COLUMBIA RIVER GOLDY GETS HOOKED ON HANDOUTS

One time I jumped clean across the Columbia River, just so I could say I did it. The river starts 150 miles or so up in Alberta Canada north of the Idaho Montana border. There is a meadow, and a spot where a log helps span part of the little stream, making it a pretty easy leap, even when you have on your waders.

The native trout there are energetic and finicky about what they eat. They don’t fall for just any old fake bug floating down the stream. The fish up there eat plump, natural, bite sized salmon flies that emerge from the water in the afternoon on sunny days come June. Salmon flies are not an easy meal for even the best of fish to catch. Salmon flies are good fliers and don’t stay long on the surface of a stream. The fish are hearty, and good fighters as a result.

I love that kind of fishing! You can get up late and come home early.

Fisherman up there, drink pure Canadian whiskey. If they do water it down it is with water right out of the stream!

The water and people up there are clean, good, and pure, naturally!
Life springs forth the same way.

Just a month or so ago I went up on the Columbia glacier as close as a regular guy like me can get to the headwaters of the Columbia River. From that little spot the Columbia flows more than 1200 miles down hill to the Pacific Ocean. A lot happens in that effort. It invites, Idaho, Washington, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, and Utah to add to its Canadian waters. The Kootenay, the Okanagan, the Wenatchee, Spokane, Snake, Deschutes, Willamette, Cowlitz, and the Lewis rivers all chip in to make the Columbia system drain some 259,000 square miles of the western part of North America.

Several kinds of anadromous fish make their living there. Salmon, Cut Throat and huge ocean going Rainbow Trout pass by great dams that have been put in their way. They swim through water that has been so dirtied that you can’t even see through it.

Up river fish and fisherman make their way through life like they ought to, wild, and free to be what they are. They live without much help or harm, from anything or anyone. It's uncivilized natural law, unfettered self-supporting, uncluttered, clean and real. No waiting in line to get what’s “left.”

Now, downstream is another thing altogether.
Eleven hundred miles downstream. One hundred miles up the Columbia River from the Pacific Ocean is the big fat civilized city of Portland, Oregon.
Big city fish and folks don’t live quite so proud down there.

I live there in Portland Oregon. I try the best I can to be outdoors, to do what’s “right”.
I fish when I can, and do my best to make an honest living there.

One day I read an advertisement in the “Oregonian”, saw a television commercial on KGW, and heard a great song on “KINK” radio about drinking Sangria wine. I figured it was my time to try it.

What you do is you mix a bunch of store bought spices and frilly dilly stuff altogether with some cheap wine and as much 151 proof rum as you can stomach. Then you heat up the whole mess in a microwave or something to make it good to the taste. It ain't exactly the good pure beverage they drink upstream from here. Of course nether is the water. Things down here are civilized!

It was a real cold day the first time I drank Sangria wine. The eyelets on my fishing pole would have frozen solid had I been fishing. The more Mike and I drank, the more difficult it became to navigate the mighty Columbia to the marina in Portland Harbor. A good place to drink a whole lot of Sangria is in the city, at anchor in the wintertime. We dropped the anchor off the bow of the “TJ” and went below to see if perhaps we could find some good in the day and later some shut eye to clear up the confusion.

The Portland Harbor was known as the Columbia slough for the longest time till some developers decided to rename it and sell property along the banks to city people that didn’t know any better.

About 5 decades ago a whale swam all the way up the Columbia River some one hundred miles from home and turned right into the harbor slough, He languished there for awhile interested in all the free stuff the Portland people were throwing in the water for him to eat.
Finally the “good life” got to be too much for him. He almost died from the experience. So he turned tail and ran back to the sea having realized it was better to fend for himself than feed from the public slough, lose his self respect, dignity, and in the end his own life.

I woke up with an awful headache from that citified Sangria brew. My stomach was not happy with the mix and it volunteered to pitch what was left in me over the side of the boat.
When I let fly the mix, the chum that was created got a rise from some kind of city fish malingering below.

I guessed at first the fish was habituated to the flotsam and jetsam boats sent over board when they were stuck there unable to negotiate the entrance of the marina like we were.

It was still awful cold and the sun had not yet rose but there were fish to be had and I had an inside line on how to get them. I went below for my pole and an old rotten hot dog. I knew I still had one left in an ice cooler brought from Jantzen Beach about a month earlier.

I figured the chumming I did ought to be about enough to fool those fish into thinking something good and stinky was about to happen!
I hooked up the hot dog for bait the best I could without actually touching it. I hung a lantern on the life stanchion at the back of the boat. I sent my lash up a flying out into the dark, heard the bait plunk into the river, and settled in for the rest of the night to nurse the balance of my hangover.

In about a minute I felt a definite tug on the line so I began my retrieve. To my delight it was a great big five-pound fish! A great big fat old pale white fan tailed “gold fish.” Yep! a real live fan tailed gold fish.

You can win goldfish when they are real little at the Multnomah county fair by the Lloyd Center. If you pitch a ping-pong ball in their bowl just right they let you take them home for your mom to take care off. Somebody probably thought the little carp was dead or the kid forgot about him so they flushed him down the toilet and right out into the Columbia Slough.

The Goldy had made his home at the outflow effluent end of one of the many sewer lines that flow directly into the Columbia River. In Portland when you flush your toilet, depending on what part of town you are in you send a little bit of big city civilization right down the pipe and into what’s left of the natural world.

The big fat fellow did not fight at all. He just turned over, belly up and came on the boat without as much as a flop. Why should he try? He was a big city fish entitled to life as it is doled out.
Be damn the standards set by his unsophisticated small time upriver cousins.

Now; it may not have been the biggest fish I've ever caught, and it certainly wasn't the proudest moment I’ve ever had, but, one must admit it is a memorable event to catch and release a great big five pound FAN TAIL GOLD FISH!
We took a picture of it with a little Polaroid and kept the picture on board for a long time. By and by the shinny stuff that makes the picture wore off in the high humidity and cold weather and in the end all proof of it might have been lost all together.

It now exists in my head, as all good fish stories should.
A high-minded memory, better than a picture, and more rewarding for what was learned.

Every once in awhile we cruise a little too close to shore by the out flow effluent of the sewer pipe by the marina and we see him there enjoying his entitlements with the rest of the good citizens of the big fat City of Portland.