Photo by Johnny Mckane from Pexels
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper—in a solo outing Sunday, was narrowly spared the indignity of expiring as a result of being impaled on a three-strand barbed wire fence as part of his—the keeper’s adjusting to age-related trout fishing activities. The attendant thrills of this age–adjusting to the rigors of trout fishing are nothing when compared to those in the early stages of a trout fishing life, as exciting as they were—first fish and all of that.
In his Sunday adventure, the keeper chose to go over instead of under a sagging barbed wire fence, and suddenly found himself straddling two strands of rusty, twisted wire that pierced his skin and drew blood, and poked through his clothing in the crotch area making it impossible for him to lift his trailing leg high enough to clear the wire.
For an alarmingly long time, there did not seem to be an acceptable solution to the absurd dilemma, which grew less tolerable by the second, and caused the keeper to consider but quickly discard the possibility of wrestling out his cellphone and calling 911. The contents of such a call are beyond imagination: “I am impaled on a barbed wire fence in the vicinity of…..”
Many similar self-inflicted fishing miseries in the past have been relieved with humor, but the keeper was not laughing as his hands bled from pushing the rusty barbs away from some of the most sensitive areas of his being.
While it did not set in, desperation tip-toed around the situation until the keeper ripped more skin and clothing in a painful dive into the weeds on the side of the fence where he had first started. From his prone position—flat on his back and looking up at the canary grass and the weeds, the keeper tried to reign in his ever-stampeding ego as it speculated about a news item beginning: “Elderly trout fisherman apparently done in by barbed wire fence…….”
It would be too much. The keeper rolled UNDER the fence, which he should have done in the first place, and went fishing. He caught one trout which he fried up for his breakfast Monday morning, while considering the wisdom of passing on the details of his latest fishing adventure to Phyllis who was off visiting her daughter Gina and otherwise might have been around to protect the keeper from barbed wire fences and himself.
