By Jim Witham
I slipped the key into the driver’s side door lock and twisted it to the left, expecting the click of the lock opening. No click. I twisted the key to the right. Still no click. Puzzled and a little concerned now, I waggled the key back and forth in the lock. Nothing.
I thought: What the…?
Several more times, futilely, I tried the key in the lock, the very key that had always opened this very lock.
I was standing beside my vehicle, locked out and no way in, short of smashing a window. And even if I did smash the window, which I wouldn’t (my Forester was six months old and I’m generally not the window-smashing type) it’s got a security system that probably wouldn’t allow anyone to start it who’d just broken a window to get in.
What does a married guy do in such a situation? Well, this married guy knows he’s got to call his wife. And when I did call Debbie, I would need to ask her to stop what she was doing at five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and come rescue me. To get where I stood, in the small American Whitewater parking lot beside Elkhorn Creek in rural Franklin County, Kentucky, she would need to drive for an hour, the last 15 minutes of which would be over narrow, twisting country roads, the kind she would never drive on, unless, maybe, I asked her to. What fun that call was going to be. Sure, call Debbie. How? My cell phone was locked inside my vehicle. The next nearest phone was back at the Canoe Kentucky shop in Peaks Mill, five miles away, where I had just come from.
I glanced across the strip of grass and the wall of straggly weeds separating me from the canoe and kayak depot, on the bank above the Canoe Kentucky put-in spot. Rent a canoe from those folks and you’ll get on the creek here, at Knights Bridge, and get off downstream at their shop in Peaks Mill. The shuttle driver who had brought me back from Peaks Mill just a minute earlier had already unhitched his trailer full of Wenonahs and was climbing back into the van. He rammed it into gear and his tires spat gravel as he shot around the rough circular drive that led back to the county road. Unless I caught him, it was going to be a long slog back to Peaks Mill in my wet wading pants and boots.
I charged across the grass and pushed through the tall weeds, feeling like an idiot as I desperately waved my arms. But I intercepted the van. The driver stopped and I climbed in.
“Hey, bud, what’s going on?” he said.
I explained.
He reached into his shirt pocket and handed me his cell phone. “Save you some time-so you don’t have to wait to call her until we get back to the shop.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the phone. It would indeed. His cell phone was much fancier than mine, lots more buttons to push. But that wasn’t the only reason I just stared at it in my hand.
“Just punch in the number and hit the green phone icon,” he said helpfully.
“Right,” I said and made the call.
At that moment I should have been making a different kind of call to Debbie, from my own cell phone in my own vehicle on the road heading home. And I should have been telling her Yes, for once I did actually catch a bunch of fish, I’d had a great day, and I’ll be home around six.
I wasn’t making that call because that morning, overeager to hop in my canoe and scoot downstream, I’d ignored a slight disconnect. I’d already humped down to the rocky edge of the creek one fourteen foot canoe; two paddles (an extra, because you never know); fly rod in protective case; insulated lunch bag with sandwich, Snickers bar and two frozen bottles of water to keep the roast beef cold and yield melted liquid refreshment over the course of the day. (I’m nothing if not careful, prudent and meticulous.) And I’d already judged that the Elkhorn itself was running very well-better than I’d expected, considering that we hadn’t had rain in ten days: a bit cloudy, as it always is in summertime, and bubbly over the riffles. It was a little before nine a.m., the Whitewater lot had been empty when I had parked my Forester and still was, and the day’s first gang of boisterous paddlers had yet to spill out of the Canoe Kentucky shuttle van. If I hurried, I could reach the spot I had in mind about a mile and a half downstream, where I would start casting. I’d have about two hours before I was forced to step ashore and let pass the first flotilla-couples, college kids, children with their parents, all waving from canoes and kayaks and shouting, “Catch anything?” No way to avoid that mess later in the day, and I won’t grouse too much about it, since the Canoe Kentucky people are the ones who sold me my Mohawk and it’s their shuttle service that makes possible my float trips on the Elkhorn. (And whose shuttle driver would offer me the use of his cell phone.) Still, a couple of solitary hours of peace and quiet would be nice. So…hurry! Get a move on! But wait: have I locked the Forester? No. I scrambled back up the bank to the Whitewater lot.
It struck me as odd that when I turned the lock in the keyhole, the lock didn’t activate, as it always does. Odd, but not a problem. I opened the driver’s-side door, pushed the button on the inside, heard the reassuring click of the lock activating, shut the door and tested it. Locked. Good. I stowed the key in the waterproof locket I wear around my neck. Careful, prudent and meticulous, that’s me. But now it’s time to go fishing.
I picked my way down the bank to my loaded canoe and slid it part-way into the creek, bottom-friction holding it steady until I eased myself down into the seat. Then I pushed off with the paddle, on out to where the current grabbed the canoe and took control. For the next mile and a half I let the creek do the work, correcting it now and again with a dipped paddle used as a rudder to steer away from deadfalls and shoals. I ignored a lot of smallmouthy-looking water- riffles with swirly pools beneath them, backwaters along the banks. This stretch of the creek is so close to the put-in at Knights Bridge that everyone fishes it. Unless you know better-and I’ve finally become someone who does-you can’t resist it. I can’t say for sure why you won’t pull many bass or bluegill out of it. But I suspect they’re either scarce from over fishing or else they’ve gotten too smart (from being fished over)-or both.
The spot I’d had in mind for the past few days, since I’d decided the Elkhorn would be my best bet this week, is about a 45 minute float downstream from Knights Bridge, if you don’t stop to cast, or flip your boat along the way, or pull over to wait for the rest of your group to catch up. On river right you pass a break in the sycamores that line both banks in most other places along the creek. In the days when I used to spend the morning not catching much between here and Knights Bridge, this would be a timely lunch stop. You’ll find here some flat limestone slabs you can haul your boat up on to and a deadfall or two back away from the water in some shade where you can munch your sandwich.
These days I pass the “lunch spot” long before it’s time to eat. Approaching it now, I know I’m almost to where I can get out of the Mohawk, rig up my rod and start casting.
But first there’s a tricky bit of whitewater to get through. Below the Lunch Spot the creek drops several feet within a couple of hundred yards, down into a churning pool I call the Washtub. Most everyone runs river left here, where the deepest and swiftest water slides along the bank. But a couple of tree limbs protrude into the creek at this point and you’d better avoid them or you’ll be knocked from your boat. And a few feet from the bank rise some rocky mounds you will need to zig-zag between. If it’s just you and your empty boat, you just shimmy on down through there, avoiding the rocks and the trees, and maybe you shout “Wheee!” or something like it when you make it down to the washtub. But if you’ve got a pretty expensive fly rod aboard and you’re here to fish, not for adventure, then you swerve around to the curving, shallow, pebbly shoreline on the right, and you bumpity-bump down to the tub. At least when you’re 58 and know what it’s like to flip your boat, you do. So what if you have to get out and push once or twice?
The washtub is deep and probably holds some pretty good fish, if you want to use bait and weight, and set your rod down on a forked stick and wait for a bite; or if you want to toss out a heavy crawfish fly and crawl it slowly across the bottom. But in summer, Elkhorn smallmouth readily smash topwater baits and if you’re me you’d rather push on down the creek a bit further, to the first riffle and pool below the washtub and start casting there, where the water’s a bit shallower and a floating popper twitched enticingly might draw up a bronze-back bass.
I spotted a weedy beach ahead on the right and back-paddled along the starboard side the canoe, causing the bow to spin to the right, toward shore. In a moment I heard the scrape of gravel beneath the canoe and it slowed to a momentary stop. As I hopped out, the current took hold of the stern, which was stuck out into in the flow, and tried to spin it into a 180 and whisk it downstream. I hustled up to the bow and grabbed hold of the plastic molding at the point of the canoe and yanked the whole boat safely up into some cradling weeds.
I turned to survey the water. A riffle extended most of the way across the creek. The bank opposite where I stood was a jagged wall of limestone, maybe 15-20 feet high. Between the far edge of the riffle and that wall flowed a narrow smooth passageway of water. What I wanted to do was cast close to that wall, just upstream from the riffle, and let my fly float down through that passageway between the wall and the riffle. See what happened.
Finally, I was where I wanted to be.
I turned my attention back to the canoe, where I’d bungee-corded my fly-rod in its case to the underside of the thwart, just ahead of the seat. Time to rig up and do what I came here for.
The call I’d made to Debbie from the shuttle van could have been worse. Maybe it was the desperation and contrition in my voice. They weren’t faked, at any rate. I saw a posting recently in an internet discussion board in which a brother of the rod asked us, his brethren, how much his fishing life would change, now that he was about to get married. Here’s something I might tell him: marriage (mine, at least) is a state where when you get yourself up a creek, she has to come bring you home.
I have been fishing the Elkhorn for 30 years. I know the way there so well that sometimes at night I push myself toward sleep by driving there from my house over each and every road. But some of the roads I see with the lights off behind my closed eyes have no names, especially that last 15 miles or so of them. They come to me in my mind as they do when I’m actually driving: turn here at that corner of horse farm fence, go down that narrow road with the vaulting trees on either side that meet overhead, continue on over the bridge that crosses the South Fork, turn left when it comes out on…
That would never do for Debbie. She would want hard data, she would want text-street numbers, names-not images dredged from some dark and misty movie of the mind. Fortunately (presciently, it turns out), a month or two earlier, I had printed from the web driving instructions to the Canoe Kentucky shop in Peaks Mill and given them to her. I don’t know why I had felt the need to do this. Maybe it’s age and the knowledge that the more you know, the less you can be sure of. I am just glad I did, and also glad that she is the kind of organized woman who files such things away and knows where to find them when she needs to. On the phone she assured me she had the directions. I told her apologetically it would probably take an hour to get to me. OK, she said, and we hung up.
Back at the Canoe Kentucky shop I went inside and explained to Allison, one of the owners, what had happened. What I mean is, I told her that I was locked out of my car and that my wife was coming to pick me up-not why my key wouldn’t work. I still couldn’t explain that. When I told her about it, she said, shaking her head, “It’s like ‘The Twilight Zone’.”
Outside again, I sat solo in the two-person swing in front of the shop, rocking forward and back. I looked at my watch: 5:30. If I were the one driving from home, I’d be here around 6:20. I figured Debbie would take an extra ten minutes or so. I vowed not to look at my watch every five minutes for the next hour.
A crowd of kayakers who’d just finished their trip had gathered a few feet away in front of the shop entrance. This was a more experienced bunch than the usual. They were debating customized hull conformations for different levels of whitewater; the pros and cons of various models and brands; a recent drowning on the Yoogie, which I gathered was a river somewhere in Pennsylvania; the highest waterfall they’d ever run in a kayak….
At 5:35 (said my watch) I stood up and strolled down to the creek, to the take-out area behind the shop. I had the notion that I’d watch the water for a while, pass some time that way. I guess I could have strung up my fly rod and done some wading. It might have made the hour go faster. But I just couldn’t-definitely not in the mood anymore. Fishing was over for the day
Back in front of the shop (5:40, said my watch), the kayakers were still at it. My swing-chair had been taken by what looked like a grandmother and grand-daughter, so I went to stand off by myself, running over in my mind what might have happened that my key had stopped working, how much trouble Debbie would have finding this place (no doubt she’d follow the directions, and if they were accurate, she’d be here around 6:30), what would happen if the spare key she was bringing from home also didn’t work, who could we get on a Sunday night to come out to the middle of nowhere and unlock that door….
Around 6:15 (said my watch) I went to stand out by the street and look for the front of Debbie’s silver Camry approaching on Peaks Mill Road. I knew this was unnecessary. Only a small parking lot separates the road from the shop, and most of the lot is filled with kayaks, canoes and trailers with more kayaks and canoes. But it made me feel better to stand there waiting. Those kayakers were still kibbitzing in front of the shop, and I figured it might be a small point in my favor for Debbie to see me by the roadside, flagging her down.
At 6:35 I went to sit back down again in the now-vacant swing chair for a minute or two.
A silver Camry flashed past at 40 miles an hour, the driver, Debbie, staring straight ahead.
For the second time that day I ran to stop a moving vehicle, waving my arms and feeling like an idiot. This time I failed.
From the road side I watched the Camry disappear around the curve just past the bridge at Peak’s Mill. I’ve driven that road many times. It’s farm country, the road is narrow, no shoulders, and you’ll find few places to turn around once you’ve realized you’ve gone too far. Maybe I should have shouted after her, instead of just waved my arms. But there were those kayak punks back behind me, riffing on their exploits, and the screech had died in my throat.
Having reached that casting spot across from the rough limestone wall, I got ready to fish. I jointed together the four sections of my fly rod, threaded line, leader and tippet up from the reel and through the circular guides. I reached into the pocket of my wading vest for a box of bass poppers. The box held a tangle of hooks, feathers and rubber legs, all attached at various points to brightly enameled pieces of carved balsa wood. One of these poppers contained considerable mojo, where mojo is defined as the ability of a live bait, artificial lure or fly to catch fish. Sunshine yellow, except where the paint had chipped away to show the white undercoat, this little floater had a concave prow and a bulbous stern, with a spray of yellow feathers around a rusty hook that curved out from behind. On a recent Elkhorn trip this popper had caught fish for me all day, including an eighteen incher, the largest smallmouth I’ve ever pulled from the creek.
But I plucked something different from the box. Save that mojo-laden one for later, I thought. Instead, I shook from the hooked-together hooks a black specimen, recently bought, with no mojo whatsoever. It was bullet-shaped, with a flat vertical rump; black tail feathers fanned out around a black, brushy tail; a line of white dots studded the bottom; black and white eyeballs were glued to either side of the nose. I don’t know what it was supposed to look like but Fred in the fly shop told me smallmouth love black. I had no personal experience of smallmouth loving black. It was also true that black poppers were all that he had in stock. Dubious, I bought them. But with the creek looking ripe today, I tied a black one on. It needed a chance to catch a few bass, accrete some mojo. Someday I was going to lose my sun-shiny buddy to a tree or snag or to plain old decrepitude and then I’d need a new friend.
As I splashed into the creek, I pulled a dozen yards of line off my reel and then tugged on the popper end to slide it through the guides. Then I began whipping line, leader, tippet and popper behind me and out in front several times, trying to keep it all high enough to stay airborne over the creek and low enough to miss the hanging tree limbs behind me, before plopping the black bullet on to a glide of creekwater scratched open by a sharp limestone crest just below the surface. On a curve of slack the popper coasted a couple feet before current and tension straightened the line. While holding the rod in my right hand, I pinched a bit of line in my left between the reel and first guide and jerked it back once, twice, three times, trying to make the popper shimmy on the horizontal, as it swung on the taut line to a point directly downstream. It wouldn’t dance-the shape was wrong. The rounded nose and flat butt allowed it to dart ahead with each jerk. But the movement, though sudden, was smooth and didn’t push up little wedge-shaped spouts of water, like my sunny buddy with the concave face. Already I was feeling less friendly toward this black guy.
The water rose up my legs as I progressed out toward the wall on the far side of the creek. By the time it reached crotch-level-a cool, wet warning that this deep was deep enough-I could just about reach the wall with my best cast. The black bullet floated undisturbed along the base of the wall, through the smooth ribbon beyond the riffle and then down into the more turbulent wash below. At the end of the drift I lifted the line off the water and cast again to roughly the same spot. I usually figure if a fish is there and hungry, he’ll eat what you’re throwing at him on the first cast. But just in case any fish out there had been looking the other way when the popper drifted overhead, I gave them half a dozen more tries. Well, apparently they weren’t hungry, they weren’t there, or they took no notice of floating black bullets that don’t splash. For the moment, I suppressed the urge to switch over to the yellow popper. I’d caught fish with it the last time I was here and conditions were pretty close to what they had been then. But the day was just getting started; there’d be plenty of time for my old standby. So I stuck with the black one through the entire riffle and the swirly water below-without raising a fish. Sorry, guy, back into the box you go.
I hopped into the canoe and sped on downstream. OK, time for the yellow popper. It was mid-morning by then and even my polarized sun-glasses couldn’t filter the brilliant light glinting hard off the broken water. I could see where the popper landed after each cast but once the creek swept it downstream, I lost it. But my with my left hand jigging the line, I’d feel a strike if I got one, even if I didn’t see the take. For half an hour or so, all I did was cast and cast again. But with all the mojo still residing in this popper, I stayed with it. And then, downstream, a heavy pull-back on the line. I squinted, trying to locate the fish. Smallmouth are famous leapers but this one stayed doggedly low. Not until I’d retrieved all of the fly line through the guide at the rod-tip, with only the much finer leader and tippet holding the fish between the rod and the water, did I see him. He was a bit shy of eighteen inches; but for me, at least, a great fish. While the fish thrashed near the surface, I reached into my shirt pocket for my digital camera. A quick snapshot and I’d let the fish go. But as I lifted him from the creek with the popper pinched between my thumb and forefinger, he flung himself off the hook into the murky water and was gone. Well, OK, so no picture. He was a good fish but short of a trophy. I’d seen him and brought him to hand. I could live with that.
Today was going to be OK.
Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes I stood out in front of the shop, squinting north on Peaks Mill road toward the curve beyond the bridge-where Debbie would be coming from, once she realized she’d gone too far and had to turn around. Surely by now she’d figured that out, surely…. Every minute that passed only added to the pile of trouble I’d made for myself. But what could I do now, other than keep my feet anchored to the roadside and wait?
When a passenger car emerged around the turn and I confirmed it was Debbie’s Camry, I partially raised my arm and gave a cringing kind of wave. I was glad to see her, very glad. But gladness mixed with a pinch of foreboding.
I directed her to park in front of the shop, then gestured to let me drive back to Knights Bridge, where my locked vehicle waited for us. I was sure she’d had enough country roads for one day. As soon as she opened the driver’s side door I began apologizing abjectly all over again.
She said, “I can’t believe I drove right past this place! I thought I was looking for some little canoe sign beside a dirt road.”
“Well, there are all these canoes and kayaks out here in front of the shop. I guess maybe you didn’t see them…?”
“No! And then when I realized I’d gone too far, I couldn’t make a u-turn. Some guy in a truck stayed right on my tail. It made me nervous, so I kept driving and driving. I don’t know how far I had to go before I found a place to turn around.”
“I did see you drive past and I ran after you, but I guess you didn’t see me. You were going pretty fast…”
“I brought the extra key. But now I’m thinking I should have brought the extra remote, too, in case the key doesn’t work.”
“Sorry, I was borrowing that guy’s cell phone when I called and I was in such a hurry I just didn’t think about that.”
Backing the Camry out of the lot, I glanced up into the rear-view mirror. Poker-faced, I met my own gaze in the mirror and kept my own counsel: so far, not so bad.
The day had begun, I had thought, when that first fish rose and snatched my yellow popper. And it did. But then it stopped again. For the next couple hours I didn’t see a fish. I was casting over water that a few weeks earlier had been full of fish that couldn’t resist the same fly I was tossing over them today. The amount of water flowing in the creek, its summer dinginess, its tepid temperature-all seemed pretty similar. But then, what I did I know? I was just a guy standing in the creek, looking down on its surface and feeling it swirl around my thighs.
Well, no matter. I wasn’t discouraged-not yet, anyway. The best-most reliable, at least-stretch of the Elkhorn lay a bit further downstream where, after passing west to east through a series of riffles and pools, it runs into the base of a steep ridge that swings it northward. The height and steepness of the ridge throws its west-facing base into deep shade until two o’clock, when the dense stand of trees on the opposite bank takes over and screens out the mid-afternoon sun. The current moves apace here and is broken by numerous oxygenating riffles. The water is darkest where it flows right up against the base of the ridge, though it isn’t particularly deep. Close to the bank, the bottom is strewn with chunks of limestone, some of which may have broken off the ridge and tumbled down its face. The shade, the fizzy water, the submerged chunks that deflect current and provide both a haven and an outpost to ambush prey-all these qualities, I think, attract smallmouth. If they aren’t biting here-and too early in the spring and too late in the fall, they won’t be; mid-summer is just about right-you might as well set your rod down on the bottom of your canoe, paddle to the take-out at Peaks Mill and call it a day.
But this day, luckily, started a second time. After I’d guided my canoe around the swerve at the base of the ridge, I got out and pulled it up onto the first of several rocky beaches on river left, directly across from that primo dark bubbly water on river right. A few exploratory casts up against the opposite shoreline and a bass rose to smack and swallow the yellow popper. A second fish, a minute or so later, and all was right with the world again. I snipped off the yellow-it had done its job, confirmed what needed to be-and tied on the black. It was now or never for this guy.
I marked on the far shore a small bay-let of still water where the hard limestone shoreline curved inward. I tossed the black popper right in the middle of it. A tug on the line to move the popper out toward the current, a quick jerk for some action and now a splash as a fish rose to snatch it. It was a small one, so I pulled it in by hand, tugging the line through the guides to the point where the knot connecting the fly line to the leader hit the obstruction of the guide at the rod-tip. Since it was only eight or nine inches long, I was able to derrick it out of the water with the rod and slide it across the surface toward my hand. I reached for the popper and shook the hook quickly out of the corner of the fish’s mouth. The fish dropped into the current, its tail flicked once and it shot downstream.
I savored the moment. This was good. This was very good. The black popper was going to work after all. Then I took one careful sliding step downstream, my body in profile to the current to minimize the pulsating pressure…two or three false casts to extend and reposition the fly line and popper out over the creek…a final cast to drop the popper up close to the far bank…now strip, strip, strip the line with my left hand, as I intently followed the popper darting in erratic spurts across the surface until, untouched this time, it hung in the current directly downstream. Nothing in this spot-not right now anyway-and so with another sliding step downstream I repeated the familiar choreography.
A few casts later another fish rose to the popper and was brought to hand. For the next hour or so, I hooked a fish every so often, which was often enough-sometimes when the popper first splashed down, sometimes on its jittering slide across the current, sometimes even at the end of the drift, as I was about to give up on the cast and start over. My response to curious canoers and kayakers went from, “Only one so far,” to “I’ve caught a few,” to finally “Well, they’re hittin’ pretty good today.”
This stretch of the Elkhorn that I like so much ends where the creek widens out a bit, deepens by several feet and loses velocity. By the time I had fished down to it, the time was 3:45. I generally fish until around five o’clock, so there was still time to bushwhack along the bank back to the beginning of the run and do it all a second time. I could probably pick up a few more smallmouth that I’d missed the first time. But I was a little bit weary and the day already felt full and round enough. If I got back to Peaks Mill early, that would be OK. Before I’d left home that morning, I’d told Debbie I’d be home for supper. She wouldn’t mind if I pulled into the driveway a bit sooner than usual.
That, of course, was before I called to say I wouldn’t be coming home at all, unless she came to get me.
As I drove us back to my locked vehicle we re-told and expanded upon the stories we already knew: how my key inexplicably wouldn’t open the lock; how she’d driven past me without looking. Talking and listening pushed all that into the recent past, back behind us, as we drove. Getting the door open was a problem yet to be solved. But now there were two of us to figure it out.
Well, it didn’t happen that day. After I pulled alongside my Forester in the Whitewater lot, Debbie handed me the key she had brought from home. It was a primary key, unlike the “valet” key that hadn’t opened the lock earlier. I had always used this valet key on past fishing trips without a problem. But who knew? Maybe this other key would work.
It didn’t: I turned the back and forth without unlocking anything.
“Let me see that key,” Debbie demanded.
I could have pointed out that I do know how to unlock a door with a key. But I just kept my mouth shut and handed over the key.
She tried it. Same result. Then she tried the valet key in the door. Nope.
No key we owned was going to open that door.
By then, only another hour or so of daylight remained. Call a locksmith or AAA from Debbie’s cell phone, wait for help to arrive, drive home in the dark several hours from now…? We talked about it. No, it was too late for that. So we left my vehicle beside the Elkhorn and my canoe back at the Canoe Kentucky shop. We’d have to come back the following day and try to sort it out then.
Home was where we wanted to be, so that’s where we went.
The next day was a Monday and we were both due at work-Debbie, early; me, later in the day. It was so early that we left messages at our workplaces that we’d be in…sometime. We couldn’t say exactly when.
An hour later, when we parked alongside my Forester, all alone in the Whitewater lot on a Monday morning, I could feel my heart thumping. Ridiculous, I know, to get so wound up about a locked door. But still. Would the clicker work? Or were we going to be stuck here waiting for help? I pointed the clicker at my vehicle…click-click, beep-beep, it responded. In other words: Open sesame!
“Hallelujah!” I cried, then opened the driver-side door and dropped into the seat. I inserted my key in the ignition and started the engine.
A red light flashed in the instrument panel, indicating a door ajar somewhere. That was odd-how could a door be open? I got out, went around and opened and closed all four doors. The warning light still flashed. Maybe the back gate…?
When I lifted the gate to slam it down again I noticed a bunched-up towel lying over the bottom half of the latching mechanism. I moved the towel, which is there to set my wet wading boots on at the end of fishing trips, and closed the gate. I checked the instrument panel: the light was off. But another light came on in my head. That towel, covering the latch, must have kept the gate from properly closing the previous morning, though I hadn’t realized it at the time. When I locked the doors using the button on the inside of the door handle, I hadn’t known that the not-quite-closed back gate then told the vehicle’s security system something was amiss, which in turn sent a message to the door lock: don’t let any key open you. Remote clicker?-fine. Keys?-no.
Mystery solved.
Careful, prudent and meticulous-well, that un-noticed towel over the latch put the lie to that.
But now it was time to move on. I eased my vehicle into gear and Debbie followed me in her Camry back to the Canoe Kentucky shop, where I retrieved my canoe. Then we continued on to Lexington. As we approached the intersection where we had to diverge, several other vehicles slipped between us. I would take the turn-off onto New Circle Road, she would stay straight on Route 421 into downtown Lexington. We wouldn’t see each other again until 9:30 that night, when I got home from work. Briefly, slowing at a yellow caution light, I turned back to look for her, anticipating she would pass me in the left lane. I held up my hand, in thanks, in goodbye-for-now.
Too late. She wasn’t behind me at all. There she was, up ahead, zipping through the intersection.
–
About the Author:
Jim Witham grew up in northern New Jersey but has lived in Lexington, Kentucky since 1978, where he is a Reference Librarian with the public library. He’s known as Bookworm on various internet fishing forums. To read more of his work, visit his website.