Sunday, August 16, 2015

The Tiniest Water

Home, they say, is where you hang your hat.  If I may be so bold, it is also where you pop your bug, swing your fur, or drift your nymph.  My home, at least since the end of the Civil War, has been a patch of briar, prickly pear, and scrub oak in the north central Texas plains close to Loving, Texas.  Seems the great-great-great-great-great grandfather (from the Guinn faction of the fam)  picked gray instead of blue,  survived Shiloh with one leg intact, and was rewarded for a losing effort (participation ribbon?) with a quarter section of hard scrabble (Thanks, Professor Graves) farm land on Flint Creek, near the site of the old Warren Wagon Train Massacre in Young County, Texas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Wagon_Train_raid

It was here that Great Grandpa Samuel David Stegall (also a Southerner, and the descendant of slaveowners in Tennessee) retreated near the turn of the last century,  married Emma Guinn, raised a family, grew some crops, wrote Methodist hymns using shaped notes, brought in the first oil well in Young County (which still provides $64 a quarter to the family fortune) and lived 'til he died.   The current house, built in 1905, has been re-imagined through the past 110 years, remains a family gathering spot, and is, in fact, what I consider "home".  I've never lived there, but have pored over her hills and creeks and dunes and gullies, man and boy, for my whole life.  I plan to retire here, and eventually, be buried in the cemetery in Loving.

On this patch of land, I harvested my first dove, quail, and deer.  I have avoided snakebites by inches.  I have fought fires, dodged floods, gotten stuck, and have alternately frozen and broiled under the extremes of North Texas seasons.  I and my multitude of dogs have been squirted by skunks, stung by scorpions, and blundered in to beehives and wasp nests.  I have celebrated holidays and birthdays and Independence Days.  My dear, dear friend died here. I courted my wife here, and eventually married off our

daughter here.   All of our registered dogs, since I was a boy, are "Flint Creek So and So", as in Casey, Gonzo, Kelly, Orvis, Nick,  Jake, Disney, Libby, New Libby, and on down the line to Bentley, our current mutt-in-charge.  This is home, if anywhere is.

There is a body of water at my home, located on a ridge high on our property, part of the Flint Creek/Salt Fork  drainage.  My Uncle Allen paid $800  to have her dug, back in the Seventies.  She was originally 18 feet deep, and occupied a third of an acre. In spite of horrible droughts, I've never seen her go dry.  Gerald put a hundred channel cat fry in back in the eighties, and I have put a few bass from Lake Graham and PK into her over the years.  John, who always sat under the pole to shoot doves, once witnessed a giant whiskered maw rise from her depths to ingest a floating decapitated dove head one hot September day and returned with a rod, a bobber, and a hook baited with worms from the cow pasture.  He was rewarded with a six pound channel cat. That fish remains, to my knowledge, the record for this body of water.   When Whitney was a toddler, I took her up to the tank in the pickup, and she and I caught dozens of stunted sunfish.  She baptized them with her trusty water gun, called them "Glitterfish", and we set them free.

So, anyway, I rode up to the tank this morning, carrying a pink ribbon festooned  TFO four weight fly rod and a box with just a few bugs picked for this water.  When I got to the tank, I saw that there was no tippet on the line, just a three foot butt section of thirty pound line.  Undeterred, I knotted on a popper, and flung it around for a while.  One stunted sunfish couldn't resist it, and came to hand.  Nobody else seemed to be interested.

If I had to pick one fly, anywhere, for any species, it would be an olive weighted woolly bugger.  Since I just happened to have one, I clinched it on, and heaved it out past the weed line, just in the shade of a mesquite tree.   On the first cast, a channel cat of two, maybe three pounds, found my offering irresistible, inhaled the little nymph, and gave me a right good tussle for the next two minutes or so.   I took a hasty cell-phone pic, and let Mr. Catfish return to his muddy, weedy, home.







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