Rite of Passage

davidtripp

Jun 1

The ten-year-old boy stood on the ledge of Rocky Ford, the most talked-about fishing/swimming hole of Indian Creek in rural Jackson, Missouri. With his rod & reel, he tossed an earthworm dug up from his grandparents' farm and watched it settle in front of the opening beneath a huge slab of rock in the bottom of the pool below. Immediately a perch darted out, seized the prey, and the boy pulled up his first fish. In later years, visiting grandparents, he would return repeatedly to this same spot, dreaming of one day standing there with a fly rod. Nearly sixty years later, it happened.

My buddy since second grade, Wayne White traveled with me yesterday to southeast Missouri. Accepting the offer from my cousin, whose farm backs up to Indian Creek, we drove onto his property, rigged up and descended the steep banks to the stream. For four hours, we hiked, waded, and climbed our way upstream from my cousin's farm, then to my uncle's, to Rocky Ford, and I was ecstatic to see that it still looked the same.

Rocky Ford, viewed from where I stood above

The creek looked the same, but the population was different. No sign of largemouth bass, perch, bluegill, sunfish or carp suckers. Only gar, and plenty of them. The result of all our efforts amounted to four gar.

OK, now what I am about to relay sounds like a lying fish story, but it isn't. Wayne witnessed it independently and will testify that it really happened. The photo he took above was my first gar nearly landed. He broke me off. I was using a white Clouser minnow, and he struck on one of my early casts. Bye-bye.

Four hours later, after wading, climbing and clawing our way upstream we reached Rocky Ford. We had nothing to show for our efforts except one landed gar, another that broke off, and two more that threw the hook (it's extremely difficult to embed a hook in their long hard beaks). We reached the end of my uncle's property, noting the barbed wire fence stretched across the creek. Fishing the last hole, I was startled by a huge splash on the opposite bank. An enormous, fat gar swam straight to me, then turned in front of me and hesitated in the water, chomping at something white in his beak. At first I thought it was a minnow, but then I saw the strands of white bucktail fluttering in the current. My white Clouser minnow! The fish had worked its way upstream the same distance as we! I kept my mouth shut, knowing Wayne would never believe me. But the fish then turned back downstream and drifted past him, twenty feet away, and Wayne saw it too. So there it is. No BS. And I'll never forget the moment.

Thanks for reading.

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