Big California Rainbow Trout, New Zealand Fishing, Obnoxious New Yorkers, And Moths--Lots And Lots Of Moths…

My friend G and I took a trip not long after high school where we found ourselves hitch hiking the entire country of New Zealand. Lots happened in those three months and three weeks (4 month Visas), and some of it sticks in the mind like moths to trout roasting over an open fire.

Seriously. JUST LIKE THAT.

And boiling down a lot of how we got there as much possible- we were hitch-hiking in the South Island and were picked up by an American from New York, who had rented a car in Auckland and was “seeing” the entire country in two weeks, which was entirely too fast for out liking. The way he bragged about what he possessed also didn’t sit well to our young ears. Plus he wasn’t funny.

“Pull over.” I told him.

“Here?”

G echoed that. “Here?”

“Yeah, here,” I told them. We were on a lonely highway in the middle of that loneliness. I could see their point.

“There is a river down there. I want to fish there and you’re in too big of a hurry.”

G was incredulous, but he looked at me sitting in the backseat, reading the map. I mouthed the words “That guy is driving me crazy,” to him. He nodded.

“Yeah. This will do. Pull over here,” he told the guy from New York.

The new Yorker stopped the car, and G and I took our backpacks out, thanked the man for his wonderful company, and got the hell away from him.

“Man, that guy was driving me nuts!” I told G.

“He wasn’t so bad.”

“He was horrible. One more story about crappy tenants and I think I was going to pull his hair out.”

“What the hell are we gonna do now?”

“There’s a river right down there. Come on. We’ll go fishing like I said.”

And we did. We climbed down over the embankment and down a steep hill and through a thin forest and found a river, just as the map had suggested. There was a great place to set up tents and we did. We didn’t have any food to speak of so fishing it was. For some reason, I just knew we were going to catch something.

We had each brought those folding rods and reels and a small bit of tackle. We fished for an hour and caught zero. Zilch. The sun was starting to get low in the sky and I ran across some fishing line strewn about on the bank. I followed it to its end and found a lure thingy we didn’t have. When in Rome, fish like the Roman’s fish, is what I always believed.

In less than ten minutes, I had me a four pound trout on my line. I wiggled him in and here he is, and my God! What a funny haircut that cute girl in Auckland gave me. I think all she knew to do was the David Bowie eighties thing, and it shows…

We gutted and cleaned my trout, started a fire, and as it just started to get dark, placed the trout on a makeshift grill and began cooking him.

This is the part of the story I wanted to tell you about. You see, G and I had the kind of friendship where trouble lurked just around every prank. Things would happen and then they’d just keep happening. We’d deal with things in this manner until one of us got to have a belly laugh. We were just that way.

As the night set in, these little white moths became interested in our flashlight, which we were using to look at the trout as it cooked. The trouble was, every time the trout lit up, little tiny moths lit on the trout, and stuck there. Now I don’t know about y’all, but moths in my trout is not how I like it. I like my trout with salt and pepper-which we had- and some butter-which we didn’t have.

And the only way to see the moths to pick them off, was to shine the light on the trout which, of course, attracted more moths, making the process of removing moths less effective than leaving them on. But there was no way I was going to eat trout with grilled moths. I just wasn’t gonna. G and I spent some time with our “Oh crap!” logic until I hit upon the idea of shining a flashlight on a white rock not far from us. This, of course, attracted the moths in such large numbers you could no longer make out that it was a rock. It also gave us the opportunity to take quick picks at our cooking fish with short bursts of light, not giving the tiny, horrid creatures the time to get to the new light source before it was gone. Pick a little. Talk a little. Pick a little. Talk a little. Quick! Quick! Quick! Talk a lot, pick a little more…

We got our trout cooked and ate in the dark. The night bugs were out making night bug noises. The sky was a brilliant middle of nowhere sky. Orion was upside down and the Southern Cross was an obvious joy to see.

When it was time for bed, I had a plan. I got into my small one man tent (G and I decided that we each needed tents, as I snored and he farted, or was it the other way around? Either way, we each had our own space out in the beautiful night.)

In the back of G’s tent, I had snuck and placed a white rock while he was brushing his teeth in the river. I zipped up all of my tent flaps and waited. When G was fully unzipped I screamed something about a snake. G stood up and sort of hobbled over toward me, as he had slipped off his shoes. I took aim. I shined.

The light from my flashlight penetrated his tent easily. The white rock glowed inside. Moths from as far away as Sydney came and ventured into his tent. I had done it. I had got the big belly laugh I needed to sleep well and sound.

I remember well, listening to G clap his hands together for well over half an hour while he tried to clear out his tent. Every now and then, he’d swear at me, and I would laugh some more.

“You ass,” was what I remember him saying most.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

“You ass.”