Skip to main content

Grasshopper Bridge, Chapter 4: The Trout Which Had No Spots

Chapter 4 of Lani Waller's final and unpublished manuscript of fishing stories, guaranteed to stir the souls of fly anglers worldwide.

Grasshopper Bridge, Chapter 4: The Trout Which Had No Spots

After three hamburgers, three strawberry malts, a greasy bag of french-fried potatoes, and four hours of non-stop driving, the Johnson family finally pulled off the main highway and turned onto a one-lane dirt road which ran alongside a large and muddy river.

Twenty minutes later, they reached their final destination, a shallow warm-water lake bordered by thick forests in dense undergrowth. And there they were in water so shallow their bellies were rubbing the muddy bottom, and their dorsal fins were sticking up like flags in the warm summer breeze. Seven-year-old William Johnson had never seen so many fish in one place in his entire life. All seven years of it.

Dozens of them. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, he thought as he stared at the sight before him. “What kind are they, dad?” he asked.

“They’re lake trout, Son,” his father replied. “Lake trout. Why don’t we go get ‘em? That’s what we’re here for. Are you ready?”

William looked at his father closely. “What kind of equipment do you use for lake trout, Dad? Do we have the right kind?”

His father smiled, “We don’t need any tackle. We’re going to catch ‘em with our bare hands. All we need is a gunny sack to put them in and I have one in the trunk of a car. So let’s go fishing.” He said all of that because at that time, in the summer of 1948, he didn’t have the money for expensive fishing tackle and because the fish milling around in front of them were not trout to all. They were something else.

William’s mother looked at both of them and then at the milling school of fish in the shallow pond inside and said, “Is it OK if I sit this one out and finish knitting the sweater? Winter is just around the corner.”

William and his father nodded in unison, opened the car doors, and walked around to the trunk. The gunnysack was a little ragged, but who could complain about that? It was brightly colored with red, green, and blue stripes along the top of the sack, in the perfect image of a young girl standing in a field of potatoes with the words “Idaho’s Best” circling around her like a halo. William wasn’t sure just what that meant. He didn’t think girls picked potatoes because they didn’t in the place he used to live, “But maybe things are different here in California,” he said to himself.

And indeed they were. World War II had just ended. The Allied Forces found Adolf Hitler, his girlfriend, and some other Nazi officials where they belonged, dead inside an underground bunker somewhere in Berlin. All had committed suicide and it seemed a fitting ending for the insanity and unspeakable atrocities they had inspired, managed, and supported.

William’s father had been in the war, serving in the United States Navy and his ship had been hit and sunk by Japanese airplanes one night in the South Pacific. The rolling waves were full of human blood that night, and it was a full moon. So it wasn’t long before the sharks moved in to feast on the dead and dying sailors who were clinging onto anything they could find to keep them afloat. What William’s father had seen and heard that night had shaken his faith in God, and from that time on, he lived on the edge of a nightmare from which he never fully recovered.

When he came home from the war, he moved his family from southern Missouri out to the San Francisco Bay Area. As part of that move, he promised William that once they settled in, they would be able to go fishing for something called a “trout.” His descriptions of such a fish had captured William’s imagination, magnified by photographs he had seen in his father’s sporting magazines.

So here they were. At the edge of a lake not quite like the ones William had seen in the magazines, but if his father said there were trout in that lake, it only meant one thing to William. There were indeed trout in that lake, and they were going to catch them with their bare hands.

Recommended


The two of them began walking hand-in-hand down the slippery banks, toward the immense school of lake trout. William was given permission to carry the burlap bag and his heart was pounding when he saw the size of some of those wild California trout wallowing around in water too shallow to hide them. As they waded into position to start fishing, William looked at the trout in front of them, and then at the burlap sack, and wondered how many it could hold. He also wondered how many they could catch because he had heard of something called a “limit” and he supposed that meant how many trout you were allowed to keep.

He took a deep breath, cleared his throat, squared his shoulders, and stood up as tall as he could. “What’s the limit here, dad?” he asked. “How many can we keep?”

His father looked back at him. “There isn’t a limit on lake trout for this lake, son,” he said. “We can keep all we catch, but I’d say if we filled the sack, we would have enough. What do you say?”

Like most 7-year-old boys, William liked it when his father asked for his opinion, and like most boys who admired their father, he nodded his head and replied. “I think you are right. That’s exactly what I was thinking. If we fill this sack, we will have enough.” It was a perfect moment for William and he never forgot it. Even the girl on the burlap gunnysack seemed happy, and William liked the way she was smiling at him.

“Let’s start fishing now, William,” his father whispered. “Here is what I want you to do. We will be a team. You stand still, as still as you can, and don’t move a muscle. Put the sack in the water and hold it steady. In one place. Don’t move it around. Then I’m going to wade in the water and make the trout swim over to where you are, and when they are close, I am going to grab them and put them in the sack.”

William nodded in approval. It is a perfect plan, he thought. What could go wrong?

“Just wait until the other kids in my class see the photos,” he said. “I will put some on a stringer and hold them up so everyone can see how big they are.”

He looked down at the girl on the sack. She was still smiling even though she was now over her head in the water as he looked at her and then back at his father and the way the sun was shining on all those trout. He thought everything was perfect.

It wasn’t long before they had the sack filled and William thought it looked like the girl on the gunny sack was dancing. Her arms and legs were flopping around and she even nodded her head up and down whenever another trout swam into the gunny sack. It was all he could do to keep all of them inside the sack and he had his hands full. He had never seen so many fish in one place, and to think that they were lake trout made his heart sing.

About 30 minutes later, he heard the car horn honking and he looked up at his mother, who was pointing to her wrist. Pointing hard. He knew what that meant and so did his father. It meant it was time to quit fishing and start for home. Just to make sure, he looked at his father, and his father simply nodded.

The bag was tied with some rope around the top, just a bit above the girl’s smiling face, and it was obvious to William there was one hell of a lot of trout in that sack. So many he couldn’t lift it. He stood still, looking at his father’s slender arms and how large and blue his veins were. He wondered why men had such large veins and it looked like they might just pop open if his father wasn’t careful.

His father looked at William looking at him and said, “William, we have to quit now because if mom says it is time to quit, then we have to quit.” William nodded in agreement and they started back to the car.

“Gee whiz,” William said as he looked at the bulging and squirming sack. “Just look at all those trout.” He could just see the faces on his classmates when they saw the photos of him holding all those fish.

They reached home around 5 o’clock and unpacked the car. The sack of lake trout was immediately opened, and William asked his father to put the biggest ones on a stringer and let mom take a picture of him holding them.

The selection was made, about eight of the biggest, each one around 3 or 4 pounds, maybe a little bit more. William thought they might be bigger than that, but he didn’t say so. That would come later in class when it would be his turn to give his talk about what he had done on vacation break.

His father got the camera out and William stood there, up against a storage shed door at 7 years of age, with no shoes on and almost worn-out pants, holding up the prize of his lifetime. His first trout. The dream beyond all dreams now come true. His heart was pounding.

The photos were developed and came home four nights later with his father. His father had made duplicates of the best photos so William could pass them around to his classmates as he told about how much fun it had been, and how he and his father had caught them with their hands and put them in a gunny sack.

The next Monday was “Story Telling Day” and when the teacher called William up to tell his vacation story, he walked up to the front of the classroom and turned to face his classmates and started passing out the photos. “I went trout fishing, with my mom and dad at a lake up north. These are the trout I caught.” As the picture circulated the class, they came to a stop at Butch Jenkin’s desk, and everyone was looking because Butch was the class bully and had a reputation for knowing everything, even if he didn’t.

Butch had been held back for two years because of bad grades and this meant he was a lot larger than his classmates. He also admitted to killing cats by throwing them in the saltwater muddy flats of San Pablo Bay when the tide was out and they would get mired down in the mud and couldn’t escape. Butch then shot them with a bow and arrow. “You should see them,” he said one day. “When the arrows stick in them, they howl and try to pull the arrow out, but they can’t, so I just shoot them again. They die after a while, and it’s something to see, all right.” So everyone was afraid of him, but no one was brave enough to stand up to him.

“Who do you think you are fooling, William?” Butch suddenly said, smiling and looking around at the class. “These aren’t trout. Trout have spots. And trout don’t have these big fat lips and big yellow scales. These are carp. And white people don’t eat them. Only Mexicans and black people eat them because everyone knows they don’t have enough money.”

The entire class froze. Even the teacher was taken aback as Butch stared at William’s frozen face. “I’ll bet you ate them, though, didn’t you?” he asked William.

William looked around the class at all those faces looking at him. And then, from some unknown place in him, something emerged, some kind of feeling, or a mixture of feelings pounding in him. He felt invisible with no secrets to hide or conceal as he got out of his seat and walked up to Butch’s chair. William’s fist came around in a blur, and before anyone could stop him, he watched Butch’s nose explode in a rush of blood, and his head fly back at an almost impossible angle. He waited for a second and then hit him in the face with his other fist.

Everyone was yelling, “Hit him again, William, hit him again.” But it was impossible. The teacher had William in a bear hug and Butch had four or five classmates on top of him.

Butch was expelled that day and never returned to that classroom or that school. No one ever knew what happened to him after that, but it didn’t seem to matter. William went home that afternoon, and as his family sat down for dinner that evening, he told his parents about the encounter.

As he told the story, William’s father had an odd look on his face and his hands were trembling when he told William that if you know how to think about something, you can make it whatever you want, but it’s always best to make it better.

William looked at his mother’s tears, then his father, and the scars on his arms and face from the war as he asked for another serving of lake trout. “These are really good,” he said. “Really good.”


Click here to download the complete book as an .epub file (we recommend using Adobe's free Digital Editions program or IOS's native Books app to read the epub file; download Digital Editions here. Click here to see other options).

The logo for the Babine River Foundation.
Please consider making a donation to the Babine River Foundation as gratitude for Lani's contribution to the fishing world.

Click here to make a donation to the Babine River Foundation in Waller's honor.

Click here to read the introduction, author's notes, and other chapters. 

Please check back next Wednesday for a new chapter. 




GET THE NEWSLETTER Join the List and Never Miss a Thing.

Recommended Articles

Recent Videos

Creating blanks with dialed technique-specific actions that perform under extreme load without failure doesn't just “hap...
News

Lefty: The Greatest of All Time

Creating blanks with dialed technique-specific actions that perform under extreme load without failure doesn't just “hap...
Gear

DIY Airbrushing on Popper Heads

Creating blanks with dialed technique-specific actions that perform under extreme load without failure doesn't just “hap...
Gear

Trailer: The Kids Are Alright

Creating blanks with dialed technique-specific actions that perform under extreme load without failure doesn't just “hap...
Gear

Fly Tier's Bench: How to Tie Craven's Lil Bit Nymph

Creating blanks with dialed technique-specific actions that perform under extreme load without failure doesn't just “hap...
How-To/Techniques

Ed Jaworowski's Functional Fly Casting Part 1: Acceleration

Creating blanks with dialed technique-specific actions that perform under extreme load without failure doesn't just “hap...
News

Jimmy Carter Was One of Us

Creating blanks with dialed technique-specific actions that perform under extreme load without failure doesn't just “hap...
News

The Genesis of a Film: Legacy

Creating blanks with dialed technique-specific actions that perform under extreme load without failure doesn't just “hap...
News

Salmon Return to the Klamath River

Creating blanks with dialed technique-specific actions that perform under extreme load without failure doesn't just “hap...
Destinations/Species

Simms Presents - Destination: Skeena

Creating blanks with dialed technique-specific actions that perform under extreme load without failure doesn't just “hap...
News

Just Do It: Nike and Drake Plunge into Fly Fishing

Creating blanks with dialed technique-specific actions that perform under extreme load without failure doesn't just “hap...
News

Abel x Nocta Fly Reel

Creating blanks with dialed technique-specific actions that perform under extreme load without failure doesn't just “hap...
How-To/Techniques

G. Loomis's “Feel Connected” Episode 2: "Rolled Up"

Fly Fisherman Magazine Covers Print and Tablet Versions

GET THE MAGAZINE Subscribe & Save

Digital Now Included!

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Give a Gift   |   Subscriber Services

PREVIEW THIS MONTH'S ISSUE

Buy Digital Single Issues

Magazine App Logo

Don't miss an issue.
Buy single digital issue for your phone or tablet.

Get the Fly Fisherman App apple store google play store

Other Magazines

See All Other Magazines

Special Interest Magazines

See All Special Interest Magazines

GET THE NEWSLETTER Join the List and Never Miss a Thing.

Get the top Fly Fisherman stories delivered right to your inbox.

Phone Icon

Get Digital Access.

All Fly Fisherman subscribers now have digital access to their magazine content. This means you have the option to read your magazine on most popular phones and tablets.

To get started, click the link below to visit mymagnow.com and learn how to access your digital magazine.

Get Digital Access

Not a Subscriber?
Subscribe Now

Enjoying What You're Reading?

Get a Full Year
of Guns & Ammo
& Digital Access.

Offer only for new subscribers.

Subscribe Now

Never Miss a Thing.

Get the Newsletter

Get the top Fly Fisherman stories delivered right to your inbox.

By signing up, I acknowledge that my email address is valid, and have read and accept the Terms of Use