From the short story, "Kinzua Gums"

Excerpt from the fishing short story: “Kinzua Gums”
by:

Joseph Manduke



So we headed out from Doylestown in the leaky mustang on a mission of pure exploration. My fishing pal and high school buddy Joe riding shotgun. I had installed a tape player in my pony and we had one tape. It was an early Beatles tape, and as I write these words I can still hear odes to the Norwegian woods and the familiar voices of Paul and John.

My thrill was to explore extreme northwestern Pennsylvania. The map claimed big fish in wild sounding places like Kinzua, The Allegheny River, and the Clarion River. Wide areas were delineated as native brook trout country, and home of the Pike and Muskellunge, their fierce cousins up to 4 feet long, and both bristling with teeth.
When dad was alive, the annual trek to the Yellow Breeches south of Carlisle was our big trip. That and a summer trip to Bradford County (Wyalusing) on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River. All year, months before these trips, I would clean and organize tackle, study the maps, dream of trout at the Breeches or sultry summer evenings along the then wild Susquehanna with a stringer of walleyes and smallmouth, to be carefully cleaned and cooked by my mother. Either Breeches trout or Susquehanna fish were a sacred meal.

On our summer trips in high school, the few we took, or the many I took alone, I slept behind summer quiet schools on the bus loading platforms, sleeping bag on still warm summer concrete. I caught and ate fish, and begged and borrowed for gas money.

In my fishing-dream- heart I studied and memorized the special map dad brought home years before. Pennsylvania’s route 6 traverses the most Northern part of the state from the New York state line near Port Jervis, all the way to odd sounding places named Kane, Warren, Corry, Westline…or Tionesta. Images on the map showed trout and toothy pike, tiny towns were I imagined Indians still netted fish and carried babies on their backs.

My fishing friend and fellow high school junior Joe and I were now on the road. Joe was a big athletic blonde kid who the girls liked. In fact I was secretly in love with his cheerleader girl and my neighbour Leslie. I think she thought of me as a combination motor head and nerd.

I had just started to get serious with Carol that summer of 1973. Joe simply said, “I don’t want to hear about that chick on this trip, we are fishing.” I had already been ridiculed for taking Carol to a dance.

Our destination, revealed by the sacred fishing map was the Allegheny reservoir. It was to be by way of route 6, that magical path I had only dreamed about. Real rugged trout country. As the Beatles groaned, we finally made it to Renovo on route 120. A dark nearly abandoned railroad town, where people were playing baseball in the main street at 3 AM. It was an odd scene. Out of bravado we drove up over the top of our world on route 144. I hadn’t known the state was this remote, wild. Finally we arrived at route 6 and went west.

The parking area by the reservoir and Kinzua dam is a wild place. They had flooded the corn planter Indian reservation to make the lake, and it made me feel sad. The loud spillway and leaking gas from the mustang’s rusty gas tank kept us up most of the night. By sunrise, a few sleepy fishermen emerged- out of one truck a bewhiskered scrawny old man. While busy at this early hour boiling camp coffee and breakfast of fried walleyes, we asked about the fishing. We became friends with old Bill, and he told us of Kinzua fish and fisherman. He said to go back into town across the old iron river bridge and make the first right. This would take us to the deep hole on the other side of the dam. We slowly drove up the road, as it became rough, boulder strewn. I swerved to avoid a rock and the right edge gave way and there we hung precariously above the trees and the roaring Allegheny below. Joe said he noticed an old jeep parked at a shack back down the hill. We walked back and found a gray tarpaper shack with half a door, the place moonshine was made and bad things happened to out a towners.

Joe knocked on the door and appeared a wizened old man, unshaven. He looked to be 100 years old and was in fact, quite toothless. We explained our plight and he yelled to someone in the shack (we thought he was alone) a filthy little boy appeared and was instructed by the old man to “go get the rope yea big around as your pxxxr”. In only a few moments the boy appeared and the antique jeep pulled my mustang right back onto the “road”. Joe gave “Gums”, as he has been later called, a dollar and the old man jumped for joy, -kicked up his heels. I had never seen someone kick up heels before. We felt as far from home as Mars, or even Arizona.

As a 10 year old living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, whose fishing exploits then, excited trips with dad to the Delaware Canal, river or Cooks Creek in Upper Bucks County, such places were odd and exotic as the Grand Canyon, or even the Desert and Cactus, or salmon streams in Atlantic Canada or Alaska.

So armed with my car and some gas, that old rusty stove I inherited from mom reluctantly (she still used it when the power was off), I ventured next out by myself to Huntsdale, where I had fished with dad since the spring of 1966………………


Copyright Joseph Manduke 2008 All rights reserved