This story is one my husband had been telling our family for years. He has a gift for remembering the details that make a story come alive, and I finally decided it deserved to be written down properly instead of living only in conversation.
I interviewed him using the same techniques I’ve learned for gathering stories for historical documents. It helped me slow down, ask better questions, and capture some of the nuances I might have missed if I had tried to rely on memory alone.
I’m not sure audiences always realize how much care goes into collecting verbal accounts from local residents and turning them into historical documents. Locally, that kind of story-gathering has only been happening for the last fifteen or twenty years, but many of the memories being preserved reach back much farther. When an older person tells a story about something that happened nearly a hundred years ago, and someone takes the time to record it carefully, that voice becomes a bridge back to a world we can’t visit any other way.
I don’t know whether this particular story will last a hundred years, but I’m glad I captured it. It made a good radio performance, and it preserves one of my husband’s stories in a way our family can keep.
SCOTT
I’ve been fishing since I was six years old when my dad took me to Lake Oroville for the first time.
Seagull sounds
DAD
Son, I want you to go over there by those bushes and see what kind of worms you can dig up. But watch out for the rattlesnakes, they like to sleep under the rocks where it’s cool. If one bites you, it could kill you, so don’t even go near them.
SCOTT
I remember he gave me an empty coffee can and showed me how to flip over logs with a long stick. I found a bunch of red worms, and pretty soon I’d forgotten all about his warning and started flipping over loose rocks as well.
DAD
Have you found any yet? Don’t want to spend all our time looking for worms when we could be fishing.
CHILD SCOTT
Yeah, Dad, I’ve got a lot of…AAAAAHHHHHHH!
DAD
What is it? What happened?
CHILD SCOTT
RATTLESNAKE!
DAD
(laughs) That’s not a snake, that’s a night crawler.
CHILD SCOTT
(scared) Will it bite me and kill me too?
DAD
No, it’s just a big worm. But the fish will like it.
SCOTT
I felt a little foolish when I put that big nightcrawler into the can with the other worms. But it didn’t take me long to learn that I loved fishing. And over the years I fished at that lake so much that I knew the shoreline like the back of my own hand.
I bought my first boat, a sixteen-foot john boat, soon after I got married. She wasn’t much, but I loved her anyway. She had a shallow draft, so I didn’t have to worry about bottoming out, and a 15-horse outboard, a trolling motor and telescoping seats. I painted her up pretty and added indoor outdoor carpet, just like she was a real bass boat.
But she had a temper. Whenever there were any waves at all on the lake, her flat bottom would skip up and down on the water and make my bottom bang on the bench like a son of a gun. My wife didn’t understand our relationship.
WIFE
You took the day off work again? To go fishing in that old boat?
SCOTT
The middle of the week is the best time! No one’s on the lake. Besides, it’s a beautiful day and the bass are spawning.
And her name is Thrasher.
WIFE
Hmph. What time do you think you’ll be home?
SCOTT
You know me. I don’t like cooking in the sun. I’ll be home around noon. Sure you don’t want to go?
WIFE
Not today. Okay, well I won’t expect you for lunch. Noon on the lake never seems to match noon on our kitchen clock!
SCOTT
A half hour later I was at the launch ramp. The lake was full and the water was smooth as glass. Thrasher and I headed out to the south fork of the Feather River, one of my favorite places to fish. As I turned into a big cove, I cut the outboard and looked up to where I knew there was an eagle’s nest.
Eagle scream
The eagle was circling over the lake, and I watched as she flew in low to the water, put her talons down and came back up with a big fish. As she flew over me, it was one of those moments a man feels pretty darn happy to be alive.
Soft motor sounds
I got the troller going and motored slowly into the cove. There was a lot of trash along the bank, not garbage trash, but logs and branches and stuff that had been floating in the water. I could almost hear my boat whispering as we got closer.
THRASHER
Hey, that spot is perfect. I’ll bet there are lots of bass lurking in those nice shady places. Why don’t you try a top water lure here?
SCOTT
I opened the tackle box and found my favorite popper. I knew if I twitched the rod just right, I could make it look like something was foundering in the water. The bass loved that, they’d go berserk and try to swallow the whole thing. So, I cast out into a promising spot and Thrasher and I got down to business.
THRASHER
Isn’t this great? So quiet and peaceful. And no one around for miles.
SCOTT
A little breeze came up and stirred some leaves, catching my eye, and something zig-zagged in the water, making a little wake. I kept fishing but I also kept watching it out of the corner of my eye, and pretty soon I’m watchin it more than I’m fishing ‘cause that zig zag kept getting closer. Suddenly I could see it was big and swimming straight to the side of my boat.
Well, this was a pickle, and as I reeled in my lure, I started thinking.
THRASHER
What is that?
SCOTT
A snake. A big one, ‘bout as thick as my forearm. Uh-oh. I think it’s a rattlesnake!
THASHER
Well don’t just stand there, do something!
SCOTT
The snake started bobbing up out of the water, darting its head up the side, trying to bop up into the boat. He couldn’t quite make it over the edge. I was wearing short pants, so I didn’t want to get my bare legs too close to him. I could almost feel the side of the boat cringing.
THRASHER
Get it off me!
SCOTT
I can’t! I don’t want it to bite my leg!
THRASHER
Can’t you club it with something?
SCOTT
I looked down at my 6-foot bass rod, which is relatively heavy and could hurt a snake. But now it had the lure reeled up with two big treble hooks hanging off the end. I couldn’t use it as a club.
So I used it to push at the snake to try and keep him from coming on board. Discourage him a bit if you know what I mean. Well, it didn’t take long for that freakin hook to get stuck in the snake.
THRASHER
(panicked) What are you doing? Get it away!
SCOTT
I’m trying! It’s stuck! I’m shaking it but the snake won’t come off the line!
THRASHER
Cut the line! Cut the line!
SCOTT
The tackle box is clear over there! I’m not draggin this snake into the boat!
I tried leaning way over, with one arm holding the snake as far away as possible and the other trying to reach my knife but the tackle box was too far away. Lucky for us, the snake finally came loose and disappeared.
I looked all around the back of the boat, but I didn’t see him swimming in the water, so I high tailed it to the other end of the boat to check there. The boat started wobbling dangerously as if she, too, was trying to find the snake.
THRASHER
Is it gone?
SCOTT
I think so. No, wait…he’s trying to get in up here!
Sure enough, he was trying to get into the boat again. I think I was shaking worse than the boat. Made it hard to get my eyes to focus on the stuff on the floor to figure out what I could use to get rid of this snake.
The nearest thing to me was the boat paddle. It’s just a little thing, but I always carried it with me ‘cause if the engine quit I figured I could at least paddle the boat back to shore.
So I grabbed that paddle and started whackin at the snake.
(sounds of paddle hitting side of boat)
SCOTT
Poor Thrasher was getting it worse than the snake, but by now I’m not hearing anything but the pounding of my heart, even though I’m just beatin the heck out of the side of my boat trying to get that snake to go away.
Then he disappeared again. I didn’t know if I actually hit him or just scared him with all the paddling. Then the boat finally stopped rocking.
THRASHER
Is it gone now?
SCOTT
I don’t know. I’m looking. I don’t see it.
The snake seemed to be gone, but, during the whole time I was chasing the snake, we’d drifted over into the trash on the shore. The boat shuddered as we bumped into a floating branch.
THRASHER
Is it gone? Don’t let it get on the logs and into the boat!
SCOTT
I thought this was pretty good advice, so I went to the back of the boat to get the troller started.
(sounds of a soft motor starting)
SCOTT
Yikes! I found it. It’s snaking up the outboard engine. I think it’s going to get in this time.
SCOTT
I watched the snake reach the gunwale. I just stood there, my mind empty. Even Thrasher seemed dumbfounded, ‘cause the boat was still as could be.
Then I looked down. I was still holding the paddle.
(slapping/pounding sounds)
SCOTT
I finally beat the heck out of that snake. Enough that it swam away and went up on the shore. That’s when I finally got a good look at it. It was a gopher snake. They look identical to rattlesnakes, but they don’t have the rattles.
But poor Thrasher had taken a beating. I ran my hands over her aluminum almost apologetically, noting every new dent in her side. In retrospect it seems silly to feel so bad about beating up your boat, but sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
And right then, we needed to put more distance between us and the snake. So
I trolled out away from the shore and started looking for another place to fish.
(soft motor sounds)
Well, the breeze felt nice and cool against my legs, calming me down, but I kept thinking about that snake and how lucky I’d been that it wasn’t a rattler. And pretty soon, I could almost hear my boat whispering again.
THRASHER
Let’s try this spot. It looks promising.
SCOTT
I checked my rod, made sure the lure was still good, and was just about to cast out, when suddenly I felt something brushing the back of my calf.
AAARHH!
SCOTT
I almost jumped clean out of the boat and Thrasher almost keeled over as I got as far away from that chair as I could.
THRASHER
What is it? Another snake?!
SCOTT
No. (pause) It was only a strap hanging down from my chair. But that’s it! I am done with this today.
(sounds of gear being thrown down and an outboard motor revving up)
My wife was surprised when I got home.
WIFE
You’re home early. It’s only 10:00! What happened?
SCOTT
I told her the story, but for some reason she didn’t believe me.
WIFE
Well, that’s a real fish story, all right. And your boat looks like it went through a war zone.
SCOTT
Yeah. I’m sure glad I didn’t have my pistol with me. I’d have shot her full of holes trying to make that snake go away. It’s a good thing you didn’t go. We’d have been sinking to the bottom of the lake and I’d still be trying to figure out how to get rid of that snake!
