Baker's Branch

Since a boy, my idea of adventure was entering a dense stand of timber at daylight with a twenty-two, single shot rifle in hand. I did it at every opportunity between the ages of ten and seventeen. The rifle, a Winchester Boy’s Rifle, model circa 1937, belonged to my grandfather, Austin Howell.  A box of .22 caliber long rifle shells cost me fifty cents which I gathered up every day from the deposit of discarded glass pop bottles at Hundley’s general store in Calvin. Three cents a bottle, which I gave right back to Mr. Hundley for squirrel bullets. Apparently, we both thought it a good deal, so many years did we barter. I went off to college knowing where to get my squirrel shells and very little else. Just the thought of the adventure I found in those deep, dark woods motivates me to this day. I did not know a boy my age that did not want to be an Indian so heroic a figure did they cut. Solo trips into the squirrel woods allowed a boy to imagine whatever he wanted to imagine. ...

If I said the word “summer”, and then said the word “thundershower”, would you understand the difference? Do you know the smell of hot concrete in the rain, and how gratifying it can be because of what it means? It does not rain in this country in the summertime. June, July, and August are what people in the oil patch used to call “waterhauls”. You can go months at a time in Oklahoma and not see a drop. Not one.  In that country, Little Dixie, and in that time, the 1950’s, my grandparents began thinking of river trips, trotlines waded knee deep to waist high, baited with crawdads seined from a pond; hand-cranked ice cream on the porch in the dark, heat lightning in the distance. Hot, hot summertime. Air conditioning? Jeeminy Christmas. “Swamp coolers” if you were lucky; those that melted the hard candy into amorphous lumps on the coffee table and wrinkled the pages there in the family Bible. The best place in the country was right there on the front porch in the dark; not coo...

  It’s light enough, now, to thread a needle outdoors at six in the morning, and cool enough to make you wonder why anyone ever complains about the heat in Oklahoma. Concrete workers, and roofers, know this. So do catfishermen. In June, in the hot, hot summertime, in the rocks, you’re going to find the catfish, three species, spawning; no roofers or concrete workers. If you do see the latter, just keep moving, gaze averted. One cool morning this week, right after a pleasant nighttime shower, you would’ve found me there. I was catching fish, nice, fat channel cats up to about three to four pounds; one bigger that broke me off. Channel? Blue? Flathead? I don’t know. I was using live bait, so it could’ve been any of those three mentioned, the flatheads almost always preferring live bait to dead. It was big, whatever it was. I say “live bait”, and that would include earthworms and crawdads, wouldn’t it? Over the years I’ve caught more cats in the rocks using what they call “marke...