Daylight to Dark

 

I had only one rule when I was a kid and it got me into both a lot of trouble and into some of the most amazing experiences at the same time. My mother said she didn't care where I went all day, but I had better be home by dark. She pretty much turned me loose; a good thing because I hated staying indoors. I should've drowned two or three different times, but I didn’t. Here I am bothering you about it.

I had an old fat tire Schwinn no gears bike with a wire basket on the front that held Dungeness crabs, blue crabs, crawdads, fish. or anything else I wanted to throw in there. The snakes, which I searched for constantly, I secreted into odd pockets of “stressed” blue jeans ahead their time fashion-wise. Mom loved me for that as it made her daily laundry chores a lot less mundane than they might otherwise been.

A kid carousing the country daylight to dark in the same mode as me is apt to see things others don't. Once on a leave from his sea duties, my dad, the Captain, checked out a bunch of camping gear from the navy base and hauled us up into California's High Sierras west of Bishop to Lake Sabrina. I fished like a wild man. Well, like a wild kid. Trout, trout, trout, an addiction I carry like the starving do a hunger.

One day I trekked uphill from Lake Sabrina along an old gravel two-track towards rumored better water. Maybe half a mile from “home” water one of the weirdest animals I have ever seen, half-way between a small bear and a large dog in size, sable in color with a cream trim of fur about a foot wide completely around the circumference of its body, came angling across the two-track from my left and crossed right in front of me not ten feet away. It scared me because I thought it was a bear. Then it was gone. I never mentioned it to anybody.

Years later, in my forties I think, I read that it was fairly common in the Sierras before the twentieth century, but was now extinct. The picture was plain, and of the same animal that I had seen. It was a wolverine. Well, now. Hmmm. Double hmmm. Anybody out there in California reading this? I think the year was 1955. Daylight to dark. A kid on the loose.

After getting some basics out of the way at the University of Virginia, I finished my college education at East Central State University in Ada, Oklahoma. Hello Blake Shelton. I loved that place. Still do. I fit there like an eel does inside its own skin. Fish, fish, fish. Yes, I did. Different species.

An hour south of Ada there was a great spring sand bass run In the Cumberland Cut, a pinch point between the Washita Arm of the lake and its main body to the south. I bummed a car off a girl whose dad flew her home somewhere back East for the break; loaded up a box of groceries, a frying pan, and one of Grandma Howell's old hand made rag quilts to roll up in on the back seat at night. I ate fried fish, potatoes, and corn bread. I caught sand bass on cheap black and white potato bug spoons until my arms hurt. No Comanche ever lived freer or happier than I did daylight to dark.

One morning I waded out waist deep and began casting. It was a dark and cloudy day that smelled of spring storms, maybe even tornadoes. Mornings like that took a while for the water to warm enough to get the sand bass interested in spawning. About my tenth cast, I saw a motion in the water about fifty feet out and slightly downstream from me. Well, now. It was an otter, an animal I knew well from my fat tire Schwinn days back in Pacific Grove, California. There are lots of them out there, sea otters. This was a freshwater river otter. The year was 1964.

It rolled over once on its back, bit the head off a small sand bass, rolled back over and then continued on up Cumberland Cut and out of sight. When I got back to school, in the library I read a piece in the Oklahoma Wildlife Magazine that said that though once common, river otters had not been seen in Oklahoma since before the turn of the twentieth century.

Hmmm. Here we go again. You give a kid a lot of free time between daylight and dark, and he's going to see things that don't even exist.

Copyright © 2024 Conrad M. Vollertsen