Oh, Those Great Balls O’ Fire!
Fishing my way through adolescence in the trout streams and lakes of the Sierra Nevada, I burned through an impressive number of green-labeled jars of Pautzke’s Balls O’ Fire salmon eggs. The “soft but satisfying” red eggs were so deadly on rainbows, browns and brookies that I rarely used anything else.
The small wild rainbows that used to live in the creek behind our house loved Pautzke’s eggs and so did the larger ones below the powerhouse in the main river. At the local trout pond, I used to pin a mini marshmallow to my hook to float my Balls O’ Fire above the weeds were the planters could see (and devour) them. And, every summer on the family campout, I’d absolutely lay waste to the truck trout that would get dumped under the bridge on our favorite creek.
Pautzke’s was my trout kryptonite all the way through high school, but in college, we began to drift apart. Suddenly, catching trout seemed a lot less interesting than chasing attractive co-eds and my fishing dropped off considerably. Of course, fishing got pushed even more towards the backburner when I got out of school, as jobs, marriage, mortgages and real life in general kicked in.
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The Healing Power of Fishing
July 22, 2004 by JD
Filed under Fishing Stories
As 10-year-old Rodney looked on with fantastic anticipation, the giant salmon was hoisted onto the lodge’s scale. For a couple of tense seconds, the red needle bounced around - and then there was a huge cheer from the assembled crowd when it finished dancing and finally came to rest at 42 pounds.
Hanging there in the warm glow of the Alaskan midnight sun, the great fish was as long as the pint-sized angler was tall. Camera flashes popped all around and little Rodney’s grin was as wide as the river. A few feet away, the kid’s grandma was wearing the most brilliant smile I’d ever seen. Watching the happy scene, I found myself wishing that somebody from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) had been there to see Rodney basking in the delight of catching the biggest salmon that the lodge had seen all season. A few days earlier, when Rodney stepped off the plane to visit the Alaskan outback, I overheard somebody ask him where his father was. The kid said that his dad had been killed in a logging accident only three weeks prior. Then, his grandma - who had just lost her only son - got off the plane and started sobbing.