Kill Phil Vol. II

Punxsutawney Phil, that nefarious, evil, smelly, mangy, disease-ridden, skuzzy varmint in Pennsylvania has once again gotten on my last nerve.

“Punx” could conceivably be pronounced “punks” and that’s what the rodent is: A punk, a lower-life form, something akin to a glob of primordial goo.

Six more weeks of winter. OK, so it’s the first week of February. We all know winter’s not going to end mid-March. Do we really need that trampy little refugee from a bad Bill Murray movie to come out of his burrow and tell us so? Down here, Punx would have been looking down the business end of a twelve-gauge and a camouflaged Cajun with a bottle of hot sauce in his pocket.

Punx. Gimme a break. Flea-bitten tramp.

I am slowly, but surely, losing my pea-brained mind. If it ain’t cold it’s raining, if it ain’t cold or raining I gotta be doing something else. I am making all the usual mistakes of mid-winter. Accumulating hiking and fishing gear; oiling reels and cleaning rods; changing fly lines that are over three years old; squinting over maps and foolishly, vainly, insanely hoping, “Maybe this weekend…”

And in the middle of all that, Punx crawls out of his mud pit to tell me there’s going to be six more weeks of winter.

I know that. OK? But an occasional pleasant day is not unheard of in this part of the world. In fact, before the forecast fell completely apart this week, it looked like Saturday might be it. My buddy and I had already planned a trip to the hills to do some exploring. Of course, as I sit and write this now, it is raining pitchforks and Gen. George Armstrong Custers outside the Banner windows. Kisatchie National Forest is getting the brunt of it, and well, bad as my cabin fever is, I know that the slightest tip of balance of my big behind would send me skidding feet-first down some red dirt slope straight into the trunk of a century-old pine tree, or at best, into Kisatchie Bayou. If there were any groundhogs in this neck of the woods, I’d probably break my leg in one of their burrows.

Last weekend, I built the first component of my skiff, the “stem” which is the bow piece where the sides meet. I carefully drew the dimensions onto a piece of cypress an inch thick, cut it on my band saw, then used that one as a pattern to cut another. These were laminated together for a total thickness of two inches, which I will this weekend plane down to the design specifications of an inch and three-quarters.

And that right there has been the bright spot of the entirety of 2010 so far.

Sometimes I think if I could talk to my father I’d chew him out but good. “My father’s curse” is how I’ve come to think of this addiction to woods and water and boats and sky and earth. The man didn’t get into football until he was retired and not physically able to do all the accursed things he passed on to me. Because of it, and while I take great pride in what the Saints have accomplished and applaud it tremendously, sitting through a football game would be even less pleasant than being flogged.

Due to my father’s curse, I don’t have that distraction of sitting through a game. Now Nick Stouff could entertain himself in other ways during the dead of winter: Play guitar, carve wood, make Indian jewelry, sketch, any number of highly artistic talents which he somehow didn’t pass a lick of down to me. I tried to play guitar a few years back, and though I learned a half dozen chords and can play The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald over and over again until you run screaming hysterically from the room with your ears bleeding, I just could never get the hang of being comfortable or any good at it. Nor did I inherit his talent with woodcarving or crafts making.

No, what he left me was the curse. The ruinous infatuation with fish and wooden boats and fly rods, as well as long, arduous, tortuous winters here at the end of the river basin where the water is muddy as Punx’ clairvoyance.

Someone once said, “Give a man a fish or a quail and you feed him for a day. Give a man a fly rod, a shotgun and a bird dog and he won’t amount to a damn.” Surely my father must have known this! He worked hard at the carbon black plant, repaired and built boats on the side for extra money, made his indigenous crafts for the shop he and my grandparents operated. All these endeavors had three purposes: Pay the bills, put some aside in the bank, and go fishing.

Could he have known? If so, he might have been more like Harry Middleton’s grandfather, when the 12-year-old boy asked granddad to teach him to fly fish. His grandfather wailed and fretted, vowing that never, ever would he corrupt the boy by doing such a horrid, hateful thing. He demonstrated how a fly rod can ruin a man by pointing to the crazy old Sioux Indian who lived a ways down Starlight Creek from them:

“And look at Elias Wonder! Yeah, take a gander at that buzzard. Forty years ago he was happy, generous, charitable, tall, dark and handsome. Then he took up the fly rod. Now consider him. Uglier than fresh road kill. Evil-eyed, cantankerous, sullen, mean. An anti-social misfit that causes a groundswell of spleen wherever he goes.”

So somebody shoot the rodent next time he sticks his nose out the ground. “Aww, but he’s so cute!” they say. Ugh. Gimme a break. Bogie’s cute. Kittens are cute. Babies are cute. Buffy’s cute. I would still not trust any of them to predict the duration of winter, nor give a goshdurn if they did, even if you asked me to wear a top hat.

So I watch the rain fall on the radar and outside the window; I remind myself, “It’s only February, you idiot,” but it doesn’t help. I am, like Elias Wonder, an anti-social misfit, a curmudgeon of the open air and hills and water, a meandering laureate of pines and creeks and swamps and bayous. All of which is a hoity-toity-sounding way of saying:

I am losing my mind and that stupid groundhog done got on my last nerve!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.