Gar Spawning

When my senior year in college finally rolled around, I was renting a tiny old house with one room large enough for desk, bed and bookshelves, a bathroom with a decent 1940s era clawfoot tub in it, and down a short hallway was a kitchen. It had an old-fashioned sink with porcelain countertop, a gas cook range and a full-size refrigerator/freezer. A tiny closet off the hallway contained a gas waterheater. Its yard was miniscule but it had a nice front driveway where I could park my pickup truck within line of sight from desk and bed. It was the perfect setup for a senior college student working through final year of studies on a squeaky-tight budget. I actually enjoyed living there until it was burglarized in early spring of that year. They took guitar, banjo, computer, stereo and a few other things I had attained over a little less than a decade. Fortunately, they didn't take the expensive math and science textbooks.

The landlord was a nice lady who interviewed me extensively before renting the place to me for $160 per month. A bargain. She was crestfallen by the burglary and understood when I told her I couldn't afford to live there any longer, releasing me from the remainder of the lease without challenge.

I kept attending classes and scored some of my highest grades that year as coursework became more engaging. Commuting to campus from the town I was working in as a weldor, the drive wasn't bad at all. Along the route I occasionally stopped to canoe flat waters of a small river where it emptied into a fairly large lake. One day before leaving there, I spotted a man who appeared to be the landowner or manager of the adjacent property stretching west along the riverbanks, so I stopped to ask for permission to canoe the river across his land. He was a nice fellow and agreed without hesitation after a brief conversation and having noticed my canoe strapped atop my pickup truck. He wondered why a college student wanted to canoe such a small backwater. I told him for exercise and to clear my overloaded brain. The truth.

A few weeks later before end of spring, I put the canoe onto the river and paddled upstream as far as I could to a branch leading over a low water crossing. A storm was brewing north over the college town and I was just about to turn around and leave in case the storm began tracking south toward me. Unlikely at that time of year, but I could see lightning flashing from the storm cloud and really didn't want to become victim of a bolt out of the blue. Also, the sky inside the thundercell had turned an ominous green, indicating hail lurked inside.

About halfway across the span between the two highways crossing the river, I knew it would take me a good amount of time to get back to the truck, briefly considering pitching a tent to ride out the storm, but thought better of that and of going any further north. As I was turning the canoe around, I looked down into the water and saw an amazing sight. I was surrounded by a huge school of gar of all sizes. There were so many of them they were thumping hard against the canoe as I turned it back downstream against the flow of their upstream surge. They were migrating to wetland headwaters on the prairie to spawn.

Biophilia getting the best of me, I stopped and got out of the canoe to wade amongst them. They easily avoided me most of the time, barely brushing against my ankles and lower calves when they did make contact. It was a mesmerizing experience, their numbers increasing with each moment. Stooping and gently rubbing a large one along its belly, it allowed me to lift it out of the water without struggling for a close look. It was a stunning, prehistoric looking thing. A loud rumble of thunder shaking me from my reverie, I lowered the fish back into the water and it calmly commenced swimming upstream again.

Reluctantly, I floated at serene pace downstream and made it safely back to the truck while the storm tracked away from me to the north and east, over the college town, just as a much more destructive storm had tracked about a half decade earlier, sprouting multiple tornadoes and killing many people. I wasn't going to college there when that happened, still attending classes in a school of music at a university about a hundred miles further east.

Memories of that fine spring day floating and wading among spawning gar are as vivid as they get, except maybe not nearly as vivid as tornado survival memories must be.