Boys and Dogs,,,,,,,,,,,,,Fictionalized Version

Ricky hiked up his jeans. He walked out of the house, looking over his shoulder, as usual, to see if Doris was watching. She was busy clipping ads from the Sun and thinking about the night. Bingo in Bremerton might bring her closer to her dream.

All Ricky wanted was a candybar or some bubblegum. He stuffed the gunnysack into the bike basket. He checked to see if the wood bin was filled, then opened the garage door to look into the freezer compartment. Even though he was only ten, his responsibility for family meals included shooting ducks and deer and catching enough fish for Friday meals. The freezer compartments were completely filled with black bass, venison, and pintails. A couple of out of season geese and mallards completed the list of meals he felt were needed to keep the family until next year.

He slipped the kick stand up and hopped up on the soft, cool seat and headed over the graveyard hill to the store. Ricky's mom could be heard in the soft evening air, sighing and saying, "Where is that stupid kid?"


Bessy was standing behind the counter at the Post Office when Ricky placed the dime, two Jefferson nickels, and a couple of pennies on the copper sheathed surface upon which many postal transactions had taken place since the early 1850s. Dan Evan's grandfather had been the first postal person to work here and Ricky knew all that history because his Grandma Daisy once was courted by Governor Evan's dad. She was a fetching young redhead when she started business college in the Smith Tower in Seattle in 1918. Dan's dad was a student then at the University of Washington. He had his eye on young Daisy, daughter of a Liverpool banker who braved the new world only to be disenfranchised by his father who, in disgust, left his wayward son a comb for his only inheritance.

Ivy House, back in England, had been a showcase and filtering stopover for all who did the Queen's bidding at the time. Young Phil had gone to Port Townsend early in the 1890s and sent his brother an urgent letter that read in part, " Dear Henry, Young and beautiful Irish girls await. Gold. Tall trees. Riches. And Indian girls lavish pots of cockles alive."

Henry was on the next boat.

Daisy was born in 1902 in the up and coming mill town of Port Gamble and the family was well established as a friend of the Indians and somewhat a friend of the Opium delusioned upper class who ran the mill, store, and assorted bars, gambling halls, and even a playhouse or two.

Henry, a proud actor and black face comedian, sang and danced with the best fof them on weekends. He tallied lumber on the mill docks with the Jones boys who loaded the cut timbers onto barges and barks. The Indian boys were strong as hell, he often proclaimed in his neat ledger books.........but at night, beneath towering Douglas firs and broad sweeping branched maples, he and the Toms, Fultons, and Pursers.........people of brown skin and wisdom beyond belief..........he and the elders, he and the youth........He, Henry Cotter and the Indian leaders, would scheme of a day when the Popes, Talbots, and Kellers would leave them all alone to dig clams, enjoy children, and live a peaceful life on the shores of Port Gamble Bay.

The Bay...........tranquil then. Tranquil now?





This was the sort of past Ricky knew and loved. The memory handed to him through story. And when Bessy handed him sheets of stamps, Ricky slipped his coins onto the copper sheathed counter to purchase tiny pieces of history.

One day, Ricky was walking from the Post Office to the store to buy the latest copy of Field and Stream. He was excited to buy the issue because it promised a story about the recent earthquake along the famed Madison River in Montana. Apparently, a mountain slipped down at night, burying people and river, trout and bears. Ricky wanted to know more.

Eventually, the fishing magazines would publish a story about how the Madison was "Better than Ever" and Ricky dreamed nightly of girls handing out fishing flies to hardy boys willing to fish troubled waters.

It would be many years and many miles before Richy made the trek to the earthquake epicenter. When he finally reached the destination, he would be transformed in ways only Nick Adams might appreciate........Lunker Browns greeted him as did nice Yellowstone Cutthroat. His labrador applauded each and every trout, then dove into the brush, only to retrieve a skull or antler from a long dead elk or whitetail so foolish as to overwinter along the banks of a flood and quake prone river.

On his first trip to the Madsion, Ricky unwrapped his sandwich. The fresh fragrance of sweet onion drifted up and away from the waxed paper and much, too much of the avadado clung to the damp edges of the wrap. Ricky bit big and hard into the tomato and cream cheese encrusted lunch, then took a long swig of root beer to quench a thirst born of too long a drive from Missoula.

His three weight sat waiting up against a twisted tangle of barb wire and fence post, willow and sweet grass. A Canada goose flew up on the other side of the river and a mountain bluebird scolded, gently from a nearby grave marker. Elk wandered high above the distant peaks within the Bob Marshall Wilderness and a Prairie Falcom shot past as if to mark its territory prior to the evening caddis hatch.

ricky brreathed in all the memory of family and so called friends, strung his silk line, and tied on a lighter than usual tippet, attached to a stiff chuck of riverfound mono that served as a transitional shooter between silk and clear leader.

ricky preferred the term "l;eader" to tippet and taper just because he grew up far to the west where his first fish were rock cod and salmon, bull cod and lings, so tasty and so tough that he needed braided cuccyhunk to haul them up onto the dock planks near where his Grandpa cut old growth into timbers and where he learned to carve cedar into a herring rake to fetch bait for big kings and bright silver coho and humpies, just right to fill the freezer for his screaming mother, hell bent on making him her provider. Or, as she could only put it, "her so called social security".

When the eighteen inch rainbow slammed his fly that first trip to the Madison, Ricky knew he had died and gone to fish nirvana. It was much like when he caught his first truly big chinook on Grandpa Walt's dock. The twenty pound king flopped around as Ricky kunked it on its head with a two by four. Then, he paraded it around to old Russell Fulton, Harry, and young Russ before displaying the golden sided salmon up in the carriage room where Pop worked ten hours each day, turning big trees into dimensional lumber.

Pop looked into the eye of that big salmon and smiled. Ricky took it home, fileted it, then placed each side into wax paper for his Gramma Daisy. He never shoed it to his mom. She was off to the bingo parlor in Bremerton. His Dad was building another speedboat in the garage.

By supper time, Ricky walked the heavy chunks of fish up past his Uncle Chuck's place and around the corner from Ida and Walt's bungalo. He snuck some peas from Enos's patch and left the fish in a white bucket on the porch just outside his Grandma's screen door.

Ricky then walked the mile back to his house, turned and tossed a tiny rock against Morris Fant's window. Morris opened the slider and slipped onto the roof. Hopping down onto the wet grass, Morris greeted his friend and the two boys went on down to the beach, lit a fire and toasted three marshmallows they snuck from the pantry earlier that day.

Long before their fathers and other millworkers awoke from much needed sleep, Morris and Ricky snuck back into their beds in the new england shacks.  they slept until the mill whistle blew, then got up to do it all over again.