There
was a warm spring that used to serve as a leaching pond for the
silver mining industry a few miles from our house. I wrote before about the time my mom thought that she was going to die by driving into it. When I got older my friends and I loved to spend an
afternoon snorkeling and spearfishing some of the millions of carp
that called the place home. There were also large mouth bass but we
only shot about two of those in the whole run of several years. My
friends and I started going when I was 15 so originally we went
riding bikes carrying the spear-gun, our snorkels and lunch.
Generally there were three of us that were regulars but we would
often times bring a fourth or even fifth man along. The problem with
too many swimmers was that there was only ever the single spear-gun
and proliferation meant less gun in hand time and watching someone
else have fun is no way to spend an afternoon. There were four main
ponds with the last one being the best for our purposes. It was about
a hundred feet in diameter, three feet deep and full of lily pads.
The lily pads were the key to our success because it gave the schools
of carp someplace to hide that was not around the perimeter. The
water was always nice and the first diver would wade in and nuzzle
his face in close to the lily pads so that his eyes would be in the
shade which allowed him to see much more clearly. Then all you had to
do was wait. The schools would come back around after the disturbance
of having a new massive thing in the water had settled and the
shooter would wait until the fish were in range and then shoot. A
turn was based on a pull of the trigger not a successful kill so the
diver whose turn it was would choose his shot as wisely as possible
so as to not waste it. If a fish was speared there would be some
whooping and hollering followed by some comparative tests of
manliness because we all know the old wisdom from the sea - the
bigger the fish the bigger the man. We spent hours and hours at a
stretch taking turns, wading, shooting, trading and repeating. When
the lily pad pond was played out we would swim up the joining stream
to the next less fruitful pond there was no middle cover so all of
the fish would be up under the trees and overhanging banks which made
it harder to get to them. This would continue until we arrived at the
first pond which more often than not was full of imigrant ad
hillbilly bathers and we couldn't fish there. One day though in the
second pond we had the most unpleasant but utterly hilarious
surprise.
