Roadside assistance for a fellow angler who “ain’t from around here”

I had just come from the river when a big man in a big pickup truck pulled suddenly off the main road after spotting me in the parking lot, where I was about to take my waders off. He stopped in a cloud of dust and rolled his window down.
“How’d ya do?” he asked, which is angler jargon for, “Did you catch any fish?”
“Not so good,” I said, which is angler jargon for, “I got skunked.”
“I fish all through here, this place is good, catch trout all through here,” he said. “You ain’t from around here, are you?”
The big man, a friendly and effusive fellow, had many tattoos. On his right arm was an image of a chef in a toque blanche with two crossed butcher knives. On his left arm, in large gothic lettering: “In Like Quinn.”
“What’s that?” I asked. “‘In Like Quinn’?”
“You heard of The Mighty Quinn, right?” he said, referring to a Dylan song from the 1960s: “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)”
I didn’t get to ask the meaning of the reference because the big man in the big pickup truck was in a hurry. He had a lot to say about fishing, eager to help a stranger who had been skunked in the big man’s home waters.
He spoke at full throttle, and with a drawl halfway to West Virginia.

“I was up here the other night, by the old garage back there. You know what I’m talkin’ about, the garage up the road, the brick garage? That’s where I park. There’s a beautiful pool there ’cross the road. Guy that owns it doesn’t care if you park there. He knows me. I caught some beauties in the pool there, one about 24 inches. . . And then, if you park up by the warehouse . . . you know the long warehouse? If you park there and walk down there, there’s another nice pool there, got some big trout innit, and then I park by the self-storage place, and you can get in river there, too. Some big fish in there. I was on my buddy’s property the other night. He’s got two big pools right there on his farm. It’s private property. He lets me fish it. I caught an eight-pound brown there, must have been 29 inches long. Caught him on a night crawler.”
“A night crawler?” I asked, with faux-outrage.
“I used a barbless hook,” he said. “They got one in here, a rainbow, must be 20 pounds. Not makin’ this up. I’m not braggin’ cuz I fish here all the time. You go up there and park ’cross from the garage — guy that owns it don’t care, he don’t live there — and you cross a little wooden footbridge, where there’s a picnic table, right? You can get in [the river] there. I use my kayak. I put in there. The wadin’ here is tough; my knees aren’t good. There’s a nice pool there. And you been to the pool behind the Have-A-Lot store? You know where that is? They got some big ones in there. You get one on . . .”
He suddenly reached across the passenger seat and grabbed a couple of white decals with black lettering: “Fish On, Biotch.” I thought he was offering me one for my car bumper, but thankfully, no. It’s the big man’s credo, something he says when he hooks a trout.
“If I were you,” he said, “I’d park by the long warehouse and walk in there, but be careful, the bank’s got a lot of weeds and it’s high, and it’s very muddy, too. You can get stuck in the bank. … Ok, buddy, good luck.”
And with that, he drove off in another cloud of dust, having rendered roadside assistance to a fellow angler.
I put my fly rod and gear away and headed home, head spinning from the overdose of fishing info so generously and enthusiastically offered by The Mighty Quinn. I no longer felt skunked. Sometimes the best things you catch on a fishing day aren’t the fish.