LL at Virtual Mirage talks about fishing
among other things. Started me pondering on how my parents fed the family.
After being discharged after WWII with a
wife and son to provide for, my father scrambled to make a living. At various
times he was a roofer, logger, operated a gold dredge, and was a ranch hand.
Then he caught on with the Denver &Rio Grande railroad.
The one constant
was poaching, mainly deer. As a wee lad I called deer “bang, bang cows”. An
early memory is waking up, at night, in the back seat of an old Ford as a deer
carcass landed between the seats and my father and Uncle Ed hustling down a
dirt road, lights out.
We moved often while my father worked for
the D&RG. The line kept laying off people and my father was usually at the
bottom of the senority list. He was the
Section Foreman in Steamboat Springs, CO when he finally had enough.
My parents
were able to buy a 35 acre “ranch”. The
place couldn’t provide enough income to be self sustaining so my parents always
had “town jobs” and guided hunters. As I matured a lot of the ranching part
became my responsibility which leads to the fishing part.
In the screenshot below the area in red
was the old place.
There was a house and two barns. Nearly three miles of the
Yampa River formed the West boundary and our side of the river was seldom
fished. My parents didn’t mind, but it took work to access, and most people
just fished off the road on the West side.
In less than an hour I could catch enough
trout for supper. The fishing I enjoyed but the object was supper. We ate a lot
of trout. We didn’t bother with weight but most fish were 12-14”. The biggest
one I caught went about 18”.
The river held grayling but we didn’t care for
them. Plus, grayling were much more work. Their preferred food is a type of
hellgrammite larvae.
You needed to wade in the river and start turning over rocks to find the
larve. I used a simple spinner, what we called a Colorado spinner, with a worm.
About a foot above the lure I would put a couple of lead weights. Cast upstream
and let the weights bounce off the bottom would usually result in a fish. I
only kept “eating size”.
We would trim the heads and tails off the
fish so they would fit into a baking pan.
Filled with water, we would freeze
them then wrap the ice block with butcher paper. A Christmas morning ritual was
trout for breakfast.
The place had been a sawmill location and
had a log holding pond that washed out. None of the subsequent owners,
including us, ever fixed the dam. The area was dense with willows, a favorite
deer staple, and we didn’t have far to go for fresh deer meat.
The ski boom and trust funders hit
Steamboat and my parents starting selling real estate. Damn soon were upper
middle class. I was happy for them but it happened long after I left, three
days after graduating high school.
Would we have survived as a family
without subsistence hunting and fishing? Probably, but we would have eaten a
hell of a lot less protein. Lots of folks I knew then lived on beans, cornmeal,
and flour.
I don’t fish much anymore. Too lazy I
guess and fish are not my first food choice.
