Noodling "Grade School" Teaches Fear Control
In any case, I gave up noodling about the time I got a fulltime job, and well before I started raising a family. I fell off the wagon one time in my early thirties when the late Alan Moguin and I took a group of teenagers canoeing on the upper Illinois over in wild Cherokee County.
Somehow, the word had gotten out that I used to be a redneck, and I was challenged to demonstrate that I could, and would, put my hands into a dark hole deep under water and pull out a fish with my bare hands. Truth is, I wondered if I could still do it as well. So, I did it, and everybody shut up about it. End of story.
The fish wasn't all that big, about a three-pound channel cat, but if I had caught a bird out of the air with my bare hands, not a farfetched analogy in my opinion, those kids couldn't have been more surprised. On the surface of it, it has to be about the most implausible manner of bringing a fish to the dinner table that you could ever imagine, and yet so deadly is the method when applied by the practiced, that its employment is accompanied by all sorts of rules and regulations designed to keep the poor unprotected "fishies" from near total annihilation.
I went to noodling grade school on West Cache Creek down yonder in Cotton County where the snake-ridden tributary falls into the Red River. I was taken there after dark one hot July evening by my uncle, Cleetis Howell, after he closed his welding shop in Walters for the day. The cottonmouths were as long as your arm, and as fat as your leg, and, like I said, it was after dark. I got to hold the lantern. "Noodling grade school" is what I said.
I got my degree in noodling college in my late teens chasing appaloosa cats (spotted flatheads) up and down the remote, sandy reaches of the South Canadian River with one of my other uncles, Bill Howell, down yonder around Calvin in ol' Little Dixie. At that time Bill owned a salvage yard/body shop that took in wrecks when the highway Patrol made their late-night calls to his house. When there, I made the runs with him, and helped pull out the tow cable and crawl under the wrecked bumpers to hook up the cable.
One night about 2:00 a.m. we pulled a '49 Plymouth four-door sedan out of the river where it had missed Highway 75's old, sharp curve on the north end of the bridge. There were a couple of victims inside the county coroner claimed, and a wet, living relative standing by the skid marks who offered to sell the car for a hundred dollars. Uncle Bill pulled the money out of his wallet and handed it over with me watching there in the dark with the lights flashing on the patrol car.
Inside of a week, the top of the old sedan had been cut off with a torch, a set of rear duals welded together and attached with half the air let out, the plugs pulled and dried, the oil changed, and before the funeral, even, we were running what I am pretty sure was the only '49 Plymouth, ever, with a set of sand duals, to noodling holes far from town all up and down the wild South Canadian.
"Noodling College" is what I said. At about the same time I got a different degree from another college and, as I hinted, somehow drifted away from the other, more profitable trade, of pulling cars out of rivers late in the night and catching catfish dinners with my bare hands.
When Adam Webster, my grandson Lane's father, called me the other day and asked if I wanted to go noodling with him and his old high school pal Jack Allen and Lane on Lake Keystone, I said "yes" so quickly you'd of thought I had never given up the game, years, though, it had been. The old war horse still answered the call.
Catfish nest and spawn at this time of the year at the back end of holes in a river or lake bank. If you can duck your head under the water, block up the hole with part of your body so the fish cannot escape, and hold your breath long enough, you can eventually get your hands around the fish's head, maybe a hand through the gills even, and come up out of the deep with surprisingly large fish that do not like what is going on.
In noodling grade school, you learn to block out the fear of encountering a giant snapping turtle, snake, or beaver in the hole by doing the same thing that Congressional Medal of Honor winners do when charging a machine gun nest: You scream like a madman, duck your head, and charge straight into the face of certain death, devil take the hindmost.
It helps to have someone make the charge alongside you, and to help block up other escape holes if there are more than one. Jack is Adam's noodling war buddy, ready to die with him if necessary. Lane is his apprentice, the new noodling school novitiate. Somebody is going to have to carry on this one tradition, along with rodeo and stomp dances, that keeps our culture from being overrun by those of California and Michigan. Conrad is the old legionnaire veteran of foreign noodling wars, no longer capable, or desirous, or running his hands and feet back into dark holes where who knows what lives. I have scars, and purple hearts. I'm the guy with the bloody forehead wrap marching between the drummer and the flag bearer.
"Conrad," Adam asked when the boat stopped near a favorite hole, "you wanna' get in?"
"Nope," Conrad said. "Somebody's got to take the pictures."
"Lane?" And youth answered tradition's ancient call, by a father, on the eve of Father's Day. Yes, all nine years of him, slipped quietly, and with much trepidation, over the side. He was honor-bound and knew it. It was not a small thing and nobody there messed it up by talking about it.
"We" caught three; one twelve, one fifteen, and one somewhere close to twenty-five pounds, I think. The water boiled and heaved. Big men surfaced for air and blew like small whales, and then went under again; sometimes their feet showing, sometimes not. You have to imagine what a small boy is thinking when his father disappears under dark waters for protracted periods of time, for, certainly, it cannot be put into words by the boy. Will my daddy come back?
No giant snapping turtles, snakes, beavers, or five-hundred-pound boy-eating catfish were encountered, but who knows? Some of us are still in noodling grade school, where anything is possible.
Some of us graduated a long time ago and desperately hope something else will happen. Again. Someday.
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