October 24, 2009 – Channel Catfish, Sioux City, Iowa

We have moved on through a completely new landscape. The flat, Antelope-carcass-strewn highways of Nebraska have given way to the flat, raccoon-carcass-strewn highways of Iowa. We have reached the Missouri River.

Fishing is known as a much more relaxing and fulfilling endeavor than golf. I’m not so sure. We were parked at a great campsite on the Missouri in Sioux City, Iowa. I meandered the fifty feet from camper to riverbank and tossed a lure into the river’s murky depths. Second cast I had a hard hit and brought in three pounds of what the locals call a drum fish, a perch-like beast. After briefly savoring my success, I eagerly tossed my line back into an eddy in expectation that every cast would result in some local species – there are 144 in this stretch of the Missouri – hooking on. Three hours later I skulked back to the van with nothing more to show than near- frostbitten fingers and toes.

The next evening I noticed a man fishing into the same eddy. I wandered down, rod in hand, to advise him that he was fishing from my spot but thought better of it when I noticed he had live bait, something I lacked.

“What ya fishing fer?” I asked in my best Nebraska drawl while looking curiously into his pail full of minnows.

“Channel catfish” he replied suspiciously while quietly covering the pail with a lid. “Where you from?” he asked, blocking my view of his neatly stacked heap o’ catfish.

“Western Canada, Alberta,” I admitted.

“Fished there”, he remarked. “Red River got plenty of catfish.”

Hoping he might share his fine pail of bait, I elected not to quibble over his geographically-challenged statement. Still he offered neither tips nor bait, so after a few half-hearted casts I again skulked back home. He waved, all friendly like, when he left at dusk, his truck weighed down by the Missouri’s bounty.

In golf, after the first whack, you are encouraged to continue beating the little white ball repeatedly for four hours. No long spells of repeated, fruitless casts for non-existent fish, punctuated by occasional, frustrating “bites” and suspicious sidelong glances from neighboring, territorial fisherman. Fishing is – paraphrasing from Mark Twain, an old Missourian, “a good cast spoiled”.

So we moved through Iowa, across the mighty Mississippi and into Illinois toward Chicago where we had booked three nights at the downtown W Hotel at an embarrassingly high price.

Have you ever attempted to park a camper van in Chicago? I recommend having your fingernails removed instead.

I called a parking company and explained our situation over the phone to a young lady who was clearly not well versed in the fine art of RVing. After a lengthy exchange she said, “Just a moment, I gots to aks my supervisor.”

The phone went dead. I wasn’t sure if I was being put on hold or whether perhaps my innocent inquiries had somehow been the straw that had sent her into a mass-murdering rage. Eventually she came back on line to state that our application had been “denied”, due to a “City ordnance”, (not “ordinance”). I was kissing my W deposit goodbye – and thinking she was loading up some ammo – when I mentioned to her that an RV was just a Canadian brand of automobile.

Eventually we got our parking spot and spent three days in Chicago.

Not much there.

Gerry and Florence