Deserts, Fishing and Camels

 

Snowed in last week, remember? Today there’s a fine drizzle coming down out here on Baker’s Branch, just enough to settle the dust, nothing more. Not nearly enough to fill the dry ponds scattered about this country.

Truth is, our state continues to wither dry going into the fifth year (my count) of a classic dry country drought. Yes, this is a traditionally dry country; always has been. Droughts here do not surprise the natives. 

When I was a boy, homesick for Oklahoma while living in Rhode Island (oh, yes, plenty of water in a state with the word “island” in it) a teacher sensed my melancholy, asked me the source of it, and the next day handed me a book entitled “The Grapes of Wrath” saying, “Here, I think you will find some people in this book you know.” 

Indeed I did. Steinbeck’s Ma Joad was my own grandmother. Her son “Tom” was one of my uncles, minus the stretch in prison, but I definitely knew where “Mac Alester Pen” was. It was just down the road about thirty miles, and where Grandpa took me every year to the prison rodeo back in the dry, dusty, early ‘50’s. 

But mostly it was the constant dryness and near desert-like conditions described that brought me back to that place and time I knew growing up. It never rained enough in Oklahoma, or when it did it rained too much. It was a land of extremes, with people to match. And we went fishing in it at every opportunity. 

Who wouldn’t go fishing in a desert, if they could? There were no lakes. Grand Lake O’ The Cherokees (as it was called back in the day) and Lake Texoma had been formed in the early 1940’s, but were still so far off for most of us they might as well have been rumored places in the Land of Oz. Sure, we had heard of them, but nobody we knew lived close enough to go to them. 

That all changed of course, but in the day of which I speak, common people (include me in that category) fished rivers, creeks, and stock ponds, which in that time were called “tanks”, because of their early importance as water sources for steam powered train locomotives. The tanks were situated to catch rare rain runoff close enough to a railroad track so that a locomotive could dip a giant “straw” into them when running low on the necessary water and resultant steam to drive the huge engines. As time passed, railroad men figured out certain species of fish could survive train travel in steel milk cans, and also survive being dumped into tanks. 

Fish all over this country were stocked just that way. It was a good and wise thing those old brakemen and engineers did, as there certainly wasn’t enough water in this country to just drop fish anywhere you wished. It has always been a dry country, right? 

Fishing that way as we did, we learned all kinds of things about snakes and turtles big enough to bite you; how to catch grasshoppers and turn over stones for worms; what really constitutes a “good” bass or catfish, and how tasty perch are to eat and how much fun to catch when that is all you had to mess with and exactly where that big hole of water was located that never went dry and harbored, Bob Jones said, a catfish at least as big as a man that had already eaten several boys to get that big. 

To this day I cannot catch a sunfish (perch) without a smile coming into my face. 

But, it is a dry country. Is now, and always has been. Sometimes there is no water in it, and no place for perch to swim, which produces fewer smiles. 

I learned that from association, but also from another book Steinbeck’s tale put me onto indirectly. That’s the way reading works: Read one thing, and it sends you looking for another. Reading about the Joad’s country blowing away from around their feet, put me into wanting to find out why the country just “up and left”. 

My science teacher gave me a book about meteorology, a term I had never heard before. I was almost on page 133 before I got to the chapter the book called the “Great Dust Bowl and What Caused It”. Pay dirt, so to speak. The book’s authors said that as far as was known, drought hit the American Southwest in apparent twenty year cycles, and that the drought cycle would last, on average, from three to five years. 

So, here we are, if the book was right, and just to let you know, I have been holding those authors, long gone and dead now, to their word, in the fourth year of a possible five. It’s also possible that this will be the year it begins to rain again on this desert country like it did on Noah, which is also a good sign that we are all living, timewise, on some kind of borrowed Biblical grace that can turn on us in a heartbeat and put the lake thirty feet above normal like it did in just one week back in the fall of ‘86. Remember when folks left their homes for fear Keystone Dam was going to break? Hmmm? 

My grandson, Lane, and I have taken to lopping small eastern red cedars on my property, stacking them in an out-of-the-way place in the yard where they can dry out, lose their needles, and become amenable for building fish attracting brush piles out here on the Branch. Thinking about it, it’s a little like leaving out cookies and milk for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, but we must have small, possible hopes to live for in order for the whole thing to be bearable. 

Right now, there is just that little bit of rain falling outside my window; just enough to smell when the oakbark turns wet. But I know there’s more where that came from. We’re beginning year five. 

What we live for is hope, like camels in line at the oasis.

© 2015 Conrad M. Vollertsen