Cleaning Fish Has Its Own Rules

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 last hour before dark I could pick up another three or four, enough for a "mess". It's been a long time since I would keep just one fish, even a crappie, and clean it to eat, but I'll clean a mess. 

Thinking about the fish cleaning chores ahead of me as I hopped from rock to rock, flipping the jig out ahead of me, put me to thinking about my friend Dub Law of Berryhill. Dub had a railroad job over in West Tulsa, retired from that and moved his base of "winter operations" (fulltime fishing) to Toledo Bend Reservoir down in Texas. He guides when asked, for a nominal fee worth every penny, but mainly fishes for crappie, his favorite species though he was an active tournament bass fisherman in northeastern Oklahoma before he retired, and catches thousands of crappie every winter on that big, timber filled lake. 

Dub knows a few things about cleaning crappie. Cleaning a hundred a night for days and days in a row is a common thing for him, most of them for clients, or friends and family that come to visit in the lakeside RV park where he stays. 

It's common for him not to keep any fish at all, much as he likes to eat them, until just a few days before he knows he is going to make a run home to Berryhill to check on things. If Dub kept and cleaned every good Toledo crappie he caught in the course of one winter season… well, we'd all read about it in the newspaper. He'd be in jail. 

One evening at dark, a couple years back on a piney point close to his fifth wheel trailer down yonder, Dub, Mike and Eddie Bostic and I broke out the long knives and went to work on a mess of crappie, somewhere over a hundred of them, only an average day for four guys on Toledo, but we were happy. The owls were hooting softly and moving quietly among the pines on the lake shore, but total darkness was not yet upon us. 

We divided the labor, which would have made Henry Ford proud. Some of us filleted, some of us skinned fillets, and some of us washed fillets under the faucet and bagged them in sums of 40 into Ziploc bags. 

Men working, with the better part of the job ahead of them, commonly fall into a long spell of quiet so as to better ease the job falling into a time-burning pace that will facilitate the task actually getting done. Nobody wants a ditch to be dug forever, or a pile of fish (about the same thing) on a table never to be reduced. Any talking done usually comes no earlier than the halfway point. You like to see the end of a pile, before you start relaxing, talk still being the best form of relaxation for thinking humans. 

Dub spoke first. We were at about the halfway point. "Stop," he said. "We've got to clean up a little." And then we did. Each of us, following Dub's lead, cleaned our knives, and our little area around the fish cleaning table, using a scrub brush passed among us to clean both knives and table. 

I immediately saw the sense of it. A less wise, tired fisherman, might have opted for pushing on through the slime, guts, and scales to more quickly finish "digging the ditch," and hurt himself, or someone next to him, with slimy, slippery equipment. Four men flashing around four sharp knives in the near dark are not as innocent a looking gathering as might first meet the eye. A biker bar birthday party might be tame by comparison. 

Without voicing it aloud, the thought went through my mind that working on the railroad could get a guy hurt, too, and that if safety commendation stickers were given out after on-job inspections, then Dub undoubtedly had a passel of 'em somewhere. You recognize a good man by his deeds. 

No noticeable signal was given, but if you had been there you would have noticed us beginning to relax at that point. Somebody, I don't remember who, asked a question. 

"Dub, You down here all winter?" 

"Pretty much." 

"When do you get down here?" 

"Oh, some'eres 'bout the first of November." 

"When do you shut down?" 

"Oh, 'bout the end of February." 

It got quiet again for a little bit, but you could really see a big dent being whittled into the pile of fish. In the quiet, the minds of at least three men were mulling over the prospect of a whole winter, alone, on one of the best crappie lakes in America. Then an owl hooted softly, right over their heads in the big pine that stood next to the fish cleaning table. Someone else, I don't remember who, spoke again in the quiet. 

"Do you ever come home? I mean to Berryhill?" 

"Oh, sometimes." 

"When?" 

" 'Bout the time I think the divorce papers 'r in the mail." 

If you were down there on Baker's Branch the other evening, before all the rain, saw me hopping from rock to rock and chuckling to myself while tossing a jig for crappie, and wondered what that idiot out there on the rocks was laughing about…. well, that's what it was. 

There's a day coming, likely, when I will have no memory. It's not here yet. 

Copyright © 2008 Conrad M. Vollertsen