Home on the Range

One Hundred Sixteen Bullheads and One Colander My brother Gene and I were best playmates—always scheming new diversions on our prairie farm. We could always fish for bass, bluegills, and bullheads in small dams nearby, and occasionally we did. I can’t remember Dad ever fishing; it was Mom who taught us to put a worm on a hook, cast it into the water with a bamboo pole and watch the red and white bobber for a nibble or a bite. That could sometimes a be a long wait. I was eleven and Gene nine the summer of 1954 when we had an unusual fishing adventure. A few hundred yards down the hill from our house was the pond—a stunning view from our house. Soil excavated from the dry creek had become the earthen dam that was filled by spring snowmelt and occasional heavy summer rains. Excess water flowed over a dirt spillway a little higher than the original path of the nameless creek. A few hundred feet downstream from this outlet, the water fell about six feet into the natural creek terrain. As it flowed over this drop-off, it began eroding the soil forming a gully. Dad invented and installed a solution he called the “trickle tube,” an elbow of two-foot diameter corrugated steel culvert material. Instead of rushing over the dirt bank, the water swirled into the tube’s vertical five-foot top section and gushed out of its three-foot horizontal bottom. It was fascinating to watch, and it worked—no more gully. But an unexpected side affect appeared: a small pool was created by the circling water coming out the bottom. It became a pool two or three feet deep and about twenty feet in diameter. Large in the spring, this pool evaporated over the summer leaving dry dirt. Gene and I enjoyed trying to catch frogs as long as the water was there. They would watch us coming, then jump in when we approached; we never caught a frog. On a late summer day, as this puddle was shrinking, we noticed there were many small fish in it. They had come over the spillway and were trapped. If we couldn’t catch frogs, maybe we could catch the fish. Instead of poles and hooks we borrowed Mom’s kitchen colander. Mom may not have understood what we were going to do with it, but she let us have it. She had two younger children to take care of, so we were on our own that afternoon. Barefoot, wearing cutoff jeans and no tops, we entered the water with the colander as our net. The pool was so small and there were so many fish they couldn’t avoid us. The more we tromped in the water the muddier it got. It became impossible to see the fish and hard for them to see us. Surely the oxygen became scarce in the muddy water, and any fish we missed probably died a little sooner than they would have, waiting for the puddle to dry up. The fish who had come down the trickle tube were young, most not over six inches long. They were bullheads, a small variety of scaleless, bony catfish with sharp protective protrusions on either side of their mouths—the cat whiskers that give the species its name. Picking them up with bare hands was an invitation to be punctured, and it happened many times that day. When we were finished, we counted one hundred-sixteen. We had been successful and had something to brag about to cousins and young uncles at church the next Sunday. When it was time to take our bounty home, the water was so murky we had no idea where the colander was. We searched frantically, then reluctantly had to admit we’d lost it. Mom scolded us soundly, but nothing could be done. It was gone. While exuberantly fishing, neither of us remembered Mom’s rule that whoever catches the fish cleans them. We had expended much energy capturing them, then searching for the colander, and finally carrying home the buckets with our harvest. Now we had to cut off the heads, gut every fish, and wrap them in waxed paper—not nearly as much fun as catching them and even more tiring. Our kitchen had its kerosene refrigerator by that time, so none of the fish were wasted. We enjoyed many bullhead breakfasts, dinners, and suppers completely unaware that some people consider bullheads too bony for serious anglers. We considered ourselves serious enough! The next spring, to our surprise, the colander showed up again to retake its place in Mom’s kitchen. She had done without it during much of a year, and no replacement had been purchased. Its adventure had changed its appearance. The colander had settled into mud that dried around it, causing a chemical reaction in the aluminum. About half of it had blackened. Seasons came and went, and the taste of the fish left our mouths, but in Mom’s kitchen the discolored colander was used until she gave up housekeeping forty years later. Perhaps she had looked at it with amusement. Her little boys had grown up and gone off on their own, but the blackened utensil recalled their childhood adventure and all those bullheads she had to incorporate into days of family meals. Almost seventy years later, our sister Crystal, too young to have joined our adventure in 1954, uses the still-discolored colander in her own kitchen. Perhaps it reminds her of her brothers’ unusual experience or of how many little fish we all ate. But maybe she sees Mom’s colander just the way she has always remembered it.