I always loved fishing. I used to swim down the Columbia River and dive for tackle and line, cleaning up the bottom. Never had no sons of my own. But I love kids, fishing should be all about kids to me, at least sport fishing. Basically, you have commercial fishing, then tribal fishing, then sports fishing. Sports fishermen take the least and put the most money into the fishery programs. In these parts, the Indians have a whole nother level of writes that you have to respect.

One time I was up lake [forgotten by writer] fishing from a canoe when I saw this kid just sitting there on sore. I paddled up and asked him if he was okay. There were people all over the place for the weekend. He said his dad was passed out drunk in the tent, not even dinner time yet. So I loaded him up and taught him the rudiments of canoeing and fishing.

Shrimping is great, but you do it in deep water with weights and a winch. You could haul that pot up 400 feet by hand, but its not advised.

My buddy and I were fishing up at [writer forgets name] Lake one time and there were these squirrel hinters up there. They had women and children and ATVs with .22s mounted on swivels. They almost got caught and ditched their bag of squirrels and told the rangers it was us. We have fishing tackle and .357s! We pointed to those guys and said, “They have the squirrel rig—any of those little things have their head blown off by a .357? I’m a meat hunter, and I would not waste the time taking a life for an ounce of meat.”

The rangers leave us be. But these fuggers, they got their wives and its summer time and they have a generator going in their camp—no good for fishing or sleeping. After it got dark, we had this one girl, kind of a riskay girl, if you know what I mean, and we give her a can of coke and she sneaks over there and pours it into their generator. By the time she is back, its sucking wind and the fellow is trying to start it. We go over, wearing our cowboy gun rigs, and ask if we can help, and console the guy, explaining to him that generators don’t last forever, while the women were gathering up the kids, afraid we were bad men. We weren’t goin’ to start no shit with them, they were the guys with the hunting rigs!

Kids are great. There is this little fella up the street that comes down with his father and helps in the yard some since my knees are so bad. He gets whatever he wants, antique matchbox cars, all the fishing tackle he likes. Ain’t no sense in hoarding shit when you got but a few good years left.

[Kelly looks across the table, this July 4th, 2024, and smiles to the Chief’s Widow and addresses her.]

My favorite place to fish was up around Sitka, in Alaska, your neck of the woods. For the most part the crabs and shellfish were reserved for the natives. We took Chinook and Sockeye. We run into this one blond, blue eyed fella, and he asks us if we’d like to take some clams. We couldn’t, we weren’t native. He says, “I’m native, got my card to prove it, you can clam on my permit.”

What the hell? This guy was a blond as can be.

So, we take our buckets and when the tide goes out, goes way out, we’re walking out there gathering clams, digging them up with our hands. These two guys come by on ATVs and tell us the tide is coming in and asked if we wanted a lift. We said, “Oh, no, we can walk!”

[The Alaskan woman laughs.]

Yeah, you know what happened, fuggin’ twenty foot tide in no time is what happened!

[general laughter]

We were running with our bucket for the river mouth, which was no wider than this table. Those guys on the ATVs were just watching and laughing.

Then, this Old Indian sees us with our clams the next day and says, “You boys are stupid,” not because we almost got drowned by the tide, but because we were digging. He showed us, when the tide went out, how it cuts a new channel each time in the sand. He walks along and kicks the bank of the new channel and clams just fall out—so we ate our fill. There must have been a hundred bald eagles at the mouth of that little river.

I had this big dog, a Doberman, I took fishing with me alone up there; slept on the pier. These pipeline guys, they worked 14 days on and 14 days off, and they’d come down and fish and use old refrigerators on plywood as smokers for the salmon. They had these big ass Alaskan dog breeds, kept saying their dogs could beat mine, but then also wanted to buy my dog. He was a good dog—not for sale. Those guys did well. I was offered a job on the pipeline—the pipe is as big as this house, built up off the ground in spots for the elk and caribou to graze. That was too much time alone for me. Those guys not only made out, but they got to buy gold from the guys on the North Slope for $200 an ounce, because the goldminers didn’t want to have to pay the taxes on the gold transfer.

I go down this one road, and I see a sign, that 46 Moose have been killed this year, on this road, and to be careful. The next day, the sign has been changed to 47 and you see this big moose on a tow truck being hauled off and the car is in the ditch. Once your car its a moose, the moose meat is worth far more than that piece of junk, so in the ditch it goes. I asked the driver, “What, do you feed the moose to the prisoners?”

He says, “Hell no! Jailbirds eat salmon for breakfast, lunch and dinner. This moose goes to orphans and the poor and elderly.”

My salmon, I like dry, like to cure it with brown sugar and apple cider, run it in the smoker for a good seven, eight hours.

[Kelly is such a nice guy.]