Mostly Sperm And Eggs
Greg Keeler 2000

Alternate titles suggested by Greg:
A Miracle of Rare Device

Gringo Deadbeats Make Good

Choagie Pork-Feed Apocalyptic Damnation

A Gelatinous Heap

As we entered a Denver Sam’s Club discount center, Gearman said, “No  leakage this year. We shall have no leakage.” He was referring to last year’s Whitefish Roundup where the 487 iced-down choagies that he and Gill Finn towed from Carbondale to Denver on a boat trailer started leaking in the fall heat so that they trailed a path of whitefish slime all the way to the downtown Rescue Mission where they were to feed the hungry.

Pronto, we were headed down an isle of huge plastic tub-like containers. “These should do the trick,” huffed Gearman as he enlisted my help to heft a couple of them into our cart, “Oh yes, cool and leakless.” Soon we were on our way, roaring through the Eisenhower tunnel toward the Aspen area with  visions of wallow-hog whities flopping in our heads, our hopes high that our team, “Trash Whitey,” would beat last years champs, “Chokin’ the Choagie.” But before we could hit the stream, we had to spend a day making more crucial preparations. The hours passed quickly while I scrawled Raffle Girl  on a bunch of T-shirts and Gearman printed off and pieced together a Trashfish 2000: Whitefish Roundup banner to put up in front of the festivities  at Gill Finn’s Alpine Anglers in Carbondale. Before we knew it, it was the  dawn of the big day and Gearman and I were picking up Roddie Quitaquit and  heading through the brisk morning. Roddie was sick and hung over from a night of cavorting, but he still seemed eager to join in the carnage. As an  outsider from Bozeman, Montana, I was thinking of grilling the two of them  about the name and history of a local peak that loomed up through the misty  sunrise, but before I could say anything, Roddy, one of the top guides in the  area, said to Gearman, “Don’t you get tired of idiot clients asking about  that damned mountain?”  So I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to cast myself  in the role of client. After all, I was brought in as more of a mascot than anything--sort of a guitar strumming oaf, going under the name of Lothar;  (last year it was Gorgo); my job was to provide a sense of zany camaraderie  for this annual fly fishing catch-and-kill event where the whitefish are fed to the poor and are replaced in the local rivers with rainbow trout . 

An hour or so later, Trash Whitey, consisting of me, Gearman, John  Talbot (another top guide in the area) and Chad, a friend of his, were  careening out of Gill’s parking lot trying to get a jump on the competition  by heading up the Crystal River where last year’s winners had caught a  bazillion of ‘em, but as the sun rose, the bazillion didn’t seem to be  showing up, and Talbot was beginning to steam. We drove from spot to spot,  hoping to hit a pod of whities but luck seemed to be somewhere else. As the afternoon deadline drew near, Gearman and I had only caught three  or four between us, and Talbot and Chad had, through dogged determination,  managed to land fifteen or twenty, but we knew that wouldn’t come close to  winning anything--except maybe the prize for the smallest fish. And sure  enough, when we arrived back at the parking lot of Alpine Anglers, tarps were  heaped with hundreds of glistening corpses. Though the Crystal had been ice  cold for whities, the Roaring Fork had been hot. While a table of Chicano  workers gutted away, Gill weighed and counted, tallying even more than last  year’s over-all catch and weighing two that went over four pounds.
 
Two fishermen  actually broke four IFGA world records for different leader weights. The previous  year, they noticed that what seemed to be average fish among the hundreds  caught were much bigger than established records, so they decided to  break a few this year. One of them told us that even our team’s meager catch  had several record breakers in it. I guess locals had never considered  whitefish important enough to submit to the record keepers; thus, these two had accomplished in a morning what many in other places spend a lifetime pursuing.
 
Out on the lawn, beyond all the weighing, measuring and gutting, young  guides whipped their fly rods around in the “Young Guns” casting contest and  tables of contestants chowed down on barbecued chicken and pork. One older  Jewish guy at my table couldn’t resist the excellent pork and said, “It’s Yom Kippur tomorrow, and the sun is going down--but for THIS, I’m willing to face  apocalyptic damnation.
 
As the raffle girls raffled and the prizes were distributed, Gearman, Gill,  and I agreed that all had gone swimmingly. Late that night I sang some goofy  fishing songs for a few die-hard revelers and even played “Mexican  Serenade,” a song in Spanish ridiculing gringos, for the fish cleaners  before we paid them--a song which roughly translates at the end as “Give me  your money then go to hell, gringo deadbeat.” Though perhaps a bit nervous,  they seemed to appreciate the song.

The next day, Gill and Gearman took me to the Denver airport, and on our  way, we dropped off four giant coolers of 529 iced whitefish at the rescue mission.  As Gearman had prophesied, there was no leakage and the fish were in good  shape when several hungry women took huge bags of fish home to their families  and I helped some mission workers carry the rest downstairs to the kitchen. 

Flying back to Montana, I felt that everything had gone rippingly--except  perhaps for the fifty gallon plastic tub of guts we had left by the cleaning  table at Alpine Anglers. That morning, before we left for the airport, we had stared at it for a while, hoping they might just disappear. Some women  who worked in the same building walked up behind me and stood puffing their  cigarettes. “What’s that stuff,” said an attractive blond woman?” “Whitefish guts, mostly sperm and eggs,” I said as I hunched beside the tub to get a photo. “What’r you gonna do with ‘em,” she said, with a look of mild  consternation. “Don’t know,” I said, but when I turned to say more, she and the others  were gone. 

It wasn’t till I’d been back in Bozeman for a couple of days that I got  the full story on the demise of the guts. Gearman and Gill Finn had taken  the sealed two-day-old festering mass up into the mountains near Aspen and  deposited them for the bears on a logging road. Gill stoppered his nose with duct tape,  removed the lid, and tipped them off of the back of the vehicle, where the  container splocked upside down onto the ground. He then removed the container to a sound something like a moose removing its foot from a swamp,  and for several seconds, the guts stood as a perfectly molded  rectangle--indeed, a miracle of rare device--before collapsing into a gelatinous heap.

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