Lake Keystone Fishing
I hadn't caught a sand bass in a dust storm in years, spring break early 1960s, but I caught one the other day. Actually, one of several, so ferociously were the white bass charging the shad up onto the shallow points in the back of Keystone's Salt Creek arm. I was wadefishing there early in the afternoon. I had the whole place to myself. A fine, brown haze smoked the sky everywhere you looked, but more particularly north, towards Ponca City. The air smelled like fresh dirt turned by a plow. So terrified were the shad that several times they shot like hot, melted silver splashed from a crucible right up onto the brown sand where they flopped gasping for air. I didn't feel sorry for them. They had made a choice. Like Jerry Clower's coonhunter, they could crawl out onto that sandbar and die dehydrated, or they could jump right back out into that water and kick every sandbass'--they could find. Some of them jumped back in. All of the others got eaten by a persistent ...