Grumpy and Schnoz Explore

I thought that for once when Schnoz called, there would be no trouble.  After all, it  was after Christmas, trout season wouldn’t open for 72 days and 11 hours, and it was a beautiful winter day in the mid thirties with no snow or ice in the forecast.

“How about if I pick you up in half an hour?” he said. “It’s a beautiful day and your wife called my wife to ask me to get you out of the house.”

“Hm.  My wife said the same thing to me.  Okay, half an hour.”

“It’s a perfect day to scout out some new fishing spots. Everybody knows all my old secret spots.  I’ve got my DNR maps, a GPS that still works, and … drumroll, please, a new smartphone Huldy got me for Christmas that can mark locations.”

“Hey, that’s the same I got.”

“Yeah, but mine also has this great new feature.  You know how I lose things? Well, with this gizmo, there’s a ‘find-my-phone’ option.  If I can’t remember where I put it, I just look on my computer, open up the file, and it shows me where my phone is. I can also talk to it, and it will tell me where I am if I ever get lost.”

“If?”

“Okay, when.”

He pulled up in front of my house like an anxious teen, horn blowing, engine revving, and door locks clicking open and closed and open.

He tossed a map at me, and I saw that he had marked three locations not too far away with florescent sticky notes and yellow highlighted lines marking the access roads. I couldn’t help pounding the dash and pointing ahead and saying, “Go, go!” like we were a getaway car, which in midwinter-cabin-fever-stage, we were.

The first one was near the end of a blue stream line with a note Schnoz had penciled in his barely readable scrawl: BROOK TROUT HEADWATERS, PROBABLY NARROW BUT NEAR STREAMHEAD AND GOOD ON HOT JULY DAY. The route was circuitous, past farmers’ houses, unmarked woods, over two gravel roads, and down a crooked lane mostly used by tractors, if the ruts were a true sign.  It took us half an hour, each minute increasing the anticipation as if it were Christmas morning again, with the childhood hope that somehow one parent managed to talk the other into a real Red Ryder BB gun. I double checked the map, looked at a bent, rusty crossroads sign, and pointed to a small bridge ahead.

“That has to be it,” I said. “We just crossed Lost Lane, and we haven’t come to Dead Pine Hill.”

Schnoz slowed the car and stopped just before of the bridge. I was out before him, hurried to get the first look, slipped in one muddy rut after another, but managed to get to the bridge first.  I looked over the right side of the crooked, wooden guardrail, while Schnoz took the left.

“Grumpy, my side’s dry,” Schnoz moaned.

“Mine too. Dry as sandpaper. The rocks don’t look like they’ve had any moss since the Crustacious Period. The road has more water in it than this gully.”

“I don’t understand. The DNR map says-” Schnoz said, but didn’t finish.  I looked up ahead, and things got worse. A piece of heavy grading equipment was parked squarely in the middle of the rutted trail.  It looked like it had been there for two years. We slouched back to the car, too disappointed to care about the mud and lost time. Schnoz took a quick look at the map while I drew a  skull and crossbones on the place where the road crossed the blue line.  Schnoz started to back up, but after twenty yards or so, lost patience and veered toward a fence post so he could turn around in four or five tries. I knew we were in trouble when I felt the car drop as if it had gone down a stairs, and instead of the sound of wet gravel, all I heard was a tire slurping.  I got out to look. It was bad – mud up to the lugnuts.

“Can you rock it?” I shouted.

Schnoz tried, but all he did was dig in one spinning wheel deeper than before.

“Push!” he said.

I went to the back, lifted the bumper half an inch, and pushed as much as my Christmas weight would afford.  The result was a spray of mud that splattered me a camo brown from the waist down.  After a few Biblical words beginning with a “d” and some non-Biblical ones beginning with an “sh” or “f,” I looked ahead to the farmhouse at the top of the hill.  It was obviously abandoned, probably in the Dust Bowl days. No help there.

We argued for twenty minutes about whose fault this was, the planner, the map-reader, the driver, or the pusher, and then wondered how we’d get out of this mess.

“Use your new wonder-phone to call a tow truck,” I said.

“I haven’t learned how to use the directory or find numbers.  Do they still have operators? I don’t want to call 911 because of what happened the last time.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.  “Don’t call 911.”

Just then, miracle occurred.  I heard a rumbling from the other side of the hill, and in a moment, an actual tow truck bore down on us, its old rustiness as welcome as cold beer.

“Need some help?” the driver said, and then without waiting for a response, pulled ahead of us, got out, and hooked a tow line to the car’s frame. In thirty seconds he had us back on the rutted trail. Schnoz found an old blanket in his trunk and covered my seat and the footwell so the mud that wasn’t dripping off my pants and into my shoes would have somewhere else to go.

“Now just keep backing up the road until you get to that gate. Then you can turn around,” the driver said.  He was a young guy and looked like a linebacker with a bad beard.

“How much for the help?” Schnoz said, worriedly.

“No charge.  You see, I’ve done real well on investing and I own my own island down in the Keys. I just do this for the fun of it, you know, helping people, and I check this road every day. You know what fishermen and hunters are like.”

“Yeah, we know,” I said.

A few minutes later we headed back to the last crossroads.  We turned left to follow Schnoz’s marked treasure map, while the tow truck driver just pulled into a farmer’s gateway, stopped, and put his phone up to his ear.

“Okay,” I said, “this next one says, ‘Classic trout water – meadow, riffles, pools, runs, open for casting, and a DNR easement with the farmer.'”

In twenty minutes and two turnarounds, we were there, and the stream before us truly looked like a gem.  Schnoz pulled to the side of the road and we looked down a steep embankment to a gate and fenced meadow, and beyond it, a riffle and pool alongside a single old oak that made it look like a postcard.

“Jackpot!” Schnoz said as we got out and slid down the embankment to the barbed wire fence.

“Should we go over?” he said.  “Maybe we’ll see something in that pool.”

“No,” I said, pointing to a dozen large, dark masses slowly wending toward us out of the shadow of the oak. It was a herd of Black Angus, hulking, mean-looking beasts.

“Well, there’s no bull,” Schnoz said hopefully.

“Yeah, but in the spring there will be moms with calves. Do you know why there are no Black Angus in petting zoos?  Because they like to trample people.”

Schnoz sighed and we turned back to the car and stopped again. At eye level up the embankment, the right side of Schnoz’s muddy car was sinking as if his two right tires were going flat at the same time.

“It looks like you parked on a shoulder made out of oatmeal,” I said.

Schnoz crawled up the bank, slipping in mud and grass until he looked almost as dirty as I was.

“Push!” he said, getting into his car and starting the engine, but I had learned my lesson.  The right wheel spun and dug in and spun again until tire smoke covered the back of his car.  Schnoz’s head slumped into his arms wrapped around the wheel until his loud horn startled him.

“Use your horn to tap out an SOS,” I called.  “Three short beeps and three longs and three shorts again, or maybe it’s the other way around. Boy Scouts, remember?”

“Nobody knows Morse Code anymore,” he called back. Since I was already dirty, I sat down on the embankment and watched the cattle. Several snorted ominously. The horn had not bothered them at all. Before the winter chill bit into me, I heard a rumbling and another horn. It was the same tow truck headed toward us. When he pulled alongside, his window rolled down and the young, grizzled man called, “You guys are lucky I’m on my way home. You could be stuck out here until Memorial Day.”

As he had done before, he pulled ahead of us, ran his tow line, and winched us out of the rut.  Then he disconnected his hook and let us go, Schnoz called, “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Herbie.”

“You’re a good guy, Herbie,” Schnoz called. With a wave, Herbie rumbled on down the road.

“We should go home,” I said.

“We’re not going home until we find a new secret spot.”

“If Herbie knows about them, they can’t be secret spots,” I said.

Schnoz got his stubborn look, which means his jaw jutted out until it almost matched his nose. He slammed his car door, grabbed the map from me, and spun away. I realized why Huldy is so good at getting Schnoz angry.  When he gets mad, he’s like a cartoon character, and you can’t help but chuckle, but not too loudly. A mile down the road and two lefts later, he found his spot. It looked promising, but I refused to get out of the car. Schnoz scrambled down another embankment, tiptoed close to a small stream, turned to me with his hands up, and said, “Ta-Da!”

I just shook my head. He walked around a broken stump to look at another run, and then he simply seemed to disappear.  I heard three short whistles, three long ones, and three short ones again. I went down the embankment and saw that Schnoz appeared to be sitting down, only he wasn’t sitting down, he was up to his knees in mud.

“Herbie!” I called a couple of times, but there was no Herbie, and then five minutes later I heard the familiar rumble and saw him snaking his tow line down the embankment to pull out another derelict.  He was laughing hysterically.

It was a silent, muddy ride home. Huldy had spread a tarp and a change of clothes for each of us on the back porch. We could hear our wives inside laughing, not exactly laughing, more like snorting, more like Black Angus moms. It was quiet for a moment, and then Huldy called out, “How’s Herbie?” and then they snorted some more.

“You go in first,” I said.

“No, you.”  I dug into my muddy, wet pocket for a coin to flip. Marriage is a hell of a way to go through life, even if you have smartphones.