The Mystery Catfish

 

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This week I traveled through Allen Parish and crossed over the Kinder Canal on both Highway 190 and Highway 165.  The Kinder Canal is an irrigation canal dug by the Kinder Canal Company decades and decades ago in order to provide water for farmers to irrigate their rice.  There was a large relift station on the Calcasieu River in which water from the river is pumped into the canal and flowed for miles and miles.  Farmers bordering the canal are able to use the water without investing in a deep water well.  They simply pay shares of their production to the Canal Company.  It is quite an engineering marvel, in my humble estimation.

As I passed over the canal, it brought to mind memories of riding my bicycle down to the canal to fish as a kid.  I smiled as I remembered one particular adventure.  I had a friend named David who lived right on the side of the Kinder Canal east of town.  He invited me over to his house to campout one weekend almost 50 years ago.  We pitched a tent on the side of the canal and dug worms and began setting out trot lines, baiting the hooks with worms, frogs, grasshoppers, and crickets.  We had lines set all down the banks of the canal amidst the cypress trees.  Every 30 minutes or so, we would go down the bank and check our lines for fish, rebaiting as needed, keeping our eyes peeled for snakes.

We started a campfire and sat around it in the interim, telling stories.  It was great fun, except we didn't bring any water.  The water from the canal was too muddy to drink.  What to do?  It was then that my friend, David, began to inform us that his Dad was a Green Beret and had taught him a trick if you were thirsty.  You would simply get a small stone, like what we call "pea gravel" and put it in your mouth.  It fools your mouth into making a bunch of saliva.  The theory is that this quenches your thirst.  Me and David and his little brother, Michael, that had joined us, ran down to the side of the road and found some small, smooth stones to put in our mouths.  Spit soon filled our mouths, but I can't testify that it made me any less thirsty.  I can't recommend it.  I give it one star out of five.

With stones in our mouths, we ran to check our trot lines.  We had caught a catfish on one of the lines.  There was a lot of whooping and hollering.  Success!  It was a blue cat.  We quickly skinned it and gutted it.  In addition to having no water to drink on this campout, we had no cooking utensils or seasoning.  That didn't discourage us.  We stuck a stick through the catfish and would spin the catfish on the stick over the fire, rotisserie style.  After a bit, the fish was done, or so we thought.  We were tired of spinning the fish, and we were hungry.  We passed the fish stick (ha ha) around the fire and we would each take a bite of the bland, unseasoned, and half-cooked fish, being careful not to eat bones.

At this point clouds of mosquitoes descended upon us like the plagues of Egypt.  David told of another trick to avoid mosquitoes.  You were supposed to coat your body with mud.  Based on the efficacy of his previous trick, I opted out of coating my body with mud.  Our campout at this point had hit rock bottom.  It was hot.  We were sweating.  Without water to drink, I was getting dehydrated, and I spit out the rock.  Green-beret trick or not, it wasn't working.  I also had a fishy taste in my mouth, mosquito bites on every square inch of my body.  I longed for the comforts of home, but it was too late in the night to back out.  I climbed in the tent, zipped it up and went to sleep.

The next morning, David and I were awakened by his brother.  He told us that HE had caught the biggest catfish he had ever seen.  It was a huge catfish!  He was making fun of us because we were older and yet he had caught the biggest fish.  He was trying to tell us that he had caught it on his fishing pole.  But something wasn't quite right.  As we looked at the big mudcat he was holding, we realized that he was pulling a fast one on us.  The fish still had a hook in its jaw along with thick black trot line tied to it that Michael had cut with his pocket knife off of OUR trot line.  It wasn't monofilament line like that on a rod and reel.  He had stolen our fish!  Mystery solved.

We were mad at him, but it was morning and we weren't hungry for catfish for breakfast.  Especially not bland, half cooked catfish, so we let him run on back to his house with the fish.