Baker's Branch

  My grandson, Lane Webster, and I might’ve been coming around a bend of the Nile, full of crocodiles and reeds, in our little petit dhow (boat), but we weren’t. We were in my sixteen-foot, aluminum, runabout, coming around that northside bend of the Highway 51 rip rap, just east of Freddie’s steakhouse in Mannford. All fishing trips start out as adventures, and then adventurous memories. It’s why some of us go. We don’t need more fish. We haven’t yet eaten all we have in the freezer. Daniel Boone didn’t keep westering just to find more land. He was bored with the sameness that collected behind him everywhere he went. Me, too. You round that corner I just mentioned, and look due east, straight down the line of rip rap, and you will see two medium-sized cottonwoods, the only trees there for a quarter of a mile, growing right out of the rocks; the trees themselves a marvelous metaphor for the tenacity of all living things. In the shade of those two trees, some sort of gamefish ...

One day this past week, early, before the water got high and ridiculous, I picked up a few crappie while tossing a chartreuse and marabou jig as I walked the banks of Baker's Branch near my house.  It'd take a stick of dynamite to find a crappie in there now, but at the time of which I speak they actually seemed to be heading for the bank to spawn. I was picking them up in about five feet of water. Then it started to rain.  The fish were not large, about three-quarters of a pound, but were beautifully decked out in spring spawning colors of pearl white, lavender green and blue, and their fins edged in velvet black. There is not a prettier fish swimming than an Oklahoma crappie in springtime, not even a rainbow trout, and if we're going to sit down at the table with them, I'll give you 10 rainbows for every crappie you slide my way across the fish cleaning table.  I had about six or seven on a chain stringer I towed along with me, and felt pretty confident that in that l...