A Ditch Runs Through It

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The thought of eating fish that lived in the ditches ranks just under cannibalism for culinary appeal. The surface film is often a prism of oil and herbicide, with brown foam bubbling where the current bumps the bank. Maybe the Ukrainians weigh the risks against the fact that ditch carp cost nothing. Maybe they think the apparatchiks are trying to scare them off, saving the best for themselves. Or maybe it just doesn't seem that bad. Most of them have seen pollution on a scale that makes Environmental Protection Agency warnings seem like nitpicking. After Chernobyl, a little thiobencarb is just spicing.

Heading up Interstate 5, Billy and I get to Tule Canal fairly quickly. We're a little hesitant to go there, though. It's almost legitimate, with a current and occasional sand banks. The only thing that rescues it from near-bluewater status is its proximity to the steady rumble of the freeway.

It looks bassy, Billy's preferred condition. The water's still and warm, with cattails dropping cotton onto the surface. Billy's a bass man, an authentic angler. I'm a little more opportunistic, going so far as to use stink bait for catfish. Stink bait, as its name only hints at, smells like a goat with a yeast infection, and it can take up to a week of steady hand-washing to be completely rid of it. Catfish love it, which must say something about catfish.

Billy tosses his Baby 1-Minus into the current of Tule Canal and works it back in. Just the week before, I'd caught a small bass in a side stream feeding from under the train tracks, and Billy's excited. Nothing comes of it this time, though, so we cross the levee to a series of ponds in the shadow of the Elkhorn Boulevard off-ramp.

We cut a slab of chicken liver into chunks and gradually feed it to a population of tiny chublike fish that strip it from our hooks almost instantly. We don't know what they are until we manage to land one, and even then we aren't sure. Something small and voracious, its jaws still working after gobbling a chunk of chicken liver half its size.

Eventually, I land a good-sized channel cat. It's hooked too deep to throw back, so I give it to the Ukrainian kid across the road. He drops it into his bucket and nods faintly. Water sloshes as the cat swims in tight, claustrophobic circles.

Later, Billy tells me that when a catfish is hooked deep, the best thing to do is to cut the line and leave the hook in. Eventually the hook will rust out and the catfish will pass it, like a kidney stone, without apparently minding much. Which probably says something further about catfish.

Apart from a woman who could be Kathy Bates' younger sister, who perches regularly on the lip of a hole in a salvaged lawn chair, we rarely see the same people twice. Some are transient anglers, some are easily repulsed. Others move on to the bluewater and never come back. A few, like us, return to the ditches. The simplest explanation is that there are fish here. But ditch fishing also offers a level of anonymity and a conditional solitude that's hard to come by. Peace within lunchtime. It is not pristine, but it's not combat fishing, either.

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