Sunday, June 13

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June 13, Sunday - More rain. Feel droopy.Went to church. Brought Mom over to our house for a while. Rained like crazy. Bud didn't feel well from his sunburn so we went to bed early.

June 14, Monday - Cleaned the whole house and baked a cake. Cool. Bud still doesn't feel too well. Blisters all over his shoulders. Today was my last treatment. Thank goodness.

June 15, Tuesday - Have to see both doctors next week. Hesser on Wednesday - Allen on Saturday. Was going to town this morning, but felt too badly. Went fishing with Marv and Bud this afternoon. 

 The sunburn aftermath continues. I had huge blisters all over my shoulders. Had to sleep on my stomach. I have never experienced another burn like this since, thank you. I'm surprised I've never had an issue with melanomas. (Knock wood)

Not much else going on - mom is taking her last Cobalt treatment, and hanging out with dad and me at the lake. The only cake mom ever made was Angel Food.

More fishing at 40 Hiway Club Lake. My tolerance for carp fishing isn't great. If you're not a carp angler, the process for fishing for the overgrown koi doesn't involve boats, waders, fly rods, or anything that looks like the standard wade-in-the-water style of fishing. If you want to catch carp, you sit. And sit.

Common Carp

My dad's rig was something like this - an open-spool level-wind bait-casting reel on an eight-foot fiberglas rod. (Spinning reels were for posers and children.) The reel was spooled with 28-pound test braided nylon line. At the fish end was a split nylon leader with two treble hooks, one six to eight inches higher than the other. Directly above that was a lead sinker. When dad was ready to go after the scaly monsters, he baited both hooks with one of his patented (fact) dough baits, reared back and cast this whole mess out into the lake. A good cast was somewhere between forty and sixty feet from the shore. Dad would then set his rods into rod-holders that he and my uncle Lawrence had designed and welded together. Then he waited. Seriously. For what seemed like days.

Bait-casting reel

The idea was to watch for signs of the carp messing with the bait - a wiggle of the line, a soft tug and the hook, a ripple in the water. Then with a flick of the rod, you set the hook and held on. A good-size carp can work you over for a half-hour or more, and the big ones never give up until they're nearly dead. I caught a 27-pound carp when I was twelve. It took 90 minutes to bring him in. You worked them closer to the shore a few inches at a time, finally coaxing them into a huge landing net.

Carp glamour shot

The only thing left to do was take a picture of the damned thing, usually on a rope or a clip stringer. My family history is told with hundreds of pictures of carp hanging on ropes near relatives.

Carp on the doorknob, Bud at the window, 1951

My granddad William H. Simpson, Fort Scott, Kansas, 1947, with fish

I know of people who ate carp, but we didn't. They are an oily species, and I'm told that they're chock full of Omega-3 fatty acids. Residents in poorer neighborhoods in Kansas City could often be seen fishing in Swope Park or Troost Lake, usually for carp, sometimes catfish. The lunkers weren't sport to them, they were sustenance.

We generally gave them away to people with less-finicky eaters at home. Years later, one of my interns at the studio, a student at the Kansas City Art Institute, told me of her winter in Prague.

As it happens, in the Czech Republic, a traditional Christmas dinner is carp that has been cooked in milk. The story was confirmed by one of my employees at Glacier National Park last year. I'm told that Prague rivals Paris for sheer beauty, but I think I'll visit in summer.

My strategy for amusing myself on fishing trips was a big can of Turtle Wax and some rags. While dad sat on the bank and tried to outsmart the clever bottom-feeders, I waxed the Big Blue Cadillac. That sucker really shined up nice. 

My personal Wes Anderson movie continues. Our narratives have much in common.