The late Mike Bachner '70 called Sugar Creek his own little slice of wilderness. "It beguiles you," he wrote. Crawfordsville native Nate Mullendore '07 practically grew up along and and in the creek. He knows exactly what Mike meant.
This trip started like so many others: an early departure from work, a hurried drive over dusty roads to a distant bridge, chasing rumors of clear water, riffles, and fish, fingers crossed for shoulder space and lazy watchdogs.
If you don’t fish at home, you don’t fish enough.
Looking at the bedrock and boulders below, I have my doubts about the waters upstream. Rocky bottoms make for easy strides but also easy spooking; an errant step turns fish into V-shaped wakes and clouds of dust. The exposed floor also means gradient and swift water, forces that push sediment and smallmouth elsewhere.
I want pools. Deep, dark pools full of rocky crevices and timber and fish too big to risk the shallows. Underneath the shade of syca-mores and cottonwoods, fully fledged in summer green, I find them.
Smallmouth are smart enough to seek cover but they can’t refuse an easy meal, even if it’s molded in plastic. Twitched erratically to the left, to the right and then to the left again, the lure looks like a wounded fish in the way that rubbery chocolate cake looks moist and crumbly beneath fluorescent bulbs and in a glass display case.
We’ve all been fooled at some point.
The elaborate dance tricks a few fish, leaves them slightly dazed and lip-sore but otherwise unharmed. I twitch my wrist ever so slightly, zig-zag-zig.
A brown tuft of feathers enters my sightline, stiffens into a silent glide, talons extended as it skims the water, arcing down and then up again before finding a rocky perch.
How cool, I think to myself. Never seen an owl take a fish.
I look up, meet it squarely in those big, round, hyperbolic eyes.
I break the stare and realize that my fishing line is hanging like a web across the water.
It took the lure.
Our eyes find each other’s again. It looks down, looks back at me, drops the plastic, unhooked and untangled, and flies away as silently as it came.
Upstream I find a feather, speckled auburn striped with white, an unmistakable match. And when I turn around and walk toward the bridge I see the bird again and again, curving around the next bend, escaping, taunting, guiding me ahead.
Mullendore is watershed projects coordinator for the Friends of Sugar Creek in Crawfordsville.
