Well ladies and gentlemen, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

 

There comes a time in all of our lives where it becomes necessary to cut bait and get out of Dodge.

 

I honestly don’t think I utter those words a whole lot or cleave to the premise though.  I’m more of a “finish what you started’ type of guy.  The best time I normally employ for cutting bait is at the preliminary stages where I’m deciding whether I want to bait something.

 

Add to that, it’s pretty hard for me to get out of Dodge if I don’t even get into it.

 

None the less, the mantra of cutting bait has a poignant application to the hyperbolic line of bull I’m conveying today, so I’m going to leave it in there for the sake of posterity, prosperity, parity, and probate.

 

Before we get in deep, let’s do a little physical exercise to get the blood pumping.  Don’t worry, it will be easy.

 

All I need you to do is hold your arms out.  Hold them at a certain width apart.

 

Now widen that width.

 

A little wider now.

 

Now extend your arms away from each other to where the distance between your hands is at a maximum.

 

Got it?

 

Good.

 

Make note of that width.  You can put your arms down now.

 

The last time I caught a fish, it was in the summer of 1987 out of Lake Buchanan here in Texas.  The width between your hands that you just made note of is a pretty accurate representation of how far I was from the bank  when I reeled in what I would guesstimate to be about a 6″ Perch.

 

For what it’s worth, there’s a professional fisherman named Randy Tharp.  I’m pretty sure it’s because of this particular angler that the website you’re reading now is not named www.randytharp.com.

 

For all I know, he’s ticked off that he couldn’t name his site www.tharpster.org.

 

None the less, angler and blogger continue to co-exist on this internet while sharing the same name and generally staying out of each other’s way.

 

So if you slide enough beads from one side of the abacus to the other, you’ll come to the conclusion that it’s been over 31 years since I went fishing.  I just never really incorporated the practice into my adult life.  I don’t eat fish, so it would seem that the only real (or reel, take your pick) goal behind me fishing would be to play catch and release, followed up by telling outlandish stories about the size of the bass I pulled out of the crick last weekend.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t need to go fishing in order to come up with whoppers to dispense.

 

I have a website for that.

 

Professional Bass Fisherman Randy Tharp does too.

 

This last weekend, I was presented with a direct reminder of a fishing story from my youth.  Said reminder triggered another fishing memory which may or not have been remembered by the deliverer of the initial direct reminder.  As such, I shall endeavor to provide a direct reminder of a rarely accessed fishing memory to the deliverer of the direct reminder about a fishing memory which gets recalled whenever cheese flavored puffs are either in the vicinity or a topic of discussion.

 

Now if you’ll excuse me a moment, I need to go back and read that paragraph to make sure I have all of my parts of speech correct.  Stand by.

 

Okay, I’m back.  Everything looks to be in good order now.  Sure it makes sense to me now, but sometime down the road I’m going to read this piece again and wonder what in tarnation I was babbling on about.  With that in mind, I’m going to make it a little easier for you the reader and my future self to understand this approach.

 

Going forward, anytime I mention ‘Dad’, I’m referring to the aforementioned ‘deliverer of a direct reminder’.

 

Did I mention that I don’t eat fish?  Yeah, I don’t eat Cheetos or other cheese flavored puffs either.

 

I used to like them a lot.  At some point in my youth, my belligerent pallet decided to expand its territory by removing dusted puffs from the acceptable substances side of my intake list.

 

Prior to that particular takeover, I had no qualms with plunging my hand into a bag of those day-glow orange goodies and shoving them into my pie hole.  Side note – at the time, I didn’t like pie either, so I guess it was more of a Cheetos hole.

 

We didn’t always have Cheetos in the house.  In fact, the only time we did have them, it was when we packed up in the old olive green (it was the early 70’s after all) Ford truck or one of the family sedans and went fishing out at Alcova Lake.

 

Just to provide a geographical reference from the memory of an impatient 5 year old, Alcova Lake is about a 17 hour drive southwest from Casper, Wyoming.

 

As with all lakes and water based recreational facilities, there was a gas station near where would-be trout assassins could stop for gas, bait, beverages, snacks, snuff, and whatever else could be successfully merchandized at a lakeside gas station.  It was there that the Tharp family (not that of Professional Bass Fisherman Randy Tharp) would restock our Cheeto reserves.

 

At this point ladies and gentlemen, I should warn you that all I have for this particular part of the story is a couple of puzzle pieces.  It’s been a long time since I’ve heard anything beyond a passing reference, so I don’t have the full story.  In the grand scheme of things, it would seem that I baited a hook with a Cheeto once in hopes of reeling in something impressive enough to get me ownership rights to the www.randytharp.com domain.

 

For all I know, that may have been the point where I swore off Cheetos.

 

None the less, I receive a direct reminder of that event every time I announce that I don’t eat or like Cheetos.

 

Amusing as that story could have been with additional details (that I probably could have just made up), there is another memory from those trips out to Alcova which is more vivid, more lucid, and generally more clear.

 

In the more formative years of the lives of my little brother and me, it seems like we were packing up in that puke green Ford truck just about every weekend and making that dreaded 22 hour drive out to Alcove Lake in hopes of catching something.  The first handful of trips were pretty unsuccessful where the fishing was concerned.  Certainly our Cheeto intake was hitting the payload, but there were no illusions amongst our little clan that we didn’t have to drive 28 hours out of town to pick up a bag of dusted cheese puffs.

 

In that time, it seemed that Dad was getting pretty obsessed with pulling some sort of living thing out of that lake so that he could gut it, batter it, fry it, and eat it.  Weeks went by and nothing took the bait.  My brother and I were getting pretty tired of going out there to feed Dad’s sense of “finish what you started”.

 

But then it happened.

 

One sunshiny day in the middle of summer, we landed ourselves at a different spot on the lake.  The cooler in the trunk was loaded up with a bowl of tuna fish salad, a loaf of white bread, some Shasta, and some Cheetos.  The trunk also had Dad’s tackle box and another cooler which had been reserved for the dead bodies.  As we arrived, Mom and Dad proceed to the trunk to start unloading it.  My brother and I had been dispatched to go scout out a spot at the lake to mount an assault.  We were wound up pretty tight after that grueling 38 hour ride to the lake and needed to expel some energy.

 

We found a spot.

 

Even more important, we found an end to Dad’s continued frustration of not catching anything.  By extension, that was an avenue to resolving the collective frustration experienced by my brother and me on those agonizing 47 hour rides to the lake for a lousy bag of Cheetos.  That little treasure we found that day could solve a lot of problems all at once.  Dad didn’t have to try to catch a fish anymore, because we had found a pre-caught fish.  It was laying there on the ground, as dead as it could be.

 

My brother and I immediately understood what this meant.

 

Dead fish on the ground.

 

Dad doesn’t have to bait a hook.

 

Dad doesn’t have to get a line wet.

 

Dad can just grab the fish from the ground and place it in the auxiliary cooler.

 

We can then embark on the week long journey to go back home.

 

Cut bait and get out of Dodge.  Easy as that.

 

We both ran to Dad to share the great news.  “Hey Dad, come over here!  We found a fish for you!’

 

As Dad arrived, we pointed out the gift that Alcova Lake was about to bestow upon us.  Dad took a look at it, shook his head and barked an order at his progeny.  “You boys get away from that.  It’s just a sucker.”

 

“A what?”

 

“It’s a sucker fish.  Someone caught it and left it there because no one wants it.”  He then walked away to fetch his pole and tackle, leaving us there feeling dejected.

 

That 10 day journey back home was going to take forever, but only after the two weeks Dad was going to spend there trying to extricate a trout or two from that lake.

 

I wonder if Professional Bass Fisherman Randy Tharp ever had to endure such a trip.  It’s probably a safe assumption that if he had, he wouldn’t be Professional Bass Fisherman Randy Tharp.