When I went to bed Friday night I had a notion that it’d be cool to get up early and sneak in a little fishing at Greenhorn Park. Even though I had a rough night and didn’t sleep well, I still managed to wake up at 6am and drag my weary body out of bed to go have a little fun. I gathered up the fishing supplies while the tea kettle heated up, poured some tea to steep, then dug around the back of the refrigerator to find those night crawlers I bought last week for the fishing trip I didn’t get to go on. I found the little white container, opened it up - frozen! Ewww frozen worms aren’t going to catch anything! Dang! Oh wait, this is the old”er” container. I know what your’re thinking ‘you actually have “old” night crawlers in your refrigerator?!’ I know, right! It was gross, but the good news is that I found the fresher worms, they weren’t frozen, and I was off!
I had a great morning fishing. Caught one and fed a whole bunch of smarter ones. So I just lost my last worm to that whiley fish when an old timer, who was taking a morning walk around the lake, stops to ask how I did. Man, this fellow was a talker! He started reminescing and just went on and on with story after story - mostly about fishing, but not entirely. It was really quite impressive how he managed to weave one story into some other completely unrelated story, without pausing for a breath. I was simply dumbfounded by it and then he tells me this story about hunting water snakes.
He says he and his childhood friends went out to hunt water snakes and he found one that was about “this big around”, holding his hands in a circle big enough that his fingers didn’t meet. When I think of water snakes I think of little snakes about a foot long or so. I really had to pause at the thought of a water snake that measured 8-10 inches or more around. “C’mon,” I thought to myself. But he continues on and explains that it’d gotten so big because it had eaten so many fish. Well at least he’s still on topic. Then he says they wanted to scare the girls so he took the snake and started whirling it around his head to make the girls squeal and fish started flying out of the snake! He chuckles with satisfaction. Can you just imagine? A gigantic water snake glutted with fish until some boy comes along and starts swinging it around and the centrifical force causes it’s last dinner to go flying through the air and making the little girls duck and scream for cover! “Fish were flying everywhere!” he says and chuckles some more.
Yep, I was pretty amazed. You never know what you’ll run into fishing at Greenhorn park. Nice fellow, don’t know if he was telling the truth about that snake, but I was entertained thoroughly.
