Armen and Cindy’s grandparents were planning on driving down to Slough City for the weekend, and Grandpa Adroushan had offered to take the kids slough fishing.
Slough fishing. That was just Grandpa Adroushan’s name for bait fishing, which you may have heard called “still fishing”—the name the mystics use for it , or simply “fishing,” what the rest of us call it. It can be seen as a hybrid of trapping and ambush. In this case, the angler’s body is part of the trap mechanism. The passive party—the angler—must wait patiently for the active party—the fish—to spring the trap. When the trap is sprung, that first tug on the line starts the angler out of his trance as though he were waiting in complete darkness at the end of a wire.
This all takes Buddha-like patience, or some substitute, say, a deck of playing cards. It’s hard for us, in this busy age of texting, GPS navigation and fly fishing, to appreciate the tremendous mental discipline demanded of the still-angler, though perhaps it did not seem so taxing to a people accustomed to down time.
Sam met the Adroushans at the appointed place and time: Peoples Ditch, just north of town, at dawn. There he met Grandpa Adroushan and Armen’s dad, as well as Armen and Cindy. An AM radio played low next to Grandpa’s lawn chair. The Giants broadcast was playing on KMJ, with Vida Blue on the mound and Hank Greenwald delivering the play-by-play. A shadow was falling over Major League Baseball at the time. The team owners were out to recapture some of their lost omnipotence. Still, in April the shadow hadn’t yet blocked out the sun. The game went on.
Sam watched Cindy cast and reel from the corner of his eye and with an occasional passing glance. She seemed to know what she was doing, though Sam was no judge of anglers. It was a good thing for him the canal didn’t demand much along the lines of casting. As he stole looks at Cindy, he sensed a confidence that went deeper than a mere familiarity with fishing tackle.
Sam felt his palms sweating. He’d fished before with Mr. Dorah, but it seemed to him he’d forgotten everything he’d learned, and he didn’t want that known. Fortunately, none of the Adroushans seemed to be watching his technique.
Armen put some space between himself and the water. He didn’t sit on the edge of the road with his feet on the bank as his little sister did. Years ago, he’d plunged into the shallow water of the ditch as the flows declined, but now the water was high, swift, and deadly, and he had not forgotten the flood.
Grandpa reminisced about fishing the Kings River some years ago with his boys. He remembered catching carp, bluegill, catfish, and trout as well.
Afterward, Sam was invited to lunch at the Adroushan house, which was a relief to him, though he was not one to seek out social events. He wanted to see more of Cindy in her natural habitat. There was something here that he hadn’t seen in her at school. She wasn’t much to look at by the common criteria, but she had a way about her that seized Sam’s attention.