JKEchelberry
01-17-2011, 11:19 AM
This story will most likely force the union to pull my tough guy card, but its been fun to write on Christmas break. Its probably a little predictible but hope you enjoy it anyway. If it meets with semi-decent reviews I'll post the rest of it over the next few weeks. Also parts of this may deal with adult topics, its all pretty tame, but just in case you offend easy.
Romance at 40
Since the divorce the very last thing on my mind was romance. Since my last romance ended with such a bang, women were not very high on my list of priorities. What was on my mind were nice quiet days fishing; doing lots of self-reflection. It’s odd isn’t it how sometimes the last thing on your mind can creep up on you.
Our story starts in a quite boring way, me sitting in my little canoe attempting to coerce a smallmouth bass into taking my lure. Like usual I was fishing the Gasconade River below the Adams Ford access. This has always been such a good spot for me because in places the water is so rough it doesn’t see much river traffic. It also holds some very fond memories of my youth for me as well, so it’s a great place to reflect and reminisce. In a day and a half I had only seen two obnoxious young men in a canoe, but besides that it was a perfect day. I was having good luck and had limited out on smallmouth, but was trying to catch a few more for fun and a few extra bait fish for the night’s cat fishing in the event that I had very good luck and ran out of goldfish.
So there I was minding my own business and the strangest thing came into view. It appeared to be two young women holding on to a Coleman cooler swimming down the river. My divorce may have left me a little on the sarcastic side; I don’t know, I may have always had it. Either way I couldn’t resist being a little flippant to the two girls.
I yelled in my most civil voice of course, you know ladies there are probably easier ways to get down the river, and you won’t scare the fish.
It appeared that this may not have been the right thing to say because both girls became very upset and started to cry quite severely. It came to me pretty quickly that this occurrence may not have been intentional and that these two may be in need of assistance. As I started to paddle over to them the only rational phrases that I could get out of them were; “Thank God”, “Please help us” and other equally unhelpful words.
After a few minutes I couldn’t take it anymore and finally had to scream “Shut the hell up both of you”. Now tell me what happened? One of the girls seemed to get her act together at this point and started relaying their tale to me.
I found out that their names were McKenzie and Melissa, they were 19, and that they were twins in town visiting their grandparents for the summer. They had decided that it would be such fun if their boyfriends came down and they took a weekend float trip together. It was all to be quite innocent. Well at least innocent from the girls perspectives. It seems that the two young men had different ideas of what the float trip was to be all about and when it didn’t progress as they had planned they took the canoe and left the girls at their previous camp. That would have been the two young men that I had seen earlier. I thought to myself that I knew I should have messed with them.
So these two poor little waifs had been left on the river with nothing but a cooler to float down on. I did feel like this would be quite traumatizing so I of course felt bad about my earlier remarks. So I had them grab onto the boat and I paddled us back to my camp. I know it sounds terrible that I wouldn’t let them into the boat until we got to shore but I’m convinced that the only thing that that would have accomplished was me trying to get my fishing equipment off the bottom of the river. So we finally made it to shore and about this time I noticed that these two young women were in nothing but bathing suits. By bathing suits I mean bikinis and not very big ones at that. That and even with swollen eyes they were quite lovely. Holy ****! I thought to myself this is rapidly turning into a late night Cinemax divorced middle aged guy fantasy. Now before your mind wonders into dark and seedy portions of your brain, be aware that my next thought was cloths. These girls needed cloths. Luckily I had planned on spending several days on the river and did have a few spares. Of course my ratty old fishing t-shirts swallowed them whole but I must admit it was better then the alternative.
So the next thing on the list was to feed them. I think that they were probably used to better food then bologna and cheese sandwiches but let’s just say that I thought that I was going to lose my hand when I gave them to them.
Next I decided to try and figure out what to do with them. Like I said earlier the water is pretty rough on that stretch of river and it was getting pretty late by that time. So it was at this point I decided to break it to them that they were going to have to spend another night on the river. This led to another outbreak of tears and me thinking really hard about drowning myself. They explained that they needed to contact their mother and could they borrow my cell phone. I told the girls that I had been on the river for a whole day and that my cell was almost dead. They wouldn’t be able to make a call due to the lack of service but they would be able to send a text. I told them to tell their mother that they were safe and that they could be picked up at this address in the morning about noon. Of course the phone died as soon as they hit send so whether the message got through I have no idea.
So here I was sitting on a gravel bar with two overly emotional half-dressed young women. So I needed something for them to do. A gravel bar on the Gasconade River isn’t exactly a hot bed of activity that nice young women are going to get excited about. Since they were too old to probably enjoy wading trying to catch crawdads I decided to let them fish. They didn’t seem too excited about it at first and made me promise to bait all of the hooks, but then they decided that since there wasn’t anything else to do that they would give it a try.
Romance at 40
Since the divorce the very last thing on my mind was romance. Since my last romance ended with such a bang, women were not very high on my list of priorities. What was on my mind were nice quiet days fishing; doing lots of self-reflection. It’s odd isn’t it how sometimes the last thing on your mind can creep up on you.
Our story starts in a quite boring way, me sitting in my little canoe attempting to coerce a smallmouth bass into taking my lure. Like usual I was fishing the Gasconade River below the Adams Ford access. This has always been such a good spot for me because in places the water is so rough it doesn’t see much river traffic. It also holds some very fond memories of my youth for me as well, so it’s a great place to reflect and reminisce. In a day and a half I had only seen two obnoxious young men in a canoe, but besides that it was a perfect day. I was having good luck and had limited out on smallmouth, but was trying to catch a few more for fun and a few extra bait fish for the night’s cat fishing in the event that I had very good luck and ran out of goldfish.
So there I was minding my own business and the strangest thing came into view. It appeared to be two young women holding on to a Coleman cooler swimming down the river. My divorce may have left me a little on the sarcastic side; I don’t know, I may have always had it. Either way I couldn’t resist being a little flippant to the two girls.
I yelled in my most civil voice of course, you know ladies there are probably easier ways to get down the river, and you won’t scare the fish.
It appeared that this may not have been the right thing to say because both girls became very upset and started to cry quite severely. It came to me pretty quickly that this occurrence may not have been intentional and that these two may be in need of assistance. As I started to paddle over to them the only rational phrases that I could get out of them were; “Thank God”, “Please help us” and other equally unhelpful words.
After a few minutes I couldn’t take it anymore and finally had to scream “Shut the hell up both of you”. Now tell me what happened? One of the girls seemed to get her act together at this point and started relaying their tale to me.
I found out that their names were McKenzie and Melissa, they were 19, and that they were twins in town visiting their grandparents for the summer. They had decided that it would be such fun if their boyfriends came down and they took a weekend float trip together. It was all to be quite innocent. Well at least innocent from the girls perspectives. It seems that the two young men had different ideas of what the float trip was to be all about and when it didn’t progress as they had planned they took the canoe and left the girls at their previous camp. That would have been the two young men that I had seen earlier. I thought to myself that I knew I should have messed with them.
So these two poor little waifs had been left on the river with nothing but a cooler to float down on. I did feel like this would be quite traumatizing so I of course felt bad about my earlier remarks. So I had them grab onto the boat and I paddled us back to my camp. I know it sounds terrible that I wouldn’t let them into the boat until we got to shore but I’m convinced that the only thing that that would have accomplished was me trying to get my fishing equipment off the bottom of the river. So we finally made it to shore and about this time I noticed that these two young women were in nothing but bathing suits. By bathing suits I mean bikinis and not very big ones at that. That and even with swollen eyes they were quite lovely. Holy ****! I thought to myself this is rapidly turning into a late night Cinemax divorced middle aged guy fantasy. Now before your mind wonders into dark and seedy portions of your brain, be aware that my next thought was cloths. These girls needed cloths. Luckily I had planned on spending several days on the river and did have a few spares. Of course my ratty old fishing t-shirts swallowed them whole but I must admit it was better then the alternative.
So the next thing on the list was to feed them. I think that they were probably used to better food then bologna and cheese sandwiches but let’s just say that I thought that I was going to lose my hand when I gave them to them.
Next I decided to try and figure out what to do with them. Like I said earlier the water is pretty rough on that stretch of river and it was getting pretty late by that time. So it was at this point I decided to break it to them that they were going to have to spend another night on the river. This led to another outbreak of tears and me thinking really hard about drowning myself. They explained that they needed to contact their mother and could they borrow my cell phone. I told the girls that I had been on the river for a whole day and that my cell was almost dead. They wouldn’t be able to make a call due to the lack of service but they would be able to send a text. I told them to tell their mother that they were safe and that they could be picked up at this address in the morning about noon. Of course the phone died as soon as they hit send so whether the message got through I have no idea.
So here I was sitting on a gravel bar with two overly emotional half-dressed young women. So I needed something for them to do. A gravel bar on the Gasconade River isn’t exactly a hot bed of activity that nice young women are going to get excited about. Since they were too old to probably enjoy wading trying to catch crawdads I decided to let them fish. They didn’t seem too excited about it at first and made me promise to bait all of the hooks, but then they decided that since there wasn’t anything else to do that they would give it a try.