Gut Reaction

We saved shoeboxes all year for our trip to Mammoth Lakes each summer. It took my dad, an engineer, to somehow arrange our belongings like a real life Jenga in the back of our car the night before our drive. It all fit perfectly with not a smidgen of room to spare. It was almost as if my sister’s yellow portable 8 track player was built to wedge in-between my bright red tackle box and my mom’s hard vinyl cosmetic bag. Packing with that kind of precision really is a thing of beauty.

Before sunrise we would pile into our Country Squire station wagon and slip out of town. My stomach would be full of butterflies. It is the same feeling I get now, anytime I leave the house before light to go on a trip somewhere. My parents manned the front seats, pilot and co-pilot. My brother, sister and I would sit in the backseat. They each had a window and I had “the hump” in the middle. We weren’t the kind of siblings that could snuggle up and enjoy the ride together. They were older than I was, by an amount significant enough to render me more of an annoyance than a cohort. They each had a door to lean against, a down jacket balled up under their nodding heads, and I had to sit bolt upright between them. If I dared slump over and touch them or cross into “their side” of the seat, I was dead. Sometimes I would get to sit on the front bench seat between my parents, which usually ended in me passed out across my mom’s lap. I distinctly remember a dream I had while asleep up there when I was something like eight. I dreamed that we were on the very same road trip, and I had wandered behind a diner where we had stopped for lunch. In my dream, there was a giant pool which I promptly fell in…as you do. Of course, I notice that the pool has a shark in it (scarred for life after seeing Jaws the summer before) and I start swimming towards the side. My sister then turns on jets that prevent me from reaching the side of the pool, leaving me hanging in peril with the giant shark. All of this may further illuminate why I wasn’t sitting in the backseat with my siblings. Adding to the ambiance of the drive was the fact that my older sister was highly prone to car sickness and a prolific car-barfer. While I don’t remember witnessing the actual retching in the car, possibly due to my tender young mind blocking the activity, I do remember the smell. Oh, do I remember the smell. All eight hours of it.

We stayed in the same cabin year after year. It was named the “Pot O’ Gold” on Rainbow Court. It slept twenty something people, and meeting us up there would be my father’s parents, his sisters, sometimes his cousins, and all the children belonging to those various relatives. I can still conjure the smell in that cabin. It was a distinct combination of pine, fishing gear, and man-made upholstery fabric. Walking in, the light would be streaming through the windows of the A frame in long, careful lines, glittering dust timidly descending in each beam. With the comings and goings in the cabin, there was a near constant tinkling of spinners on the fishing poles belonging to each person. We all had poles. To be part of the family, it was a requirement that you fish as soon as you could master the pincher grasp as an infant. My first trip out on the lake was in my car seat at six weeks old. My family doesn’t kid around about fishing.

There were three shifts each day. One group would hit Lake Mary before dawn each morning. I was always in this group. It was my favorite. We would spend two or three hours trawling the lake, waving as we passed cousins…uncles…grandparents in other boats. It was often cold, but always successful, bringing a bounty of fish each morning, mostly Rainbow trout, but sometimes Brown or Brooke.

Second shift was still-fishing at midday. This always involved lunch on the water, usually a salami sandwich, soda and some kind of candy. My mom favored Abba Zabba bars. I’m not sure how, but I always managed to eat despite the Zeke’s garlic fish bait and salmon eggs under my fingernails. I suppose that stuff doesn’t seem quite as distracting at eight years old. Still-fishing was tedious. Boring. I almost never caught anything. Sometimes, I would go with my grandparents. I would sit dejected on the middle perch in their boat. Once in a while my grandfather would lean over ask me to try using his fishing pole since mine didn’t seem to be very lucky. Miraculously, that always did the trick. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I thought back and realized that he always handed me his fishing pole when he knew there was a fish on the line. Thinking about that now, as a parent myself, ruins me every time.

The third shift was at dusk. I never went. It was basically meant for cocktails on the lake. It’s probably a mystery best left alone, since I’m sure my grand fantasy of my parents yucking it up on the lake with thermoses of booze could quite possibly be better than the real thing. Almost certainly.

The combination of all that fishing and all those fishermen led to a huge amount of fish cleaning done by my older siblings and aunt every night at the kitchen sink. It was a disgusting job, and not a few dry heaves were scattered throughout the process. Someone, at some point, decided to start saving the guts.

This is where the shoeboxes come in.

It was the brainchild of my grandfather, my father, and my older brother. Each night, we would take one of the shoeboxes and line it with plastic wrap. Next, we poured the day’s worth of fish guts into the shoebox. My older sister and aunt took it from there. They took the box and wrapped it in lovely gift paper. Once in a while, they would tear the corner off a dollar bill and stick it under the edge of the lid to give the impression that it was a gift box stuffed full of money. It was impressive camouflage.

Since the cabin we stayed in was located on a cul-de-sac, our own street was out of the question. There was, however, another street running behind the cabin with just a small, sloping section of woods between our cabin and the street. You had a perfect, yet not obvious, view of that street from the back deck of the “Pot O’ Gold”.

After dinner, while the adults were sipping Manhattans on the deck, the kids would slink through the woods and quickly, quietly deposit the package on the road, and race back through the trees. Some of them would hide behind trees or in rotted out stumps or rolled up in a hammock. Then, we would wait. It never took long.

A car would drive by, slow down, pass the box, and then stop. Sometimes, they would back up. Sometimes, someone would get out of the car and investigate. They would look around. They would look from all angles at the package. Once in a while, they would nudge it with one daring toe. Inevitably, they would pick it up, dash back to the car and take off. At this point, we would collapse in laughter and congratulate ourselves on a job well done. Then, we would race back to our hiding places and watch them circle the block over and over again. For hours.

Later, our devilry escalated when my dad rigged the box, using rubber bands on the undersides, so that when the lid was lifted off, the sides slammed down delivering the payload of fish guts onto the lap and into the car of the person that picked it up. We went to bed before that car stopped circling.



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