Another Fish Story, Sort Of....

A few entries down  I wrote a fishing story that had to do with Thomas falling in the creek.  If you haven't yet read it, make sure you do!  It made me remember another fishing story.

Before I was even pregnant with Andrew, Thomas and I went fishing with my eldest sister, her husband, and their two young sons.  My BIL was a paraplegic, so he was confined to a wheelchair.  We went to a local state park resort, to fish in the river below the dam.  To get to the spot we had to go down this steep path down an embankment, straight down from the parking lot.

Everything was fine, until it started raining.  We thought it would just be a little shower that would pass, but it didn't, so we knew we had to leave.  There was absolutely no shelter where we were.

Getting my BIL up that steep path in a wheelchair was not going to be easy.  We tried having Thomas push and my sister pull, then we tried having my sister and I pushing and Thomas pulling, but the path was too slippery and steep, and we just couldn't do it.

Well, Thomas happened to have a big rope-like cable in the trunk of the car, so he had me go get it.  He tied it around the wheelchair, then he and my sister got behind and in front of the wheelchair and I went up to the parking lot and wrapped the cable really tight around a lamp post.

Thomas and Dennice would move the wheelchair up the bank a little, probably less than a foot at a time, and hold it steady until I could pull the cable tight again.  Whenever I'd see the cable go slack I would tighten it up.  In that way we sort of inched him up the bank, the cable acting as a support, so the wheelchair wouldn't slip back whenever they'd get it up a little.  It worked, and even though we didn't catch much fish, and we got rained out, we still had a good time. 

The funny part, though, was that while I was standing in the rain, under that security lamp, holding taught that cable wrapped around that lamp post, a car full of men came cruising through the parking lot.  They slowed down a little and gaped at me; I nodded and smiled.  They literally stared and gaped at me for several seconds, before slowly cruising off.

Now if you'd seen a woman (and at that time, newly married and weighing 98 lbs., I looked more like a little girl) standing under a lamp post in the pouring rain, holding a taught rope that disappeared down over the bank toward the river, wouldn't you have at the very least stopped to see how big the catch was?!  If I'd been thinking I'd have yelled, "It's a big'un!"  Or "It's a fighter!"

Oh well.  I probably wouldn't have wanted them to stop and help, anyway.  But I would have loved to have heard them telling the story when they got back home!