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In my family, there was no clear line between fly fishing and moonshinin'. My daddy, the local bootlegger, taught my brother and I how to fly fish, Baptist style. This made fly casting very difficult, because, as everyone knows, Baptists have no rhythm. This meant that our fly casts would only travel about 10 feet in front of us. But we persevered, mostly because Mamma was a Presbyterian and she had taught us from an early age that everything was predestined. We figured that it was our lot to be sorry fly fishermen.
Saul, my brother, was the worst of all. He practiced shadow casting. He would stand in the moon light and cast to his own shadow. Sometimes, he managed to catch himself in the trousers with a #4 Wooly Bugger and he would run in circles like a dog chasing his tail. Later, when Saul developed an affinity for relationships with folks of his own sex and didn't care for women, I attributed it to being wooly-buggered in the moonlight.
We grew up in the great depression known as Odessa, Texas. It was tough fly fishing in oil slicks in the desert, but we worked hard at it. We were tough and we knew it. One day I hooked a roughneck in the ear. I'm proud to say that, although he beat me to a pulp, I kept my rod held high, up out of the cattle tank he tossed me in.
I fell in love with Chessie - a Methodist. Daddy used to say the only difference between Methodists and Baptists is that Methodists never got completely clean. How do you take a bath if you only let your hair get sprinkled? Anyway, Chessie had a brother who liked to lay around nekkid with bar girls (naked is when you don't have clothes on. Nekkid is when you're up to somethin').
So one day Chessie's brother goes fishing with Saul and me. First, he ticks us all off 'cause he brings nuttin' but Pabst with him. Then he has the nerve to bring a bag of coffee beans to fish with. Said something about fishin' for yuppies. I told him: “Maybe guppies.” He said "No, Yuppies!"
Saul and I wandered off fishin' and came back to discover, happily, that Chessie's brother had drunk all the Pabst. But while we was gone, Chessie’s brother had set down on the tailgate of the truck and wrote up this new language. We told him he was nuts. The language was all in weird sentences with parenthesis and stuff like that. We took him home and said good-bye.
Three years later, Chessie Gates and I were married. Her brother, Bill, invented some kind of window or something and now lives in a house big enough to put a shopping mall in, up there in Washington state somewhere. Saul finally moved out to Colorado and caught his first trout. It so made him mad that the darn thing wasn't covered in oil that he broke his rod, moved to California and started a chapter of PETA. Me - I'm still in Odessa. Going fishing in the mornin'. I hear there's been a blow down at the refinery. Maybe I can get in on some fresh oil fishin'. Doug Gilmore ©2008  About the Author...Doug Gilmore of Adaire, GA, was instrumental in the founding of GOTC gatherings and their support of Casting for Recovery. Besides fly fishing, Doug enjoys bird hunting, woodworking and fine scotch
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