Instant Fish!

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

I am, admittedly, far from an outdoorsman. In fact, my wife and daughter are at home with a rod-and-reel or a .410 than I am, and that’s actually pretty cool, but it’s just not my scene.

So maybe this story I’m about to tell you is something you’ve seen or heard about dozens of times, but I still thought it was interesting enough to share.

My in-laws live out in the middle of nowhere in a little section of Lee County called Clay Hill in Haynes, Arkansas. It’s in between Forrest City and Marianna off of Highway 1 if that helps at all. And on the 40-acre site, there’s a small pond. At least there is right now.

You see, my wife and I have been married 28 years and I’ve been going out to Clay Hill for 30 years now and over the course of those 30 years, there has, at times, been a pond there and not been a pond there. It has a habit of filling up and drying out every few years or so. About 15 years ago, the full-time residents there (three families’ worth of my wife’s kinfolk) made the effort to dig it out, fill it with water and even put some fish in there. But that only lasted about 5 years and since then it’s just been a little low spot that has been home to bullfrogs, turtles and a few snakes. I don’t think it has completely dried up in at least 7 or 8 years, but no effort to keep water in it has been made in at least that long.

Anyway, my daughter has found herself a country boy(friend) who is every bit the huntin’ and fishin’ fellow that I am not, and he accompanied us out to “The Hill” as we call it over the weekend. While the grown folks were playing cards in the kitchen, the kiddos went out riding on four-wheelers. After a while, they came in wanting to know if we had any fishing poles they could use.

“For what?” we all asked.

“There’s fish in the pond,” my daughter proclaimed. We quickly assured her there were not. My wife’s sister and her husband said they had dumped some leftover minnows from a recent fishing trip in there but that was it.

But my daughter’s boyfriend insisted he had seen at least a few bream up by the bank. Although they were both assured that was quite impossible, they were given permission to get a couple of rods and reels out of the shed and have at it.

“There aren’t any fish in that pond,” my father-in-law insisted after they left. “The might catch a cottonmouth.”

Well, we went back to our card game and such. About 15 minutes later, our cell phones began to ding. You can probably guess where this is going … my wife opened up her phone and clicked on the text message app.

“Well, look at that,” she said, turning the screen so we could all look at that. It was my daughter, holding up a fish on a hook. It was a small fish, about the size of a Twinkie, but it was definitely not a minnow. It was, according to people who would know (not me) a shell-cracker.

My mother-in-law jokingly suggested that my daughter’s boyfriend “must’ve brought it in his pocket.” But a minute or two later, there was another round of “dings” from our phones. They had caught a small crappie. Then they caught a couple of very small bream, including one that was not much bigger than the lure that snagged it.

Eventually, my sister-in-law and her husband could no longer contain their curiosity and they too headed down to the pond. And sure enough, there were dozens of fish in the water, including one that was larger than my brother-in-law’s hand (and he’s a big dude).

No one could explain how those fish got into that water. There’s no other connecting inlet or outlet and there’s no other significant body of water, not even a ditch, in the vicinity. The pond hasn’t even been more than a few feet deep in well over a year and was definitely bone dry for a while long after there had been any fish put in it.

Do fish eggs go dormant? If so, for how long? Is there some underground channel to the Mississippi River or St. Francis River, which are both near-ish but still miles away. Could some bird have landed there and pooped out some preserved fish eggs? Or a turtle or snake from elsewhere? People who know much more about this sort of thing offered all of these as possible suggestions but no one was even a little confident in their suppositions.

I know I didn’t know. And after spending a couple of days looking into it online, I still don’t know. I guess Jeff Goldblum’s character in “Jurassic Park” was right all along when he said, “Life always finds a way.”

Instant fish … just add water!