Place Blog #8: The Other Side

This week I soaked my hands in blood, metaphorically and physically. I participated in all things sacrilege in my beliefs as a fly-fisherman…

I followed a stocking truck, dumped buckets of fish that were raised in raceways into Delaware Creek, a neighboring watershed to Lost Creek.

But I did it for my daughter.

We woke at 6 am, extremely early for my daughter. She did well, though, and got dressed quickly, letting me stuff her into these miniature neoprene waders my dad got her for Christmas, before she followed me into the misty morning. The air was damp and chilly as we stopped to get hot chocolate, egg sandwiches, and worms at a local gas station, but Clara didn’t flinch. She was excited; we were putting “trout-fish” in the creek.

I met my friend Zach Hosler on Zendt Hollow Road where the Juniata Stocking Club kept their pens. A small mountain spring, no bigger than a drainage ditch along a highway, fed this homegrown hatchery. The stream ran along the road, cutting through one of the club member’s farm, which--strangely enough--raised bison.

When we arrived, Zach was already standing in the bed of his truck, foot propped up on this huge white plastic tank. A black rubber tube, hooked up to a pump in the mountain stream, filled the tank while Zach’s dad and a number of other older guys ran around the pens with buckets and nets. When the tank filled to 180 gallons, the aerator pump kicked on and the old men started hauling up buckets of fish.

They brought the buckets up to Clara to see; it seemed as if there was more fish in the bucket than water. Sleek, marbled green backs, white-tipped fins of brook trout, golden bellies of brown trout, and jewel-sides of rainbows—they rolled over each other, slapping their tails, splashing Clara in the face with water. She laughed, and the old men laughed with her. Yet, they kept bringing each bucket for her to see…and to get splashed by.

I noticed that these fish were more colorful than most stocked fish and bigger than state bred trout, and asked Hosler about it.

“Fresh-water shrimp,” he explained, “this stream is full of them.”

I felt better knowing that these trout were somewhat educated, eating natural foods and not just trout pellets. Maybe I wasn’t just about to dump genetic Frankensteins into one of my new home creeks. These fish at least had experience that would lead them to hitting a fly.

After we filled the tank with about 400 fish, we headed down to the creek. We pulled out a few buckets at each bridge and road-side hole. Clara even got to put three buckets into the creek. Each time, she danced with joy, splashing in the shallows of the creek swollen over its banks from the past week’s rain.

Finally, we reached the public park where we emptied out the tank. When the last bucket of fish was carried off to the final hole, I broke out Clara’s Disney Princess rod so that we could try and catch some of the fish she just stocked in the creek. I place the bobber, tipped her hook with a wax worm, and helped her cast out into a nice current seam in the creek, right were the fast water eddied out into slack water along the far bank. It wasn’t long until we had our first fish, which she helped reel in. The fight wasn’t epic, the fish not huge. But Clara was so proud of catching her first trout ever (she had only caught sunfish before this), that she didn’t want to throw it back.

Normally, when Clara has gone fishing with me, we would reenact a catch-and-release ritual. I bring in the fish (sometimes with her help, sometimes not), unhook the fly or bait-hook from its mouth, extend it to her so that she can pet it with one finger on its head before she says “Ewww, it’s slimy; throw it back!”

Today, though, as I reached out the trout to her, she petted it on the head like normal but then said, “I wanna eat that fish; keep it!”

Shocked, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t carry a stringer because I didn’t usually keep fish. Moreover, when I have kept fish they usual have been big enough to make  a meal out of just that one fish…so it had to be 15 inches or greater. This fish was only 9 or 10 inches at best.

I begged some of the other fishermen that were in the park, and one of them gave me a plastic bag to keep the fish in, but I quickly realized that we would have to be mass murderers today. Within the next hour, we had three more fish of equal size in our plastic bag creel, while having thrown two others back just so we could keep fishing.

As we packed up our gear, a light drizzle swirling in the breeze that began to pick up, the last of our fish flopped in the plastic bag. It hurt me to watch that trout struggling, not because I minded killing a fish, but because I minded killing one so small, and killing so many. I was saddened because I knew that these fish would not be here in days to come to bring more times that Clara and I could bond and behold nature’s wealth.

When we got home, though, Clara holding the slick bag of slimy fish up to mommy, saying, “I am going to eat these fishies I caught,” I thought that maybe there was no foul today. We “paid” for those fish with our work. The stream in which we planted them would get too warm for trout later in the year anyway. Moreover, I didn’t just plant fish; I hopefully planted a fingerling of a tradition in my daughter’s memories. I’d like to start joining the club on more stocking trips. Probably the next one will be to Lost Creek. I’d like to fish more streams where Clara gets to catch trout that she placed there with her own hands. I want to share memories with her that I didn’t get to with my dad because of the confusion and hatred bred in divorce.

So, yeah….that’s right. All of my fly fishing friends…if you can find this blog in the overabundance of blogs on the internet: I have participated in a trout stocking; I have caught fish with bait; I killed those fish, took them home, and fried them up; and I liked it!