The lady told me on the phone that she and her husband wanted to have a shore lunch like they had experienced in Canada, so by golly a shore lunch she was going to have, once I figured out what it was, exactly. When I paddled folks down the river on one of my float trips, as a teen-ager, they generally brought lunch, which consisted of pre-made sandwiches, fruit, cookies, what have you. And cold soda pop!
Shore lunch is something they had in Canada, I knew, but I didn’t know if you could have a shore lunch on the Piney. I asked the old rivermen in the pool hall, and the only one who seemed to know about it was Ol’ Bill Stalder. He said it was simple. You built a big fire on a shady gravel bar and cleaned your fish and rolled them in flour with pepper and salt and plopped them in an iron skillet with about a half-inch of melted lard in it. And you brought along sliced-up potatoes and onions and dumped them in there on one side… so you had to have a big skillet. Then you opened up a can of pork and beans and set it to the side of the fire so they would warm up good, and that was it.
Ol’Jim Splechter chipped in his advice, saying it was good to make a pot of coffee and have sour-dough bread to heat up and dip in the lard to round it all out. I began to wish I hadn’t promised that lady a shore lunch! What I was accustomed to was baloney and Velveeta cheese sandwiches with some of those chocolate cupcakes and a banana and a couple of bottles of Jic-Jac grape or orange soda pop. Now that made a fishing trip tolerable!
When the day of our float trip came, I throwed Mom’s biggest blackest iron skillet in the old johnboat, with everything Ol’ Bill told me to have. We didn’t have many fish to fry when we stopped in the shade of a big sycamore, a couple of small bass, and a goggle-eye or two and a few black perch. Back then in the sixties we didn’t filet fish, I just scaled them, cut of the heads and removed the entrails. Then we cooked them whole and tried not to swallow any bones.
I guess I really didn’t build a big enough fire, and unfilleted fish are thick, so maybe they really didn’t fry long enough. And true to my nature, I forgot the salt! And the flour didn’t stick on real good. But the pork and beans weren’t bad. And the potatoes and onions were passable, even if they weren’t fried to a point that you would say they was exactly ‘done’. The fish weren’t exactly ‘done’ either! That lady didn’t chip in and help, she just watched me set there on a log and sweat over that fire trying to fry fish and potatoes for the first time in my life, so she could have her “shore lunch”.
Most folks I guided on Big Piney float trips as a kid came back a time or two but that lady never did. Her husband came back that fall with a friend of his. And he brought lunch, fried chicken I think, that he had bought at some new place in the city called Corporal Sanderson’s. But all he had to drink was beer, so all I had was spring water, and there were no cupcakes and bananas.
Nowadays, folk’s go to Japanese restaurants and eat raw fish called soochie or something along that line. Remembering that day in the summer when I fried fish on the gravel bar for that uppity lady, I wonder how in the heck anyone can sell raw fish! Since that time on the Big Piney as a boy, I have not offered shore lunch to paying float fishermen I guide on various Ozark rivers. My dad said that no one should have expected that from a 12- or 13-year old kid who was only getting paid 50 cents an hour. But in years to come I did lots of gravel bar cooking, usually on overnight float trips when I cooked bacon and eggs over a Coleman camp stove fire. And today no one cooks more fish for fish-fry events and get-togethers than me. I have a fish cooker I haul along with a small propane gas tank. And I have some Andy’s fish coating. No lard… but plenty of salt for those who need it.
For those near Mt. Grove Missouri I will be speaking at a day-long event there on Saturday, August 14 at 11:00 a.m. It will be a Missouri statehood celebration day! I will be signing my books afterward and giving away my Ozark magazines and my Outdoor magazines as well. Hope to see some of you there.
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