June 2008 NewsletterJim Casada
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www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com June JubilationAs this newsletter is being written I am sitting in an upstairs bedroom in my boyhood home. It looks out over the little town of Bryson City, situated along the banks of the Tuckasegee River, and on the opposite side of the valley Frye Mountain towers skyward while outlined in the blue haze which gives the Great Smokies their name. The setting and my sense of place bring a whole host of memories, most reaching back to the halcyon days of my youth, flooding to the forefront of my mind. The stair-stepping slopes which eventually lead to the peak which is Frye Mountain were the setting for many of my squirrel hunts as a boy, thanks to the fact that they lay within walking distance of home. The ridgeline just to the east of the main peak was home to a fire tower (it was removed in 2006), and teenagers loved to brag about having hiked all the way to the site. It was an arduous climb, but physical challenges were manna to adolescents of my generation. There were no couch potatoes among my circle of acquaintances, and my family didn’t even own a television. Primarily though, my view evokes memories of what the month of June meant to me as a boy. Foremost in importance was the fact that school was out for the summer and three marvelous months of being carefree lay ahead. Mind you, there were chores aplenty and more than a little structure imposed on me for those summer months. Dad seemed to have an endless supply of tasks which needed to be done around the house, and when his well of work for me began to run dry, Grandpa Joe could fill the void in sterling fashion. Yet even those summer chores were, in a fashion only someone who cherishes the good earth can fully understand, decidedly pleasant. There were rows of corn to be hoed and thinned, with two stalks to the hill being the norm (four seeds were planted just to guarantee a good, even stand). At Grandpa’s place, in particular, it seemed the rows stretched on forever, and hoeing out the corn there brought the need for extra care. He planted both pole beans and October beans in the rows of corn, with the towering stalks of Hickory King corn. Hickory King was his favorite, thanks as much to versatility as anything else. It made mighty fine roasting ears, was a superior corn for hominy, produced quite acceptable corn meal, and was hardy and productive as all get out. Grandpa saved seed from prime stalks year after year, thereby doing his own homespun brand of superior breeding as well as avoiding the dreaded matter of spending what he invariably called “cash money” to purchase seed. You had to wield a nifty hoe to avoid chopping down young bean plants while getting competing weeds, and woe be unto me if I made a mislick, usually because I was daydreaming about fishing, and Grandpa Joe observed it. On the other hand, if I worked with a will, taking care to avoid hoeing down beans and tender shoots of corn as well as leaving volunteer ground cherries and old-fashioned yellow pear tommy toes, I could count on an afternoon fishing trip and, late in June, all the ice-cold watermelon I could eat. Grandpa was a pure fool for watermelon, and he would spend cash money to get one as soon as they became available at the local market. In my mind’s eye I can still see him, bent and stooped with age, walking back from town with a big tow sack slung across his back. It would contain a dark green cannonball watermelon of the sort you never see anymore. Most of my work revolved around gardens, in one way or another, but there was also grass mowing to figure into the equation. Virtually all of my lawn mowing as a boy was done in a fashion today’s “greenies” would find eminently acceptable. That is to say, it was done with an old-fashioned reel mower you pushed. I think Al Gore is a smarmy buffoon, but long before he suggested gas-burning engines were dooming the planet I was doing my part! Of course, such sweat of the brow work is beneath hypocrites of his ilk. I’m not sure how I got off on that tangent, but since it’s my newsletter I can say what I wish. Gore goring aside, I did plenty of lawn mowing as a boy—our lawn (no pay involved there), that of our next-door neighbor for a pay scale that started at 50 cents but eventually reached a dollar, and plenty of others I helped Grandpa handle. He was a peculiar soul who refused to take a “regular” job which involved oversight or having a boss, but things like pruning, doing yard work, and other tasks he could do without being required to follow orders were just fine. Other work included caddying at the local golf course and, throughout most of my teen years, working on that golf course as a sort of greens keeper and jack-of-all-trades. Mind you, the “greens” were ovals of oiled sand which were kept smooth with a drag, and much of my work involved hour after endless hour astride a vintage Allis-Chalmers tractor pulling gang mowers to cut the fairways. Occasionally this would be varied by use of a side blade to cut the rough. Mostly though, I fished, piddled around, walked in the woods, camped, shot endless rounds through my BB gun, made slingshots, threw rocks, built forts, and worked hard at the incredibly joyous task of just being a boy. By the beginning of June the bottom of my feet would be thoroughly toughened. That would be thanks to having spent the previous four to six weeks of going barefooted at every opportunity. The first time the thermometer flirted with 70 degrees I thought it was time to shed shoes, although Mom and Dad saw matters somewhat differently. One standard of measurement, and a matter of pride among the boys I ran around with, was to step on a still smoldering cigarette butt and hold your foot on it. If you had built up a sufficient layer of callus, you would put it out without feeling any heat whatsoever. I did wear shoes on days along the river though. There was too much cut glass and too many sharp rocks to do otherwise. My time spent fishing, along with occasional exercises in seining branches, building dams, riding float tubes after a heavy rain had swollen the creek brought a world of fun. If the fishing involved the river, my catch would be catfish, bream, knottyheads, and the occasional sucker or redhorse. That fishing was done almost exclusively with bait, with my array of offerings including red worms, crickets, spring lizards, and night crawlers. The latter two, incidentally, were also a source of income, since local bait stores were always in the market for them. Later in the summer the bait possibilities would expand to include “nests” (the larva of wasp, hornet, or yellow jacket nests I had raided) and grasshoppers. Those days along the river were carefree and relaxing, and some of my experiences with an old river rat named Al Dorsey were of particular note. He reeked of alcohol and the odors of the unwashed, and I later learned he had spent a good many years in the state pen for manslaughter (a shootout in the heart of town), but to me he was first and foremost a catfish wizard. Once, when he hooked, played, and landed a whiskered giant of better than 40 pounds while fishing off what was then the only bridge spanning the river anywhere for miles, the feat was the talk of the town for weeks. As I grew older and my parents came to trust me more, my river time increasingly gave way to days spent fly fishing for trout. I could bike or walk to nearby Deep Creek, and seldom did a day go by when I didn’t manage to get in at least a couple of hours wading and working its trout-filled waters. That hasn’t changed a lot. Just yesterday I fished, probably for at least the thousandth time, a favorite stretch of water. It gave me a limit of fish, as has been the case off and on for almost 60 years, and I just chuckled when a fellow alongside the stream, one of what locals refer to as Floridiots (summer residents from Florida) pronounced with absolute certainty, “There are no fish in there.” Those jubilant days of June lie far in the past, but each time I renew my acquaintance with the place where I was raised, each time I see a familiar scene or cast to a pool which hasn’t changed in decades, they come rushing back through the corridors of my mind. I’m blessed to be able to have such a sense of geographical connection, and doubly blessed that so much of it links me closely to the good earth and the water which is that earth’s life blood. May it be the same with you. As an after note, I should add that I am presently deep into turning that marvelously misspent childhood, or at least the trout fishing part of it, into a book. Scheduled for publication in 2009 in conjunction with the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it will be a detailed look at all aspects of fishing for trout in the Park on a stream-by-stream basis. I also intend to include plenty of human history as it relates to the Park, trail information, natural history, and of course thoughts on tactics and techniques for fishing the Appalachian high country. If you would like to be put on a list to be notified when the book is ready, just drop me an e-mail to that effect (jc@jimcasadaoutdoors.com). Thank you for subscribing to the
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