise for flies in the shallows.
Suddenly, old King plunged headlong into the pool, water spraying in all directions. He swam around the hole, then climbed out and shook off, giving us a shower.
"Well," Bill said, "I guess that's the end of the trout-watching in the Willow Tree Hole." We all laughed.
A cow path led from the pool down through the pasture. In the distance, a grove of trees stood on the valley floor. The crick meandered between the trees. A small herd of cows grazed contentedly in the grove. Bill decided we'd better turn back before King got mixed up with the cows. Reluctantly, we headed back upstream, stopping now and again to gaze into the crystal water or to look at wildflowers.
About halfway through the Big Woods, we crossed the widest and steepest spring that fed into the main crick. We followed the spring fifty yards to where it bubbled out of the ground. A thick carpet of moss covered the rocks and ground. The moss was cool to the touch. Marsh marigolds and watercress grew in huge patches. My God! What a beautiful place.
Johnny produced two plastic bread bags from his hind pocket, took out his jackknife, and began cutting watercress. Bill and I joined him. In no time, the bags were full of cool, dark green watercress.
As we neared the car, the robins heralded the coming twilight. I turned and looked back at the valley. What I had heard, smelled, and seen during this beautiful day was stamped in my memory. Thus began a lifelong affair with Hidden Valley.
On the way home, King lay with his head on my lap, dreaming of stumps, water, and cow trails. I thought long and hard, Should I or shouldn't I?
Finally, I blurted out, "You think it'd be possible I could go trout fishing with you guys this year?"
Bill and Johnny looked at each other. The silence was deafening. At last, Johnny said, "I don't see why not."
I could have sprung through the car roof, but I held myself in check.
* * *
The next day, I bought my first Minnesota nonresident fishing license. A seemingly endless week followed. At last, Sunday morning arrived.
Johnny and I left the car by the iron bridge early in the day. Rubber boots, fly rods, worm boxes, bottles of hooks and sinkers, stringers, and sandwiches were all the gear we carried. I began fishing at the Sandstone Hole. I tossed my worm-baited hook into the pool below the ledge. I just knew in no time I'd have my limit of ten trout dangling from my stringer. After all, wasn't this crick teeming with trout?
Five minutes later, no bites. I pulled my line up and moved farther out on the ledge, throwing my bait farther downstream. In the deep, clear water at my feet, trout zipped back and forth, some diving for cover right under the ledge.
This time I waited maybe ten minutes. No bites. The line lay quiet, as if there wasn't a trout within five miles.
Oh, well, I thought, I'll just move down into the Big Woods where all those shady, dark log holes are. Surely I'll get some there. I pulled in my line.
I figured Johnny, who had gone downstream ahead of me, would be a ways into the woods by now. But when I came to the first good hole, there sat Johnny, almost completely hidden in the shade behind the upturned roots of a fallen tree. His pole lay a short distance away, line sagging under the tree in the pool.
"Doing any good?" I asked.
"Got two so far," he answered.
I walked by, continuing down the crick to the next pool.
I drifted my bait under a log. Bang! My line straightened out. I reared back on the pole, felt the weight of a fish for a second, then slack. I baited up again, drifted my bait under the log half a dozen times with no results, then moved on.
During the next several hours, I worked my way out of the Big Woods, into the pasture, past the mill ruins, and all the way down to the Willow Tree Hole. It was a nightmare. Either I didn't get any bites or I missed the ones I got. Finally, at the Willow Tree Hole, I landed a small trout. I held him tightly and put him on the stringer carefully, as if he were the first trout I had ever caught.
I thought of Johnny. Where in the hell was he? I hadn't seen him since the morning. Maybe something had happened to him.
I started upstream at a brisk walk. I found him halfway through the Big Woods, sitting against a big basswood tree in a grassy clearing, pole at his feet in the grass, line lying quietly in the dark pool.
"How'd you do?" he asked.
I held the little trout out of sight. "Oh, I got one. How about you?"
"They're down there on the stringer." He pointed to a shallow, rocky riffle.
I went down to the riffle, took a good-size rock off the end of the stringer, and pulled it up. Seven sleek, dark-backed trout flopped and splashed in the shallows! A couple were in the sixteen-inch class. My heart sank.
"Bring 'em along up here," Johnny called, as he wound up his line. "I guess we've got enough for today, huh?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tales of a River Rat by Kenny Salwey. Copyright © 2012 Kenny Salwey. Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Foreword
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction Mary Kay Salwey xxv
Rat Tales
The Spring That Runs Forever 3
Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer 25
The Bullfrog's Ball 31
A Splash in the Night: A River Rat's Bear Tale 33
The Redemption Coon 43
Dusky and Red 61
A Fish Tale of a Fishtailin' Trout 73
Somethin' Fishy Goin' On 87
The First River Rat 91
Ever Been Lost? 101
Those Swamps You Call Home 109
The River Rolls Along 125
Kickin Skunk Cabbage 129
A Boy, a Grampa, a Swamp 147
Cowboy Kenny and the Swamp Steers 153
Recipe: Cowboy Kenny Cookies 175
The Ballad of Cowboy Kenny 177
The Old Woodstove 181
May: Trout Fishin' and Morel Pickin' 189
About the Author 201