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He struck it against a driftwood log, and it twitched a few more times before it stilled. “Don’t let it suffer like that,” my dad said, bending down and gently but firmly taking hold of the gasping fish.
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I picked up the fish, felt its weight, its power, its will to live, and watched for a moment as its scarlet gills fluttered in the sun. I turned back to see a trout on the line, flopping in the sand, its scales shiny like mica. I gently held the line, until I felt the telltale tug that prompted me to grab the branch and sprint up the beach. I would throw the bait as far as I could, which probably wasn’t that far, but then it didn’t really matter.
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I didn’t have a fishing pole, so that day, my dad cut a long willow branch, to which he added fishing line, a lead sinker and red-and-white bobber, and a worm on a hook. Sand gathered on the outside of the sharpest bends, creating beaches like the one we called the Sandbar, where we fished and played and picnicked and camped. The culvert had been built to divert the Animas’ floodwaters under the highway that led to Durango, five miles to the south, but to a 6-year-old boy, it felt like the gates to the underworld.īeyond the culvert, the river ran slow, lazing through sandbanks and wetlands and cottonwood groves, bending back on itself, as though to rest from its tumultuous southward tumble from the nearby San Juan Mountains.
#Meaning of fishing in the dark Patch
We ambled past a raspberry patch and cornfield, then the low, whitewashed milk house and the rickety hay barn, through a gaping, dank culvert.
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My father led my older brother and I on a walk, stopping occasionally to point out a stalk of asparagus just gone to seed, a red-tailed hawk floating overhead, telling us what it was and looking at us with warm brown eyes to make sure we understood. I was maybe 6 years old, and the pungent aroma of the season’s first cutting of hay still lingered in the air on my grandparents’ farm in the Animas River Valley in southwest Colorado. With water filled with slime and poison, carrying qualities which destroy all agricultural values of ranchers irrigated therefrom, it will be truly a river of lost souls.” -Durango Wage Earner, 1907 I was sitting on top of my friend when The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's song Fishin In The Dark came and he looked at me and said this is a song for me.“The farmers along the Animas River are sitting down and permitting the waters of that river to be so tainted and polluted as that soon it will merit the name of Rio de las Animas Perdidas, given it by the Spaniards. What does the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Fishin In The Dark mean? Did he take you fishing at the right time? Maybe he thought about you when he heard this, or maybe it was his romantic fantasy about you. I think it's really fishing with a lot of romance. Jump into the river and cool off from the heat I waited all winter to come just to take you with meĪnd it doesn't matter if we sit down or not.
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Spring is almost over and summer is approaching. I'll take you to a special place that Audi knows. The lyrics are:Īcross the field, where the bay revolves around the old stump road. I was sitting on top of my friend when The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's song Fishin In The Dark came and he looked at me and said this is a song for me. What does the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Fishin In The Dark mean? 3
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