by Peter Dalton

Created on: May 07, 2011

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Paddles

 It began as a beautiful summer day. That was back when I was enjoying the new found freedom of owning my first car. A deluxe 1967 white Ford Falcon, with a 289 V-8 which I bought for $150. Abby and I had been up to his families cabin before, but we always were driven by his dad, which was an experience in itself. Driving with his father down highway 120 with the top down in the huge white Cadillac shark convertible. It would have been like a page out of a Hunter S. Thompson story, if I had read any H.S.T. at the time and we were on some heavy duty drugs. The days with hs dad, we were young teens with only an inclination of the huge pharmacological universe that the future would be. But on this summer day we were on our own. We had driven up to the Lake of wonder through the farmlands of Northeastern Illinois of the day. It felt like wilderness to me. Abby being more widely traveled than I would surely disagree, but as a city boy it was the wilderness to me. Out where no one can hear you scream.

We had loaded up the unlikely combination of an inflatable raft, marine battery, and trolling motor. We were going fishing. I had fished with Abby many a times from shores and jetty on the big lake Mich. We caught fish ranging from bluegill to bullhead from the lake of wonders shores. Chubs in our overnight fishing excursions under bridges, occasional perch from the shores of the big Lake, and plenty of bullhead from Gompers lagoon. However this time we had watercraft, so to speak, and we were going to go after the prize fish we had always been denied. The one that lurked out in the waters which we could never cast to. What little I know about fishing, I know from Abby. My dad had some archaic fishing gear that dated back to the 1940’s, which I can only vaguely remember being used while on the only vacation I ever remember taking with my family. A trip to a cabin in Sturgeon Bay. I was very young and remember not being able to get up and go fishing with my older brother and dad. We are nine years apart, my brother and I, so I imagine he was of the age when the last thing he wanted to do was to be fishing with his father, and I was of the age when that was all I wanted to do. Funny how we misjudge as parents.

So Abby and I loaded up the raft early one morning and set out on our fishing excursion. Although I would question in the back of my mind the wisdom of two strapping lads being out on an inflatable boat with sharp

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