Of Woods and Waters: A Kentucky Outdoors Reader

Fish Story

Fish Story J I M WAYNE MILLER By February we were growing restless. Evenings we sorted through our tackle boxes, making everything neat, untangling snarls of leaders, hooks, and swivels, sharpening knives. Our boat sat on its trailer in the garage. We polished brass, put in a cockpit light, tightened cleats, coiled anchor lines, ran the motor in a barrel until it purred. But the lake held low and muddy, full of stumps and rocky ridgetops jutting from the chop like the backs of dinosaurs. A week of rain brought the creeks down muddy. Cold wind drove the water, slopping it against red-clay banks, stirring it to a soupy froth of rising falling rocking driftwood rafts. On a Saturday in March when road signs droned in wind we took a whole trunk full of kites and fishing rods and drove to the big field beside the school. I snapped a flopping shark-faced kite onto a spinning rod and let it run, shaking its head, 332 up into the currents of high blue sky. Fred flew a red-eyed dragon, Jimmy a bat. We braced the butts of our rods against our stomachs, we pumped, we reeled. I tried the stiff salt-water rod and reel and burned my thumb as the shark raced off with all my monofilament. We gave the kites their heads, then fought them down, adjusting drags, comforting burnt thumbs with a kiss. The kites took off toward distant trees, made long, bull-necked runs at far-away power lines, darted, twisted, rolled, swooped while we ran backwards reeling up slack line. More than once they tangled our lines high overhead. A low-test line I used for trout in Trammel Creek popped like a pistol shot, then fell toward me as the shark lunged free. We waved to him and wished him luck.—That night blue sky kept running underneath my eyelids, and the shark-faced kite with jagged teeth was climbing still, trailing a length of line. I waved again. From The Brier Poems (1997) JIM WAYNE MILLER 333 ...