The Elusive “Big One”
By Loren L. Fenton

I guess I must have caught the dream from my father somewhere around the age of five.  I can still remember standing with him in the aisle of Amundsen’s Hardware Store in Sunnyside, Washington looking at the biggest fish I had ever seen in my short life.  I think it was probably a Spring Chinook salmon that someone caught in the Columbia River.  They had the fish displayed on crushed ice right there in the middle of the store.  I have no idea how much that monster actually weighed or the length from snout to tail, but to my young eyes it was huge!  A bunch of community men – farmers and businessmen – all stood around raving about the catch and exclaiming over it.  The excitement was infectious.  If I ever went fishing, I wanted to catch a big one!

A time or two that summer a couple of us kids took our poles and tried to fish in the drainage ditch.  We were too young to know there couldn’t have been anything in the irrigation runoff water to catch anyway, but we had fun just because we were fishin’.  For some reason our hooks always came up empty.

That fall some new neighbors moved into a house that sat on a hill top just northeast of our place.  Much to our delight and surprise the family had two children, both a little older than my brother and me but about the same age as our sisters.  The older sister, Carol was in the eighth grade with my sister Beulah Fern.  Her brother Dean was probably two or three years younger than Carol.  We got pretty well acquainted during that school year, but in the spring when school ended they moved away.  They said they were going to a place called Sandpoint, Idaho.

Somewhere Daddy had heard about Sandpoint, in Idaho’s northern panhandle, and nearby the state’s largest freshwater body, Lake Pend Orielle.  In the 1940’s Lake Pend Orielle was stocked with Kamloops trout from British Columbia.  These fish reportedly grew to enormous size.  Farming must have been pretty good that year, because Daddy decided to take a vacation fishing trip.  Since the neighbors had moved there, it was the perfect opportunity to visit them and also try to catch one of those big Kamloops.

Northern Idaho and Lake Pend Orielle were a long ways from where we lived in Washington’s Yakima Valley.  It would take us at least two days traveling to get there.  The only transportation we had was our farm vehicle, a 1938 Chevy two-ton truck.  Obviously there wasn’t room enough to fit all six of us – Daddy, Mother, my two sisters Katty Joy and Beulah Fern, my brother Beryl, and me in the cab on the one bench seat.  Crew cabs on trucks were still many decades in the future, so the only solution was for us children to ride in the back.  Daddy fixed a tarp for shelter over the cattle racks, and we had various things to sit on as we rode along.  Really, I don’t remember being uncomfortable at all, or even thinking it was unusual.  We were on a grand family adventure.  (In fact, it was the only vacation we took as a family . . . ever!  Other leaner farming seasons and constant expenses kept luxuries like fishing vacations at bay through all the rest of my growing up years.)

Daddy’s brother, our Uncle Floyd and his family lived in Spokane, Washington.  We stayed overnight with them, and it was fun to see our cousins Joan and Jerry.  Ever the gracious hostess, our Auntie Helen provided wonderful food and comfortable beds for the night.  All through my life since then I have had a special fondness for Spokane.  I’m sure much of that is because of the precious memories stemming from this visit.

The next morning we continued our journey.  We drove through Couer d’Alene, Idaho and turned north.  A couple of hours later we arrived at Sandpoint situated on the northwest arm of Lake Pend Orielle.   Our friends greeted us warmly as we unloaded our bags and bedrolls.  The next day we would be on the lake – looking for the “big one!”  I remember sleeping in a closet of some sort.  I was the youngest – and only six years old – so I slept in some sort of makeshift bed under the stairwell.

Since I was only six, and now I am seventy-three (!), I honestly can’t recall all the details of the night and the next day.  I do remember that it was very hot!  My sister Beulah Fern tells me that I cried and cried that night because I was too hot to sleep.  Apparently, my crying upset our hostess who scolded me for crying so much.  That part I don’t remember at all.  But I do remember going out on the lake the next day in a small rowboat.  It was a scorching summer day on the water.  All the Kamloops were deep in the lake escaping the heat.  Our friend Dean caught a few sunfish and tossed them back in the water, but that was it.  On that day the big Pend Orielle Kamloops trout all lived to swim another day.

It must have been very disappointing for Daddy to not catch a kammie that day.  He had talked and dreamed about it for weeks, and then to come up empty handed just didn’t seem fair.  He didn’t ever really say much about that.  But the fishing trip in the old ’38 Chevy was really the trip of a lifetime for us.  We never stopped talking about it, and through the years it has become an almost legendary part of our family lore.  I can still see the lake, the surrounding mountains, the forest, and those little sunfish that Dean released back into the lake.  I can still feel the rocking of the rowboat and the lapping of the waves.

And I am still looking for the “big one.”