Baker's Branch

  I am not a “techy.” I’m not even sure I can spell the word right. I can’t even operate my cellphone. People ask me all the time why I don’t “do” Facebook. Jeeminy Christmas. Why don’t pigs fly? The most embarrassing thing about it, and the only thing about it that embarrasses me, is that my father obtained one of the first Master’s degrees in Computer Science, and used that degree to run a plant that made space shuttles fly. One of my brothers programs computers for the federal government. The other two brothers have fingers that “fly” over computer keyboards causing them to make lots of money. I can’t turn one on half the time. If you’re still thinking about the parenthetical phrase in the middle of sentence seven of this piece, I will tell you that I also don’t think it’s possible to embarrass a redneck. They don’t walk around thinking about the possibility of being embarrassed, about anything. They’re too busy doing things with their hands. Give me a hammer, a saw, a...

   I fish for trout because of where they live. I like cool, clean water that moves beyond where I am. Because they are good to eat, and leap three to four feet high out of the water when hooked is secondary to me. Channel cats do that, and are better eating to boot. When I moved to Sand Springs in ‘66, Park Fennell took me to the Illinois River below Tenkiller and introduced me to the trout fishing there, and the access to it through old Mr. Stanfill’s gate there at riverside; the white, gallon coffee can nailed to the gate post to receive a fifty-cent donation for a day’s trout fishing. Honor system, of course, as there still was honor in the system, though it was disappearing fast. The water moved cold and relatively clear there as I remembered it did as a boy in the Sierras. No snow capped peaks or ten thousand foot elevations, but the water was cool, clear, and going somewhere else beyond me. Trout fishing. The closest “town”, Gore, was maybe a mi...