Job was a little fishy

Whose idea was this anyway?
It sure wasn’t mine.
But, as a kid, my job wasn’t to plan or come up with ideas. I was merely labor.
That was particularly true when I was a teenager, and my payment for services was usually the continued use of the family station wagon when I needed it. (Gasoline wasn’t included in that privilege.)
But as any laborer can tell you, inevitably jobs come along that simply make no sense. Yet if the person giving the orders is Mom or Dad, there’s little choice but to attempt the impossible.
It was about 1965.
My parents had bought a small farm in rural Jackson Township and built a little house there with visions of eventually retiring to the country. They had a small pond excavated and had dreams of lazy afternoons spent with a fishing pole.
But if you’re going to go fishing, it’s important to have fish in the pond.
That’s where I came in.
My mother had been studying up on all sorts of services available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She’d already had me plant dozens of evergreen saplings to form a windbreak. (The fact that my father eradicated about 75 percent of them with his riding mower didn’t deter either one of them.)
 The pond needed fish, and the USDA had fish to offer. So my mother ordered fish.
And then, for reasons that are long lost to the mists of time, the rest of the family went out of town.
I had my freedom and the station wagon, but I also had been assigned an impossible chore.
The fish were arriving by mail at the post office in Portland. What I needed to do, I was told, was to get a clean trash can, put it in the back of the station wagon, fill it with water, dump the newly-arrived fingerlings (or whatever they were) into the water, then drive out to the farm and stock the pond.
Piece of cake, right?
Wrong.
For starters, the station wagon was the wrong vehicle for the job. A pick-up truck was clearly needed.
The top of the trashcan nearly touched the roof in the cargo area of the station wagon. To run a hose in and fill the can, I had to leave the back window open.
Even then, the can wasn’t quite big enough.
To meet the guidelines provided by the USDA, I nearly had to fill the thing.
And by the time I had driven a block, at least half a gallon has sloshed out.
Still, I was feeling confident when I stopped by the post office, claimed the package, and dumped its contents into the water.
I was feeling much less confident five minutes later as every bounce or bump seemed capable of up-ending the whole thing, fish and all.
By then, I was already wondering about the wisdom of the whole thing.
After all, if the USDA baby fish had survived shipment by the post office, couldn’t they have hung on for 20 more minutes? Then I could have just emptied the packages into the pond.
But that’s not what the instructions said. And those weren’t the orders I had been given.
Finally, driving more slowly than usual and probably irritating everyone else on the road, I arrived at the farm.
That’s when I faced a more serious problem.
Even with a significant amount of the water sloshed over the inside of the station wagon, a trashcan of the remainder is incredibly heavy.
Getting it out of the car was going to be challenge enough. Getting it across several hundred yards of open landscape was going to be impossible.
I drove as far as I could, dodging what few evergreen saplings my father had failed to mow down, but eventually there was no choice.
Lifting and hauling, moving a few feet at a time, with water and traumatized baby fish splashing about, I made my way up a hill, through a field of weeds, and down to the muddy shore.
By now, I figured, most of the fish were scarred for life. And maybe half of them wouldn’t last a week.
But with a mighty splash, I dumped the trashcan into the pond.
How many fish survived? More than I ever expected. And they certainly did better than the evergreens I planted.[[In-content Ad]]