T.E. Griggs
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Water quenches my thirst for fun

1/31/2015

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Picture
A Wisconsin angler casts in Madison's Lake Mendota, near University of Wisconsin.

In the last line of the book "A River Runs Through It," as in the last line of the movie, Norman Maclean says, "I am haunted by waters."

I am practically haunted by that line. Thank you for giving us that personal observation, Norman. I couldn't have said it better.

As an angler, I could come up with something silly, such as: Water casts a spell over me. As a swimmer, I could come up something stupid, like: A wonderful feeling washes over me when water and I are as one. Egad, that's bad! Yet, Norman Maclean came up with: "I am haunted by waters." It fits me perfectly.

I grew up enjoying the world of water. I swam like a fish, and I fished for fish.  Still today, I am happiest when I'm on the water or in the water or along the water.

Many kinds of waters exist on our planet; we have salt water and fresh water and brackish water; we have oceans and lakes and streams. We have different kinds of streams – brooks, creeks and rivers, for example. We also have ponds, pocosins, bogs, swamps and bayous. And we have big water and small water, and I guess we have in-between water, but I've never heard anyone ever talk about in-between waters. I especially love small water.

Some of my most memorable fishing experiences have come in small water – little brooks and tiny creeks, which are beautiful and alluring, and they're also intimate. Sometimes they're full of surprises; a little creek can yield up to you a big, beautiful, colorful, shiny, smooth, wet, jumping and arching, flipping and flopping, utterly fantastic, wild trout. The battle with the trout is always exciting, but the holistic beauty of the water, the fish, the cut of the creek through the forest or the meadow or the pasture, and the special intimacy of it all is wondrous and unforgettable.

My favorite small water is a tiny creek in the San Bernardino National Forest, in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California. It's pools contain colorful wild trout, and it's edges and the surrounding forests – that would be the pine forest of the higher elevations and the elfin forest of the high chaparral, which exists at about 4,000 feet elevation and lower – are home to many southern Pacific western rattlesnakes and a lot of mule deer, black bears, mountain quail, bobcats and many more species of inhabitants, including a few mountain lions.

I discovered the wonder of my favorite creek back in the late 1980s, when I was a college student at Cal State, San Bernardino. I decided to study along the creek one day, surrounded by the serenity and solitude of the forest. I was new to the creek, and I had no idea it held trout.

Crystal-clear creek water flowed over smooth, granite rocks and into a beautiful pool next to me before it continued flowing down the north side of the mountain range, across more rocks, over stretches of rippling shallows, and through many more clear, quiet, beautiful pools. As I read my textbook, my eyes became distracted by some movement in the water. I looked up and saw nothing out of the ordinary, but I let my eyes gaze into the water, to take in everything under the water's surface. Then I saw it – a golden-colored rainbow trout. Instead of silvery, it was rather golden. Instead of a pinkish line down each side, the color along each lateral line was more reddish, and the fish had red on the gills and throat, like a cutthroat trout. But it wasn't a cutthroat, and it wasn't a California golden trout. Was it a hybrid? Was it a native? Was it indigenous just to this creek and nearby creeks? I didn't care. I was surprised the little creek was home to any fish at all. I put down my book, and kept gazing into the clear pool. I spotted a few more trout and decided to return the next day with my fly rod.

The first thing I noticed the following day was the congestion of trees. I could not cast my line because of all the pines, willows and mountain alders. So, I would need to sneak up to the hole, swing my line between tree branches, and twitch my dry fly across the surface of the water. It's one of several ways that we fly fishers utilize a simple technique called dapping.

As soon as my fly hit the water and twitched a few times, a gorgeous trout darted up to the water's surface and grabbed that fishin' fly. One jump, one flip, and that golden rainbow was gone. However, I had gotten a hit on my very first cast, and from that moment on, the little creek was my favorite place to be.

I almost checked out of life while fishing along that creek – twice. The first time, I was alone at a place where the creek is squeezed between two rock walls. The rocks walls might be better described as two tall, rocky, craggy, granite cliffs. I had fished two beautiful pools just above that spot. Now I could neither walk along the creek, nor wade the creek, because it dropped steeply and dramatically in elevation and amongst gigantic boulders, all squeezed between those tall rock walls. I had to either turn back and go around on higher ground, or climb out of the little creek canyon by rock-climbing straight up. Being the stupid and impatient person I am, I decided to climb straight up. All was going well, when I pulled myself up to a narrow, horizontal crevice in the granite, and there in front of my face was a southern Pacific western rattler, coiled up, rattling and ready to strike. I was surprised and a might-bit scared; I don't know why that snake, which was only two feet in front of my eyeballs, did not strike me in the face and sink its fangs into my big schnozzola. Before it could, I fell back and down a few feet onto a granite-boulder outcropping that saved my life.

The second time I almost checked out of life on the creek, I was alone and working my way up the middle of the creek, when I slipped on a big, smooth, wet, slippery rock. I fell backward, onto my back, and cracked my head on another big rock. I suddenly went woozy and started losing consciousness. I remember looking up at pine boughs, alder branches and blue sky, all of which began to blur together, and then my vision started turning black. The cold creek water must have brought me back, though, saving me. After a minute or so, I finally got myself up on my feet and standing, although rather wobbly. I was, of course, soaking wet; the back of my noggin was bleeding; and I had a whopper of a headache.

I have lived through other mishaps in other places and have harvested the bounties in many waters around the world. I have fished above the Arctic Circle in Norway, catching colorful char; dug for clams in Japan; speared Puerto Rican langoustes in the clear waters off the beaches of the Isla de Vieques; and I've caught largemouth and smallmouth basses in freshwaters across the United States, and I've pulled calico and black basses out of our oceans.

Canoes, rowboats, bass boats, ski boats and pontoon boats have gotten me around on freshwater lakes and steams, and the United States Navy has hauled me around oceans and seas aboard various configurations of amphibious assault ships. (You squids and jarheads will know what I'm talking about when I say I've sailed aboard an LHA, an LPH, an LST and an LPD.)

Jogging along water is also a favorite pastime of mine. My absolute favorite run is along the Pacific Ocean beach, tide pools and bluffs of the Point Fermin area of San Pedro, Calif. A close second is along the Atlantic Ocean on Onslow Beach at Camp Lejeune, N.C. And when my son was in the hospital for a year in Madison, Wis., a good stress reliever for me was always a long jog along Lake Mendota.

I don't want to water down this blog too much, so I'll end this and get out of your hair. I believe I'll jog out to Horner Park and take a walk around the lake and see if I can see any wintertime life stirring in the water and ice on this last day of January. Oh, how I'm looking forward to springtime and a good fish fry.
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Airplanes, baseball cards and Elvis

1/24/2015

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All my old stuff is gone.

Many years ago, when I was deployed overseas as a young jarhead, my parents moved into a new house, but my childhood possessions – my old comic books and model airplanes and rock 'n' roll records, for example – did not make the move with them.

That's my stuff we're talking about. My stuff was gone.

I know what you might be thinking: What would a 20-something United States Marine Corps sergeant want with comic books and model airplanes, right? And why would I need all those old, worn, scratchy records – half of which were by that misguided Presley dude, who stopped making killer rock 'n' roll and started wasting his time in movies?

Well, think about this: Elvis Presley's first recording – a single 78 rpm record he recorded at age 18 on July 18, 1953, in Memphis, for his mother – sold at auction earlier this month for $240,000, plus a $60,000 auction fee.

That 1953 acetate saucer, featuring "My Happiness" on one side, with "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" on the flip side, sold for a whopping $300,000!

Of course, none of my old 45 rpm Elvis records would be worth 300 grand. I doubt that any one of them could attract 300 cents, but I wouldn't want to sell any of my Elvis 45s, anyway. I just wish I still had them – to look at, to hold, to reminisce with. Heck, I'd jump into eBay and bid on an old record player, so I could play them.

I also could play my copies of "Great Balls of Fire," by Jerry Lee Lewis; "Get a Job," by the Silhouettes; and "Johnny Be Good," by Chuck Berry, to name just a few. But, alas, they are all gone – no longer my cherished, beloved, musical property. My folks thought better of my jazz LPs, though, and saved them for me.

For those of you younger than I, which probably includes most of you, LP is what we used to call a 33⅓ rpm long-playing record. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for rescuing Stan Getz, J.J. Johnson, Horace Silver, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Shorty Rogers, Chet Baker and all my other jazz greats from being carted off to the Salvation Army and Goodwill stores. I will listen to them until the end of my time, thanks to your wise and thoughtful decision.

The folks came through on the baseball front, too. They kept my revered Stan Musial-model Rawlings Trapeze baseball glove and my treasured baseball-card collection. They even saved the 34-inch H&B Richie Ashburn baseball bat that I got from a boyhood buddy in return for a 33-inch Mickey Mantle Louisville Slugger.

Mom and Dad's efforts, however, were practically for naught, because of me. I really hate to write about this, because I've tried pretty hard to forget it, but here it goes. I sold my baseball cards. Yikes! It's out there. I have revealed my foolishness. I've told you about one of my life's most stupid mistakes. I thought I was hard up for money, so I sold my baseball cards. It didn't matter that I had a nice savings account and a couple of certificates of deposit and that I easily could have gotten a loan from the bank. Oh, no. I sold my baseball cards that dated from the 1950s and '60s, even a few from the late '40s. I had not only bubblegum baseball cards, but also baseball cards from chewing tobacco and breakfast cereal. (No, I did not chew the chaw; a family friend gave me those old Red Man chewing-tobacco cards.) I sure do wish I still had my baseball cards.

My genuine Stan Musial, autograph model, Rawlings Trapeze fielder's mitt is gone too – because of a different kind of stupid. You see, I played baseball when I was stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and after practice one day, I placed my beloved glove on top of my car as I took off my cleats. Then I threw the cleats into the car, hopped into the driver's seat and drove away. I do not know how long or how far that wonderful glove stayed on top of the car as I drove home, but I never saw it again. To this day, it kills me. At the same time, it comforts me, because it tells me that my forgetfulness these days is not a sign of the onset of dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Nope, I've been forgetting stuff all my life!

I guess I have no need at my age for model airplanes, but I do wish my parents would have saved them or some of them. Along with plastic model airplanes, I also built some model cars that would be very cool to display now.

Many of my planes hung from my bedroom ceiling. That was very cool back then. I remember waking up one night, just in time to see my World War II German Heinkel He-111 bomber, directly above me, falling down directly at my face. I jerked my head to the left, and the plane crashed onto my pillow. That was crazy-weird, I'm telling you – another odd example of an incident that seemed to border on extrasensory perception. But don't you have to be kind of smart to experience ESP? Well, I know I'm not real smart, and I'm surely not insightful enough to explain how I awoke in the middle of the night at the exact moment a scale-model enemy aircraft was set to dive-bomb my ugly mug. Crazy-weird, indeed.

I wonder what happened to that Heinkel bomber. Maybe it went to some disadvantaged youth or one of the boys at that orphanage that used to be located nearby, between Shiloh and Belleville, Ill. And maybe the guy's grandson owns it now, and it's hanging from the grandson's bedroom ceiling. Nah, probably not, but that would be cool, wouldn't it?

I also wonder where my comic books are­ – or where they met their demise. Do you realize how much some of the old comic books are worth? I've seen some very valuable issues featured on television's "American Pickers" and "Pawn Stars." Some of those thin, little books are pulling in pretty big bucks. Doesn't matter to me; I have no comic books now. I hope some deserving kid got mine and enjoyed them until they fell apart.

It's Saturday morning, and it would be nice to have some Elvis music in the background, as I write. However, as you know, I have no record player, and my 45s are gone. I could order a CD of Elvis Presley's early hits, but that would take a few days to get here. How about downloading iTunes? I don't know. My options just can't compare to holding and playing those original 45 rpm records, most of which came in hard-cover sleeves with color photos on the front. They were classic.

Maybe I'll just bring up YouTube and click on Elvis' greatest (early) hits, and I'll write along with the sweet sounds of The King. Sure, that's it. Thankya. Thankya vury much.
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    T.E. Griggs is a writer, editor and photographer and a retired U.S. Marine.

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