My Uncle Pete — uh, my step-Uncle Pete. . . Shit. Your mom’s sister’s husband is your uncle, but what if she divorces and remarries? Step-uncle, right? I’ll start over.
I did a BUNCH of camping and fishing as a kid, and found that different people have different approaches to both. The same summer I discovered Quiet Riot (“Metal health will drive you MAD!!”), my cousin Chad and I went camping with my aunt and her newish husband, Pete. Pete didn’t like me. Or Chad either, really. But he was trying to make nice, I have to give him that much. Pete was a camper camper, as opposed to a tent camper. Me? Even now, as old and fragile as I’ve become, I much prefer sleeping in a tent, close to the ground. So, the first night, Chad and I stayed up all night, burning up all the fire wood. Pete was, to put it mildly, unhappy about this the next day. Chad and I spent a good two hours that morning gathering wood for that night’s fire, and we weren’t allowed anywhere near the fire anymore either.
That afternoon, Chad and I caught a few crappie, and that night was the last time in my life I ever tried to clean a fish. I had this crappie that had been out of water for better than two hours. I decide to descale it first, as I had been taught, by taking the back of my fish knife and scrubbing it against the scales, which would cause them to pop off, easy as pie. So imagine my surprise when the fish fought back! It scared me almost completely to death, and I didn’t end up actually eating any fish the rest of that trip.
That evening, toward sunset, we were out on the lake in Pete’s little out-board, trolling. To me, this wasn’t fishing. But it was nice and peaceful, tooling around the lake and catching a fish almost every ninety seconds or so. Each new fish we caught was immediately put on the stringer and then gently lowered back into the water, so they wouldn’t die until later, when it was time to cook them. So after we had about two dozen fish on the stringer, Pete realized it was getting dark and made a bee line back to shore. That was the funnest part of the trolling, when he put the hammer down and stood that little boat at attention. I thought, Yeah, we’re boating NOW!!
Pete beached the little boat and we got out and he said, “You guys grab the fish.”
FISH!!
SHIT!!
I ran to the back of the boat and brought up the stringer. There were NO fish on the stringer, as we’d been hauling ass across the lake, and they’d still been in the water. No, what I brought up was a stringer with a couple dozen sets of disembodied fish lips.
I looked at Chad.
Chad looked at me.
We both looked at Pete, who was purple.
I swear, at the exact same second, Chad and I looked back at each other and squealed, “FEEEEESH LEEEEEEPS!!!!!” and proceeded to fall all over each other, laughing too hard to breathe, rolling in the sand, not quite pissing ourselves. This was when we were maybe eleven or twelve years old. Pete finally started talking to us again about three years ago.
