Baker's Branch

  Much of my wife and my "getaway" was for the daily retreat from cellphone bars and road rage as well as the fishing to be found in remote country. The back straps on a five-pound walleye are two inches thick and maybe fourteen inches long. That’s a lot of fine eating for two people set up for seven days, alone, tucked away in a far, far wilderness cabin on a lake called “Slender”. The back straps don’t call to attention the side meat, fine itself, which can be almost sixteen inches long, an inch thick, and, of course, there are two sides. We had all the fried-golden walleye fillets we could possibly eat in two meals, and it came from just one fish. Seven more days. Maybe heaven. It was all Pam’s idea. I haven’t gotten over it yet. Fifty years, and she still amazes me. My end of it, she says I still make her laugh. I still like watching her move across a room. We were to mark our fiftieth wedding anniversary; July 8th, I think. Yeah, I still can’t remember it every t...

  What we learn, we know. I don't know how to steal hubcaps, rob banks, or sell drugs. Nobody ever showed me how to do those things. I have always felt my body type was better suited to robbing banks than teaching English. Fortunate for me, and maybe you, too, some adult took me by the hand and showed me, or told me, how to do other things. My grandmother, Lillie Howell, was one of them. One day home on college break and eating a corner piece of one of her June blackberry cobblers, she walked up to where I sat and said apropos nothing, "If you ever get thrown in jail, don't expect me to come visit," dished me up another serving, and walked back to the stove. Obviously, it made an impression. I'm still talking about it, right? And so it has been as far back as I can remember: Men, and quite a few women, setting me on the straight and narrow whether I liked it or not. I don't know why Gary James took it upon himself to teach an archery class to Keystone ...

  It was perhaps the meanest fish I have ever tangled with in my life: All teeth and attitude. So what if it was only 12 inches long? I’m telling you, it was all teeth and attitude. It was a baby long-nosed gar; probably last year’s hatch. It drifted up out of a clear, deep water hole to a silver and black, floating Rapala stickbait I was tossing from a float tube into a creek southwest of Mannford a couple of days back. It glared at the lure, then lunged at it, popping it into the air which made me laugh. The fish was barely longer than the lure. That made it funny. I let the lure lie there on the surface about 10 seconds, and then twitched it. The baby gar got mad about it. Pow! He flipped the lure straight back up into the air again. I laughed even harder, like I would have had I been attacked by a munchkin with a whiffle ball bat. It was ridiculous. When the ripples died on the water, I twitched the stickbait again. “Crack!” Man! This time he hit the lure so hard it sounded lik...