On this fine autumn day, I am sitting on my couch waiting for the Notre Dame game to start. It's raining/snowing outside and I wish that I could run out for some quick bass pond action. Unfortunetely, I went out last night and drank entirely too much while watching my St Louis Cardinals put down the Phillies and punch their card for the NLCS. Today I feel somewhere between death and doom.
Thinking about the fall weather, Notre Dame and Bass got me thinking about Saturdays back when I was younger. I grew up in southwest Michigan and less than 10 minutes from South Bend, Indiana. I never really dug the whole moldy king salmon fishing, nor the people who participated in it. So early fall meant three things:
1) Notre Dame Football
2) Smallmouth Bass
3) Maple Bacon Wrapped Pork Chops
This time of year was always filled with hope. It was just before the camo-clad rednecks would leave the salmon rivers for their tree stands, and also before Notre Dame had a chance to lose too many games. So I would be filled with hope of future steelhead and Notre Dame Football glory. In the meantime, I would focus my time on the stretch of the St Joseph River that runs through downtown South Bend.
Even though access and fishing was good, we would usually not see another person. So we would pack up the boat with with a cooler full of beer, a little grill and a radio to listen to the game. The river, despite flowing through downtown, was always beautiful in it's fall colors and interesting architecture surrounding it. We would listen to the game and catch smallmouth. The river flows right pass the stadium, so we could hear the crowd erupt as we listened to the play on the radio. At halftime, we would fill the air with the smell of maple-bacon wrapped pork chops and put a CCR tape into the boombox. The sound of the Notre Dame band roaring back to life less than a mile away, would signal that it's time to turn off "Lookin' Out My Back Door" and get back to the smallmouth and Irish football.
No comments:
Post a Comment