“Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.” - Sam Keen

“A man says a lot of things in summer he doesn’t mean in winter.” - Patricia Biggs

July

By the time July rolls around I’ve dropped the hoe. I stuck with it as much as I could stand, but by this time of year, it’s a completely useless tool as far as I’m concerned. Some years, dryer years, I hang tough. Lately hanging tough is a dead concept for sure.

I figure the guy who invented the term “the law of diminishing returns” once gazed at a very lengthy row of weed imperiled corn, on a sweltering July afternoon, hoe in hand, and said to himself, “There ought to be a law against this @#$%.”

In the event that you’ve never spent the better part of a July day hand picking corn, let me assure you that it’s about as close to the water cooler in hell as you can get.

I don’t begrudge weeds like I used to. Here lately I’ve taken to referring to weeds as potential equivalent to fertilizer. I know that’s right stupid, but when you can’t kill “em, well you get the picture.

The corn has been stood up at least three times now. Maybe the weeds will help some. I’m counting on it. Horizontal corn is butt ugly. None-the-less, some small silver queen stood tall and ripe. It’s a glorious thing ripe silver queen.

Rampant perspiration equity spent for free groceries expires easily in July. The okra finally decided to cooperate. Odd how okra beats a mean weed to the sun. If you don’t love a mess of fried okra you ain’t from around here.

The bush beans are hanging around longer than expected. Finding beans among the weeds is always exciting. Finding snakes hiding in the beans is world cup level entertainment. How does a copperhead know that small tasty critters like a tender bush bean?

July opens an illegal squirrel season in the tomato patch. Squirrels filled with lead surely provide some important nutrient the Better Boys and Rutgers crave. Maybe it’s the calcium and decaying hair that make Rutgers so tart.

I’d swap a hoe for a five weight fly rod in a heartbeat in July. Head to the mountains and forget free groceries if I could. Trout beckon in July. A wetter than normal July makes it hard to quit a decent garden. Weeds can be ignored, trout can be dreamed of. Cold mountain plunge pools can almost be overlooked.

August and Big Lips

There was and maybe still is, for the lack of a better description, a sink-hole pond in Hixson, hidden now, encased quietly, behind a nasty looking strip of commerce, that was once a lazy August training ground near an old railroad overpass. Somehow this pond was apparently connected underground to the nearby 90 degree turn of North Chickamauga Creek.

In the days when Dragging Canoe moved about this stretch of creek, I imagined the spot to have once been a camp, or maybe a swimming hole for the fierce old warrior. We know of this connection between the creek and the pond, when the creek flooded, the pond rose to the same height. It was a tree choked pond with only one fishable access, maybe only twenty feet wide. The balance of the pond was not fishable from the bank.

It was this small patch of dirt where our carp fishing training sessions commenced on hot and muggy August mornings. In these days, August was fraught with boredom and boredom pushed us further into the wilds of old Hixson. Those were the days when an adventurous explorer could peddle a bike down Hixson Pike at an early hour, and if you were lucky, never see more than a few old truck passing either way. The piscatorial quarry in this body of still and mysterious pothole was anything that had gills.

Without fail we were never in time to claim the center stage spot in the only treeless patch of water. No matter how early we peddled, we were always amazed to find our best spot already claimed by the same old man comfortably encamped on what he called his “fishing cushion.” His seat had obviously been snatched out of some nearby roadside dump many years before, but it looked significantly more comfortable than sitting in the mud.

He mounted his throne like some expert sultan. From this well worn perch, he tolerated the large majority of our questions as we ogled his stringer of various species of fish that fell to his three rods resting in the Y shaped forks of nearby branches now jammed in the mud.

The old man was a true gentleman, not only tolerating our deluge of stupid questions, but inviting us to join him. “Maybe I can teach you young boys some secret tricks.”

The secret? His bait was the secret of carp capture.

The secret recipe is as follows:

Light bread (fresh, eat the crust)

Crumbled frosted flakes

Sugar and vanilla extract (not the drinking kind)

Place corn flakes, sugar and vanilla in each piece of light bread and massage slowly into a semi-hard ball and squeeze it securely on a hook small enough to hide the hook entirely.

Hiding the hook is most important. Apparently the most discerning of the carp don’t care for the taste, or smell, of cold steel. If you’ve ever observed a carp closely in the lips you’ll understand how a smaller hook, well hidden, is necessary for the occasional smaller carp to swallow.

Why carp? Boredom factors into the equation easily. Humidity figures in dramatically. Fishing from a shady spot on a bank is important in the terrible heat of August, the less you move the less chance you get overwhelmed by dehydration. Carp don’t demand a lot of movement.

Why carp? Mostly it’s the furious battle and the high density of available targets. Plus they live and thrive in just about everywhere you can drown a bait, fly, or white bread dough ball loaded with sugar and vanilla.

Carp are prolific and don’t appear to be all that impacted by pollution or predators, and they like to eat.

McClane’s New Standard Fishing Encyclopedia and International Fishing Guide tells us the following: “Female carp are prolific, 150,000 eggs per pound of body weight is the average; a fish of 20 pounds may drop 2 million eggs. But the eggs eye rapidly, and hatch within 4 to 8 days, at which time the quarter inch fry bear a large pearl shaped yolk sack. The fry sink to the bottom grasping it, or grasping plant stems with an adhesive organ on the way down. On the second day they struggle to the surface to gulp air for their gas bladders. Once this had been done, they swim actively, absorbing the yolk sac first, then feeding on algae and plankton. Young carp grow rapidly, under exceptional conditions gaining 3 pounds per year. Long lived (20-25 years in the wild and 47 years in captivity) tolerant of high temperatures (to 90 degrees F, for a 24-hour period) yet equally tolerant of low temperatures to the point of withstanding temporary freezing, able to utilize atmospheric oxygen and the last to expire in a drying pond, and above all smart, this shrewd Oriental remains an enigma to most anglers. The carp has most attribute except good relations.”

Unfortunately we never learned much of anything about the fine art of cooking carp cakes from our old mentor. We just gave him every trophy we hauled in. I guess a gear straining fight with a 15 pound carp was enough at our age. At the time, fighting a swimming F-150 on ten pound test and a six foot long piece of solid fiberglass was food enough for young trophy hunters.

That was enough to bring us back to a strange small pond most mornings in August. I can’t remember why we abandoned that fishing hole when we did. Maybe it was flat tires, or the advent of August football practice, or a shattered rod, or maybe it was the lure of easy money in some nearby farmer’s hay field.

One More Country Store Story

Reader response was genuinely positive to a couple of recent renderings about country stores. I recently ran across a classic, compliments of Ray Lum. Ray Lum was Mississippi mule trader and he told this story to William Ferris back in the 70’s when Ferris was the Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Mr. Ferris published this story of Ray’s in his book titled; “You Live and Learn, and Then You Die and Forget it All.”

“I was trading in Mayersville, and I was riding one mule and leading eight or ten mules and horses. I pulled into Mayersville ‘cause I had to stop at the store there and get some sardines and crackers. This old man named Meat Myers was running the store, and up comes an organ- grinder. He had his organ grinding and making music, and his little old monkey was dancing around. Old man Myers had a great big bulldog that was sitting down looking at the little monkey with his head between his paws. The organ-grinder kept a grinding.

Old Man Meat didn’t give the organ-grinder anything. He didn’t give him any nickels or dimes. He didn’t like that monkey. The little monkey kept a dancing and all. When the monkey got over close to that bulldog, Mr. Myers says, “You better not let your monkey get close to that dog. That dog will kill him!”

“This monkey can whoop that dog.”

“What?”

“Yes. This monkey can whoop that dog.”

Oh, the fat was in the fire.

“Would you bet on it?”

The organ-grinder run his hand in his pocket, pulled out a fifty dollar bill and handed me the fifty dollars. Well, Mr. Myers like to tore his pocket off getting his fifty out. When he handed it over, I said, “Your money’s turned to water, Mr. Myers.”

Talking to the man that had that bulldog, “Your money’s turned to water.”

I knew better. I’d had a monkey. They got ready, and the organ-grinder said, “Get your dog ready.” Mr.Myers said, “He’s ready.”

He had that big old bulldog back there, and the little old monkey was jumping around. “Cheechee Cheechee,” the organ-grinder asked Mr. Myers, he says, “You wouldn’t mind him having that little pencil, would you, something to kind of protect himself?”

“No, you can give him a cord of wood if you want to.”

The organ-grinder gave the money the little pencil. “All right, he’s ready.”

“Turn him loose.”

The old bulldog surged at the monkey, and the monkey just hopped right up on his back and started jogging him in the @$$ with that pencil. Kept shoving that pencil in his backend. Well, that bulldog knocked two slats off the fence, run right under the house, and the little monkey jumped up on the porch. Here the monkey, come back, “Cheechee Cheechee.”

The organ-grinder had done that before and was smart. He says, “Ah, maybe the bulldog didn’t have a good chance. You want to give him another try?”

Old Man Meat says, “Give him the money Ray.”

He wasn’t going to argue about it. He done seen enough. That settled that deal.

I had a little old monkey once. He’d go up in a tree, take a crap in his hand and throw it at you. I’d have a devil of a time trying to get him down.

I swapped the son-of-a-gun for a bulldog and swapped the bulldog for a horse. You just have one monkey in life, You don’t ever want the second one.”

September

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I once met old Meat Myers. Not sure it was exactly him, but he sure sounds familiar from some old country store where I once bought some sardines and crackers, and maybe pitched a few horseshoes.

I don’t much care for August, never did. Maybe it was August football practice that did it, or picking up bailed hay and hot barns. Glad to see it go. Thank goodness for dove season and squirrel season and such, even if it still feels like August. Maybe it’s ‘El Nino’ on steroids, who knows?

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