Bass Fishing and Things You Don't Know

ESPN has had plenty of hours of fishing tournaments, and it's very pretty on the lake where the guys are catching fish very easily. I thought they would be sitting in their boats and just reeling in those catches, but it seems they stand for hours to get the number of pounds to be a winner. If they make a catch but it is too small, it doesn't go in with their treasure chest. And they watch for any thing that might give them an advantage in catching the prize fish, the movement of any nearby vessels, the way the sun is hitting certain spots. One of the winners last week was from Japan, and I certainly didn't know the Japanese liked to fish in a competitive way. I guess I thought it was strictly an American sport. 

But there are plenty of things I don't know. When Ben was little and just learning to put words into sentences, he did a great job except for "L" sound. Some words like "ladder" came out almost "yadder" because it was more like a "y". I knew with time he would get it straight because all toddlers do, but those darn "L" words were hard. One day I was looking at a family picture book and pointed to his cousin Laura Lyn. If you have trouble with an "L" sound, that will get you, so his "Yara Yen" was not quite right. I decided I could be a good speech therapist, so I put his sweet little face in both my hands, looked in his eyes, and said, "La...La...Laura.  La...La...Laura." He looked at me with his pretty eyes that were not brown even though my mother-in-law was sure they were going to turn and smiled back at me. "Aha," I thought. I know some of the things I've read in books about speech are going to be helpful. Later in the afternoon Ben was trying to get a ball out from under the couch where it had rolled. He needed my attention, and I was watching "As The World Turns" which takes all your efforts. He came up to me, held my face in his hands, looked in my eyes, and said, "Ya...Ya...Yara. Ya..Ya...Yara." So I thought I had taught him how to make a new sound, and he thought I was just making an emphatic point of some kind. 

More than 30 years ago I was sitting in a Sunday School class at Southcrest and dear Bennie was telling our class how hard his mother had worked to keep his large family together and safe. I think he had 12 or 13 siblings. "Sometimes," he said,"we didn't have enough food. But Mother would make sure we had something even if it was bark soup." Bark soup! Yikes, was she scraping the bark off trees and giving it to her family? Everybody in the class probably shivered and pictured the poor table being laid. Now fast forward to about a year ago. I was doing research for a book called A Thousand Years of Eating on The Cibolo(available from me but soon to be on Amazon, plug, plug). I wanted to see what the different groups who have lived here in the Hill Country ate beginning with the Tonkawa, then the Spanish, and then the German immigrants. As I'm working through various sites on the internet to get material and recipes, I look at the top of one page and there is "Bark Soup."  Holy dandelion greens, there it was.

It seems bark soup was used by groups for thousands of years. The Adirondack Indians(like the Adirondack chair you may have in your yard) got their name because it meant bark eaters. When the Germans came to Texas in 1845, it was a miserable experience because after the hard month-long boat trips from Germany, they got to the coast of Texas and were expecting to be greeted by wagons which would take them up here to  New Braunfels. No wagons--they had been hired by a government agency  and taken away. Now they camped on the sand with nothing to protect them and little food. Malaria, dysentery, cholera, yellow fever were all rampant. Out of the many thousands who had come to this great new land, only about 1500 were still alive when the wagons finally did get there. Now they set out for the Hill Country, and those who were already sick and weak died on the way and were buried in unmarked graves. They didn't have guns to kill any large game like deer, so they made do with what they could just like the Indians had done. The bark of willow, maples, pines, or spruce were removed. Next was a white layer which they scraped to make sort of a pasta. It could be dried on a flat rock, and when it was dry enough, they could boil it or even grind it into a kind of flour for mush. It wasn't a Big Mac, but it could be filling. 

We can think we know something and come to realize later we are way off the truth because of a new experience. It just takes the willingness to open our eyes to everything around us. In these days of internet and social media we have to read closely and ask questions, always expecting that a big fish, or an "L", or some bark soup can give us a brand new and better understanding.