I spent this past weekend at Quartz Mountain over in OK, camping and fishing along the river. I knew I was in for a trying weekend when I went to set up the tent and discovered the poles were not in the bag with it, nor were they anywhere else in my car. Sticking the camera's tripod and a folding chair inside was the best I could come up with.
I fished for about an hour using corn for bait, per local advice, but eventually got disgusted with the constant tangling of corn, hook, sinker, and bobber, and switched to a topwater crankbait lure for no other reason than I like to watch him skitter across the top of the water. With no expectations of catching anything, I was pleasantly surprised to hook a handful of small perch. Now I have never caught much of anything, unless you count the numerous boots, tires, used condoms, snakes and turtles, and assorted trash that I've snared in the past...that BMX bicycle was pretty cool though... but fish have always evaded me and so I really had no idea what to do with them once I caught them beyond tossing them back and hoping for another one to come my way. Sort of like my dog chasing my neighbor's SUV. After a while I tired of this and headed back to my camp.
On the way there, some kid offered me a trout she'd caught. Figuring I might as well learn sometime, I took it and headed off to attempt to clean my first fish. I'd seen the pictures online, read the instructions. It looked easy enough. Stick the knife in it's butt and cut towards the gills, then cut the horseshoe looking thingy and it all pulls out. Except, I must have cut something wrong. The guts remained firmly attached, and the only thing I pulled out was his jaw. Additional cuts freed the gills out, but the guts remained hanging by the intestine. This was getting messy. I finally just sliced off the tail, and freed the guts from the body. Then there was the matter of the bloodline, which the guy online made dissappear with a simple scrape of his thumbnail. Not so mine. Many many thumbnail scrapes, a fork scraping, knife scraping, and digging with some pliers later, I had 99% of it out. One more cut removed the head, and at this point I realized why I should have left the tail on. Scraping the scales off would have been a lot easier with something to hold onto. Then I remembered, I was supposed to fillet it. Now what did that guy online say? Cut from the belly to the backbone? Or was it the backbone down to the belly? I opted for the backbone cut. So much for being easy. A nice hack job later, I had done little more than peeled the skin off one side. Then I remembered what one fellow said. Flour the fish, toss it in the pan in some butter, and once it's cooked you can pull the backbone and the whole skeleton comes out in one yank. COOL.
One floured fish fried up and one yank later, and I had 3 backbones and a couple of bones out. It took a few more yanks to pull out the skeleton, and one touch to realize the thing wasn't fully cooked. Back into the skillet to fry some more. By this point I was really getting hungry. The butter and fried flour coating sure smelled good. Eventually it finished cooking and I eagerly pulled off a chunk to try it out.
And just as eagerly spit it back out. Blargh. The texture was similar to what I'd imagine a fried ziploc baggie would have, were it dipped in fish oil first. Luckily I had the foresight to pack a cooler with hamburger fixings.
The rest of the night was fairly uneventful save for the rampages of 5 boys from a neighboring camp, which mercifully ended the instant I told one of them I had just been released from prison. I crawled into my droopy tent, watched a movie on my DVD player, and went to sleep.
I did not stay asleep, however. My back pain kicked in around midnight, so I popped a couple of hydrocodone to ease it up. I vaguely remember waking up again at some point and taking two more, and I clearly remember waking up at 6:11 with a screaming back to take two more, which must have finally done the trick because I didn't wake up again until 11:30. That was when I realized that 3000 miligrams of hydrocodone, in a 6 hour period, on an empty stomach, was probably a really bad idea.
I staggered out at the crack of noon feeling like I'd just downed an entire case of Boone's Farm. Everything was swimmy, including my stomach. I barely remember packing camp and heading back for home. To say I was looped was an understatement. I was hammered, fried, stoned, thrashed, pickled, and bombed. What I do clearly remember, however, was the realization hitting me like a tax audit that I was about to puke, and I had very little time before I did so. The car slid in sideways as I braked it hard onto the grass, and I bolted out and around to the passenger side just in time to remove the last bits of undigested hydrocodone from my system.
Now I'm not the sort who desires assistance when I'm bowing to the porcelain god. I don't want someone to help hold my hair out of the way, or rub my back. I just want to be left alone. Sadly that was not quite an option on the side of the road by the park. I can only say I hope none of the passerbys had weak stomachs, because I haven't been that sick since that roadside party my freshman year of college.
This pretty much continued the entire trip home. Drive a while, stop and "ruminate" for a while. Eventually the purging stopped, but the paint sniffing feeling remained. I know I watched a Jet Li movie with my boyfriend that evening but I can barely remember it.
We're going camping/fishing next weekend, on the condition that we bring an air mattress and some of those hand warmer things to slip under my back should it wake up and begin to sing again. I'm leaving the 'scripts at home, ugh.
Diesel - $3.99-$4.09
