Spiderwebville

From the Lost August Files

“It’s called ‘fishing’ not ‘catching’,” my friend reminded me.  

I was marveling at my son’s ability to throw his lure into the water over and over… with no bites… for hours at a time. 

 Watching a dead house-fly is more interesting. It seems to me that it would be more fun to replace the hook with a sparkly shiny thing that randomly explodes. 

Today, I took Jay fishing, and after two hours, he caught nothing and still didn’t want to go home. So, while Jay fished, I decided to walk down the trail, which I had spotted on the road to the lake.  

I found the trail quickly and discovered, within 100 yards, that the trail was actually a lure to trap humans in the woods… much like the type of trick that a scary movie bad guy would pull on a hiker for the purpose of killing him while screeching music plays in the background.   

The best thing to do would have been to turn around and watch Jay fling his hook at the water, so, of course, I continued walking into the thick woods of Fish Lake.   

I encountered no scary movie bad guys and there was no screeching music, but I did find Spiderwebville.  I’m not arachnophobic, but I’m also not a fan of spiders skittering across my clothes and skin looking for orifices.   

While pulling gobs of spider webs off of every square inch of my body, I took a sharp left out of Spiderwebville and ended up in Mosquito Town.   

Mosquito Town was not much better that Spiderwebville, but considerably better than Gnatland, which is the last township I visited.  During all two minutes in Gnatland, I managed to drown a number of gnats with my eyeball wetness and internal nostril moisture.   

They are still in there.  I can feel them. 

I gave up trying to dodge the webs, bugs, and bushes, and crashed back to the main road. I looked like the scary movie bad guy I was trying to avoid.  I was adorned, head to toe, with clumpy spider webs, which contained leaves, twigs, and insect skeletons. 

I removed my hat to clean it off and stood wondering how many living hitchhikers were still on my body.  I imagined a few of them were taking refuge in my underwear, but I decided dropping my pants in the road would end in a very awkward moment for me and the family toodling by in their mini-van.  Instead, I walked back to the pier leaving most of the bugs in Washington behind me. 

On the way back to the dock, I stopped by the Port-A-Potty and found out where all of the remaining insects of Washington were hanging out. I’ll take a wild guess that the majority of the population of the USA would rather relieve themselves on national TV news that lock themselves in that particular Port-A-Potty. 

With my bodily function mission aborted, I went to Jay to tell him we had to go.  I found him on the dock happily zinging a Rooster Tail into the murky water. 

As we were leaving, he picked up a dead trout floating next to the dock.  It had not rotted enough to make it unrecognizable as a trout, but it obviously wasn’t something to put on the grill. 

Jay looked around a bit, studied the fish a bit, then paused as if trying to decide if he should go through with whatever cool idea he had come up with.  A pregnant moment later, he tossed it back into the water for the next young fisherperson to pick up. 

I didn’t ask him what the alternative to tossing the fish away was.  I don’t want to know.  It’s better that way.