Author Archives: mrsslatersparrot

One of the great joys in my life is fishing in the ocean. I was lucky in that my parents always had a boat as I was growing up, so I was introduced to salmon fishing as a youngster as our family spent many wonderful holidays boating in the waters around Vancouver Island. My first job out of high school was guiding at a salmon fishing lodge on the remote BC coast, and I later spent fifteen years working in the commercial fishing industry, harvesting all manner of seafood from Prince Rupert to Victoria. These days my time on the sea is limited to couple of salmon fishing trips each summer. Now, most of us know that fishermen (and women) are often wonderful raconteurs, and many embellish their tales with colorful detail and dramatic touches that might not be entirely true but certainly add panache to the tale. As the old saw goes, “Every fisherman is a liar except for me and you…and I’m not so sure about you.” In that vein I wrote this prose poem about someone who is new to not only salmon fishing, but also to the art of talking about his new hobby. He’s a fairly quick study, but he just might be in over his head. (I’ll just add that I’ve actually experienced every fishing event recounted here. Really.) YOU CAN’T BULLSHIT A BULLSHITTER “I caught my first salmon today!” I said to the pretty barmaid. “I remember my first salmon,” she replied, “the spring jumped three times before I got it in the boat.” “I caught my first spring salmon last week, and it jumped three times!” I said to the young man filling the gas tanks for my boat. “I remember my first big spring salmon,” he replied, “it bent my rod…

So I buy a long distance phone card at Superstore when I’m grocery shopping last night because I had to use one once recently and they’re pretty handy things really especially considering work doesn’t want me racking up long distance charges on my work cell phone which is my only phone, right? So I get home and put the groceries away and start dinner because it’s late since I stayed late at work and then went grocery shopping and now I’m getting hungry and then I think hey I should call ____ using my new long distance phone card, right? So I pull the thing out and put on my glasses and hold the card under the lamp because the print on those things is super super tiny and I don’t know how they expect us old people with less than perfect vision can ever read the silly things and I dial the teeny tiny phone number on the card and then when I get to the prompt where they ask for the card number I’m all like what’s the card number maybe that number there so I plunk in the super long number on the card and then the prompt says I’m sorry that is an incorrect card number so I plunk it in again thinking I’d mis-plunked and it tells me the same damn thing, right? So I’m all like what the heck is this crap and I peer at the teeny tiny writing on the back of the phone card again and then read the instructions that I didn’t read the first time because the writing is like super super tiny and there it instructs me to scratch the back of the card in a certain spot and that will be my card number and so I…