Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 2, 1993 TAG: 9309080442
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Bill Cochran
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
When dry weather settles in, even cutting hay won't make it rain, and if it hangs around long enough there is no hay to cut.
So we'd watch the sky, and finally some magnificent thunderheads would pop up in the northwest. Before long, thunder would be rumbling and the wind would blow the dry grass flat. The hot sun would disappear and the songbirds would vanish, and I have seen times when the nighthawks would fly in the middle of the day.
Then something would turn the storm, sending it west of us. It would rumble down the river bottom, pass through town 12 miles away and disappear like a freight train going into infinity.
We'd watch its progress from the hillside, and my uncle would get sore because the rain was wasted on town when it really was needed on the farm. ``Maybe they are paying the preacher more down there.''
My disappointment would be rooted in another cause. When it rained, I got to go fishing. When it didn't, there was the seemingly endless job of haying.
One of the great dramas of life was getting in a load of hay with black clouds boiling up on the horizon, and beating the rain to the barn by a few seconds.
But I liked it best when I would be awakened in the night by the music of rain falling on the tin roof. I would stretch luxuriously under the sheet, knowing it meant a full day of fishing.
Even when it is too wet for haying or working the garden, there's always plenty of rainy-day work on a farm. You can change the oil in the tractor, sharpen the mowing machine blades, cut burdock. But my uncle liked to fish as much as I did, and that was one of the reasons I spent summers working for him. It wasn't the $5-a-day pay.
He liked trout fishing best, and as a younger man tied flies in a room up over the kitchen, seated at a homemade bench stacked with the fur and feathers of road kills, a cloud of sweet-smelling pipe smoke rising to the ceiling.
Then his big, leathery hands got too stiff. In the mid-50s he gave me a bunch of his tying materials along with a book ``Professional Fly Tying and Tackle Making'' by George Leonard Herter. It always has been one of the most valued volumes in my library.
There was a period when I was a purist fly angler, but still I delighted in helping my uncle fill Prince Albert tobacco tins with a variety of critters: worms, grasshoppers, crickets, crawfish, lizards. He was the best bait fisherman I ever knew.
One thing about the rain, it didn't just give us an excuse for fishing, it also freshened up the streams, adding color to them, and that would put the brown trout on a feed. My uncle always knew a pool that a big brown called home, one of those stream-born beauties, its golden sides peppered with bright orange and red spots that had a blue halo around them.
I'd make sure he got to the pool first, and I would head on downstream with a book of flies bulging in my pocket.
His bait-caught trout invariably averaged bigger and heavier than my fly-hooked fish, but I'll never forget the time I hooked a really big trout in a long, narrow pool. The fish was way too large just to flop out onto the bank. It was a fighter, a reel-screamer. At the moment, it was everything I wanted in life.
When it began racing up and down the pool and I had to run along the bank to keep up, I knew I needed help. My uncle was too far away to call. That left prayer.
``Lord, as thou knowest, I have not always been thy obedient servant this summer. But let me land this trout and thou has my promise I will never do anything wrong the rest of my life.''
I landed the trout.
by CNB