Bluster County Blues: The Raging Giant Blue Goldfish
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Fish stories in Bluster County are not hard to find. True ones, as true as my own, are harder to come across, naturally, but it is all about the source. I heard this one from a man whose cousin used to date the girl whose father once sold Simon Neres, the fisherman, a car. Outside of having been there myself, it doesn’t get more authoritative than this.
A fish was caught in the Fox River a few weeks back. Some say it was a carp, some say it was a salmon, but a few people have whispered it was a goldfish which escaped from a laboratory in the Argonne National Laboratory downstream.
The story is that the fish was a mascot, and the fish flakes box was kept too close to where they tested polonium. The researchers liked to say, "There's my Po' fish." They thought it was funny.
Slowly, the goldfish became a lively blue. And it grew bigger than its bowl. Po became the alpha fish. Even the cat was scared of him.
Deciding a better life for Po could be found in the wild, the researchers let him go at the base of a waterfall in the nearby woods, expecting him to live a quiet, happy life.
Could he be the same one in the Fox River? Could he have jumped the waterfall, swam upstream, and navigated through a system of tiny streams to the Fox River?
It is really possible he swallowed not only hook, line and sinker, but the pole too, and then the fisherman himself?
No one ever measured it because it did not stay caught. As it swallowed the pole, he fell onto Simon Neres' boat, the Nauti Hijinx. Clearly and right away, he knew this was no trout.
"I felt like Jonah," said Neres, "Not a nibble all morning. No nibble this time either. One minute, I'm-a casting, using an ordinary spinner. I gave it a good right sling, took the hook out maybe 15, 20 feet from my boat, in the center of the river.
"I might as well have been fly fishing. As soon as the lure hit the water surface, I saw a dark hole -- must have been two feet in every direction -- coming up out of the water. My lure went in, sure, but the hole kept coming at me. It was like jumping headlong into a cave. First the pole went in, and I thought I could land the fish.
"But the force of the thing -- oh! He took in my arm and my top torso. Yeah, I have seen the inside of the beast; I tasted its vile stench -- and he took everything I had to rid myself. Foul! Foul!"
Neres shook his head in shame. A fisherman should never be beaten by his prey, but his prey should never be a fish of such grotesque size and style.
"He landed on my boat. You can see here -- that blue glow -- that sticky stuff near the cooler?” A sleek shining blue-ish ooze, fluorescent and fluid, rested on the boat's deck.
"That blue thing flopped off ol' Hijinx. The splash almost sank her, but bless 'er, she stayed afloat."
Usually, all that is left behind in a “the one that got away” story is the story itself and some hand motions indicating how big it was. This glow was real. Surely no fish could have slimed the boat? It could be nothing else.
Simon Neres wasn’t bragging. He was afraid. Neres' stuck his hands in his pockets as if he were looking for his next words.
"Somewhere in there is Blue." Neres pointed to a dark patch of water beneath a grove of willow trees. He was unaware that Blue was, in fact, Po, a rogue goldfish which ate radioactive fish food flakes.
"Not fishing here again. I'll try me someplace safer. Maybe try the Mississipp -- see if the bull shark are biting. Those I can handle," Neres said.
No one else has mentioned the fish, but the Bluster County goose population has dropped dramatically. Strange waves have appeared up and down the Fox River, and more than once, boats have felt an unexplained shove beneath. Most boaters claim they probably hit undergrowth, but none have actually seen branches or logs.
When crossing the bridge at North Avenue, or walking in the park near the former Mill Race Inn, take a look at the water. If you see a blue-ish hue in the darkest part of the river, take a few steps back. Po might be hungry.
These are the days in Bluster County which give me the blues, but I would live nowhere else. The sun rises an inch higher here than anywhere else in the world, making every day brighter.
