The Amazing Popiel Pocket Fisherman
“My goal in life,” I crowed, “is for it to be okay if I’m reincarnated as any of the animals I encounter during this lifetime, including those I rely on for food.” I bragged to my book club about the fifteen-dollar-a-pound hamburger I served at our monthly potluck (fifteen-dollar-a-pound hamburger before Covid cut our money in half). “His name was Meatball, and I bought him before he was born. A lady out in Parks raised him for me. He was wildly expensive, but eating with a clear conscience has been worth every penny. Meatball had a wonderful—if short—life, gamboling in green pastures and eating grass as Mother Nature intended him to. He never knew antibiotics, pain, hormones, or a harsh word. He got to sleep in a clean, safe place at night and died a quick, merciful death.”
For emphasis, I showed off what I call ‘The Taj’ to my book club friends—my over-the-top chicken yard. The one with all the luxuries including safe, overhead chicken wire, warm, snug nesting boxes, heat in the winter, plenty of room to run, and toys.
But methinks I protest too much. There are darker chapters lurking in my past I am trying to make Karmic amends for.
About the only thing I didn’t like about my summer job backpacking for the Forest Circus as a young’un was the food. Oh, I started off happily enough at the start of each summer, like the rest of my crew, with dehydrated turkey tetrazzini and oatmeal with dried milk. We had to carry 20 pounds of surveying and marking equipment for work, so our camping gear was necessarily as skinny as we could possibly make it. We cut the tags off of tea bags and took the cardboard out of the toilet paper. But by the time we’d been at it for a month or so, we were hauling fresh tomatoes and cantaloupe and summer sausages out there with us for our work week. Marking the boundaries around future timber sales was back-breaking work in the rugged beauty of the back of beyond. We gloried in it, and we suffered for it. Sure, you expect your feet to blister, but your shoulders? Around your hip belt? We were busting ass at high altitude and I, like everyone else on the timber crew, was starving for real food. For protein. I bitched about it so much that my crew pitched in and bought me an Amazing Popiel Pocket Fisherman® as a gift.
The following week I ditched the summer sausage and spent the weight on a lightweight aluminum frying pan, a plastic film canister of shortening, a small jar of bait, the diminutive fishing pole, and a spatula. I was scheduled to be working by myself at Carnero Creek, and by the time I’d walked a full day to get there, my mouth was watering for fresh fish.
Although I had never before so much as wet a hook, I caught a little kokanee salmon that first night in camp with my third cast. It was only about as long as my hand, but he went for that creepy neon orange bait as I had been assured he would. He was too little to keep, obviously, but he was also slippery and extremely agitated. Like anyone would be if they had a vicious hook in their mouth like that. I tried to gently pick him up and get the hook out, but he wiggled out of my grasp and, tethered, thrashed in the dirt and rocks on the bank until I could get him again. I tried a firmer grip.
That half hour is one of the worst of my life. It certainly was the most gruesome. I tore that poor little fish apart trying to get that effing hook out of his mouth. By the time I did, I was in tears and he was way dead. It was not a quick, merciful death.
I ate every bite. All four of them. I may as well have been eating sawdust. I felt like I was going to throw up every time I swallowed and by the time I finished my meal I’d cried so much I was dehydrated. I took a long drink from the cold, clear stream and threw the rest of the neon orange bait in. The fish could have it.
By the end of that week I was gaunt and glassy-eyed. I had neither summer sausage, cheese, or even dehydrated turkey tetrazzini to fill in for all the fish I trusted I’d be eating. I viewed it as my penance. Those were the good old days when I burned calories (I just accumulate them now), and I lost fifteen pounds that week. I couldn’t spare them then. I was weak and wobbly by the time I hiked out. I think I only made it because I made sure I used all the paint (that’s one timber sale boundary that was **well **marked), and had a bit of honey left in a tube.
Earl, one of my book club buddies and an avid fisherman, sagely tells me I should have just cut the hook off. It was the first time I had ever fished, and I wouldn’t have known to do that. I might have been able to figure it out but a pair of dykes wasn’t included in the work tools I had with me. I had a logger’s tape, clinometer, boring tool, Tatum, a spray gun, and a half-gallon of paint, but Leathermans multitools weren’t so much as a twinkle in their inventor’s eyes yet. My pocket knife wasn’t even of the Swiss army variety.
That poor little fish haunts my nightmares still. I politely refused Earl’s invitation to go fishing with a shudder, as I have all other such invitations since Carnero Creek. I gave the amazing Popiel Pocket Fisherman® to one of the guys on my crew and went back to lugging summer sausage and cheese for my protein. I still don’t eat much fish, I can’t help but think of the poor, poor thing when I do. So if I go overboard paying fifteen dollars a pound for hamburger and making life cushy for my chickens, well, I have much to atone for. And if I am reincarnated as a little kokanee in Carnero Creek, I will understand I earned it and can only pray I get better than I gave.
It was a different time. A different world, really. People who have grown up with the flexibility streaming video offers—the option of paying a little more to opt out of having to watch advertisements, flexibility of viewing times, and multiple video devices in the house—won’t remember what it was like to sit through some of the painful TV that inflicted even more painful commercials on its watchers. Geezers like me remember well. There was one TV in the house I grew up in (and we thought we were rich to have it), and remote controls hadn’t been thought of yet. Via the antenna sticking up from our roof, we got a station out of Los Angeles that aired really bad horror films on Saturday afternoons. My mom and sister were fans so that’s what we watched. The movies were cheesy and campy, and the (presumably affordable) ads were awful. Clanging and garish with flashing lights and a strident voice hawking some kind of cheap plastic stuff. The Amazing Popiel Pocket Fisherman was one such irritating commercial, and in the course of one B-horror movie, you had to watch it over and over again until it was like fingernails on a blackboard. It must have worked though, that commercial is what made me think I could fish without a single clue about how.
Follow Terryl's work and give her feedback on:
| Mastodon | https://mastodon.sdf.org/@wordsbyterryl |
| mailto:moonlitpress@proton.me | |
| more | https://blog.moonlitpress.org/index |
Gratitude list:
| Graphic design by AJ Brown | https://mastodon.sdf.org/@mral |
Terryl is grateful most of all to that poor little fish out at Carnero Creek. I owe him more amends than I can make in a human lifetime. He set me on a lifetime path of seeking cruelty-free, sustainable food.
Terryl is always grateful to the Life in Pieces writing circle, who read an early draft of this, and of course, to AL, without whom nobody but me would ever read this stuff.
AL and Terryl are both very grateful, always, to the people who read our work. You are what makes it worthwhile.
Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.
Terryl is the author of:The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 : 978-0-9894698-5-2
AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.
A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.
Together, we are MoonLit Press.