I was acting on a tip. A friend of a friend had heard I was chasing inferior mouths in grimy drainage ditches and had marked a large “X” denoting an unknown ditch overflowing with fish.

I always take these with a grain of salt, as folks that use regular tackle can fish a much greater range of water than I can. It was close by, so I risked the pre-dawn bumper-tag with loaded tomato trucks while sliding precariously in their wake.

It’s the height of the tomato harvest, and the cool of darkness allows workers a respite from the 100° daytime temperatures. Harvesters clank away in the fields scraping the tomato plants out of the ground, where their sorted and the undesirables are mashed underfoot. A steady stream of trucks rumble out of the fields spilling tomatoes on every curve, causing the entire county to smell of blood; a cloying mixture of rotting fruit with a hint of the ketchup twang.

I finally found it – technically it was a slough, one of many that feeds the lower Sacramento river, the progeny of countless tomato fields and rice paddies, a toxic plume too deep to wade – and too opaque for flies.

Each body of water, clean or dirty, has its individual style or flair – and despite all the hideous things I’ve stepped in or waded through, this place turned me squeamish.

It’s not the color of the water or the odor therein, I had to face a personal Demon, a special form of Kryptonite that sends me screaming back to the car – something rabid dogs, an angry landowner, or bloodthirsty gangbangers could never do.

Big Man-eating Spiders, thousands of them….

As big around as a half-dollar, and every break in the foliage had 10 or fifteen of them idling in the breeze waiting for some sweaty fisherman to take a face full of creepy crawlies and expire in terror.

My unique flavor of mild arachnophobia is typified by tolerance … until I see the eight-legged SOB, and then his arse is lipstick. The surrounding countryside and my house may belong to “Sir Charles” at night, but come daybreak he’d better dig a deep hole…

It’s an uneasy truce, “don’t see, don’t mash.”

Fortunately all the migrant field hands were at distance, because even though I backed away slowly, the involuntary shudders transformed my normally masculine stride into something a runway model would envy.

Spoken to no one in particular, (A couple of octaves higher than normal) “Nope, no fish there, not worth stringing the rod, Nope.” 

(… cue the squealing tires and spray of gravel …)

I had once heard that Japanese anglers have a custom of entering the water on the sight of a spider’s web – as it means no one has fished there recently…

… which neatly accounts for the skeletons I saw.

Tags: arachnophobia, spiders, personal demon, fly fishing, slough, lower Sacramento River, tomato, Sir Charles, Kryptonite