WALK SOFTLY AND carry a sharp hook.
These were the words of Terry Crane, a dark and demure derelict I met on the East Fork Dickey one misty Monday morning.
If not for the bubble gum wrappers he left behind like a trail of bread crumbs, I would’ve thought he was an apparition.
The way he appeared and reappeared along the remote river’s banks, it was as if he were set upon the terrain to torment me.
First, there would be a tiny kerplunk downriver followed almost immediately by the sight of a steelhead struggling about the rushing rapids.
Within minutes, a figure covered head to toe in camo would lurch out of the shadows, unhook the flailing fish and whisper in its ear.
And like that, he was gone, blending back into the brush like some backwoods Kaiser Söze.
Only sporadic rustling sounds exiting the second-growth timber let me know he was still around.
Follow the Bubble
Soon my eyes no longer looked toward the river, but were instead affixed on the forest around me.
I had to track this mysterious man down by any means possible.
So I got down on my belly and began to crawl.
Special circumstances call for special measures, sometimes even the discarding of one’s dignity.
This was obviously one of those occasions.
I came upon the first wrapper about 100 yards downriver: Double Bubble, original flavor.
I gave it a sniff.
Why? I can’t tell you. It just felt like the right thing to do.
I detected a foreign odor but could not identify it.
Undeterred, I crawled on.
Within 20 yards I ran into another Double Bubble wrapper, then another and another.
Some were original flavor, others apple or watermelon.
All the while, I could hear fish after fish getting reeled in from different locations downriver.
My blood began to boil.
A scofflaw catching all of my fish without even a wink or a nod?
This was beyond the pale.
Sniffed out
It wasn’t until the last wrapper, watermelon, that I finally caught sight of the gigantic man sitting with his legs crossed under an evergreen.
He was rigging his hook for another cast, a piece of Double Bubble in his right hand with the wrapper behind him.
Puzzled, I watched as he slid a hook through the middle of the gum and dabbled a few drops of fly floatant on it.
“I see you picked up my wrappers,” he said without turning around. “Thanks.
“Now I have no idea how to get back home.”
I was speechless.
“Terry Crane . . . no relation to Frasier,” he said, a slight giggle coming from his 6-foot-5, 225-pound frame.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he went on, piercing my ears with each word (his high-pitched voice would make Mike Tyson cringe).
“How is this fella catching all of these fish with a piece of bubble gum?”
His voice trailed off as he crawled toward the river, rod in hand, “Walk softly and carry a sharp hook.”
It was a piece of piscatorial advice I’d heard many times before.
But not from someone wielding Double Bubble and red Gamakatsu hooks.
And certainly not from someone who looked like Hulk Hogan and sounded like a backup singer for Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Clearly, this guy didn’t get many visitors.
“I always liked Double Bubble,” he said in between grunts, a steelhead already thrashing about at the end of his line.
“I liked original flavor after I woke up, apple after breakfast and watermelon before lunch. It’s the same with steelhead.”
I was confused.
A thousand questions flew through my head.
How could nobody else know about this?
How did a hulking hick from Dickey discover what amounts to fish crack?
Should I immediately go back to Port Angeles and buy 1,000 shares of Tootsie Roll stock, then tell everyone about it?
Yet all that came out of my mouth was one question.
“So what do you whisper to the fish?”
He pulled the steelhead out of the river, a chrome bright fish that had to weigh at least 12 pounds, and finally looked at me with his sunken eyes
“Come over and listen,” he said.
I crawled over and put my ear next to the fish.
“April Fools’.”
________
Matt Schubert is the outdoors and sports columnist for the Peninsula Daily News. His column regularly appears on Thursdays and Fridays. He can be reached at matt.schubert@peninsuladailynews.com.