First person wakes him up..

We said it every time, without fail.

Like clockwork, we'd have just taken our shirts off and thrown them into the cabs of the trucks, grabbed our fishing poles and were headed down the side of the mountain in the middle of another scorching Virginia summer day.  Mission: well, there's a lot to it, so I'll bottom-line you: we wanted to have fun, and catch as many smallmouth bass as possible.  But there was a lot more.  Get away from our girlfriends, responsibilities, and cell phones.  Cool off in the river.  Share a lot of laughs.  Take in the absolutely breathtaking beauty that is God's creation.  You know the "fishing stories" your grandfather might have told you as a kid?  A lot of the ones my grandkids will hear about happened there on the river with my boys.

Anyway, we had a guy in the group who was terrified of "Mr. No-shoulders" as he called them.  Nobody's really crazy about coming up on a snake unexpectedly in the woods, but this guy was comically afraid of them.  His nickname is "Kramer" and his spastic-freakouts reminiscent of the Seinfeld character were never more vivid and animated than when we encountered a snake in the woods, or in the water.  The path that cuts through the side of the mountain is essentially a one-man trail so you have to go single-file through.  And, the saying goes, as it pertains to a snake, that "the first person wakes him up, the second person <upsets him--edited>, and the third person gets bit."  (this was proven false several times, as we saw at least one snake every time we went down there, and usually if anyone gets bitten, it's the first guy through.  And, even if you're one of those "tough" guys, it still kind of freaks you out when you're the one who gets struck).

The entry point to the fishing spot is so cool---right underneath a dam, where the end of the dam meets the side of the hill, and the water rushes over so fast, that there is almost always a cooling mist hovering that creates a mini-rainbow right in front of where we'd stand.  The deafening roar of the water rushing over the dam was always so peaceful, and often times we'd catch a few fish right there in the midst of all the rushing water.

In the summer, the sun doesn't go down until almost 9 o'clock in this part of the country, and it was often that late when we would finally make it back to the trucks.  The hours between were spent catching fish (and sometimes getting shut out), slipping and falling on the rocks, talking about women, and building life-long friendships.  I've been in several weddings, attended kid's birthday parties, and prayed with and for my brothers when they were going through serious life-changing crises.  Hard to believe it all started when a few crazy 17 year old kids decided to get together and wet a line to pass a summer afternoon.

The snakes never went away.  Shortly after college, I learned that the dam had been closed to the public because it was infested with rattlesnakes, and it was no longer safe to go down there.  I was crushed when I read the text message from Kramer. 

So we may never be able to spend the afternoon there again (with our football and basketball knees, falling on the rocks probably isn't the best idea anyway).  I see these guys all together maybe once a year, and the same stories we witnessed first-hand and have heard retold five thousand times are repeated, again and again.  And there's never one speaker--everyone chimes in with his own version of events, or things that someone forgot.  It's basically a train-wreck of verbiage jumbled together which hardly qualifies as conversation, and it's essentially incomprehensible through all the laughter. 

Nobody seems to mind.