Fried Mood

I hate hot weather. I thought I was getting used to it but the past two or three weeks of brutal heat has kicked me in the nuts with reality and cured me like a Honey Baked ham.

I stayed inside all day Saturday doing things to myself with ice cubes that usually require a medical license and when I finally emerged from my sunless bunker at 9:30 PM it was 108 degrees outside. The low temperature at 5 AM was 90. This is wrong.

I think it’s important to blame someone for this climatic serial killer who’s stalking us day and night. The obvious choice would be our mentally disturbed president which wouldn’t be wrong but I’m opting for a more local assassin. My enemy in this war is one of the local weather broads. Don’t know her personally and don’t care to but this women made a decision a few weeks back that has come to haunt our days and nights like a mutant strain of diarrhea taking hold at the annual Kiwanis Chili Fest/Monster Truck Rally in Bakersfield.

One night I’m watching the news and her last name is, well, that's not important but the next night she’s going by the last name Toasty. Ok, she got married but you don’t have to change your name, understand? Since the name change the temperatures have gone apeshit. It’s pretty clear who’s fault this is so please, please change your name before people begin bursting into flames on the streets.

In an effort to find some relief from the heat, I joined up with a couple friends and headed into the mountains for a day of fishing. Our first stop, a Dinky Creek, which sits at 5600 feet provided little break from the pain. We fished for a couple of hours with only a couple of small fish landed. We kept hiking downstream for mile or so but everywhere we stopped we found half naked fat people and their kids wallowing in some of our favorite fishing holes.

We climbed up and down some steep hills only to be greeted by more hillbillies. By the time we found unmolested water, the sun was beating off the white granite like a three dollar whore yanking off a drunken district attorney. We were drinking water like crazy and still couldn’t come to terms with the heat so we made the hot climb back to the road so we could make a new plan.

We broke down our gear, rehydrated and began driving up the mountain in search of cooler air. Ten or twelve miles up the road we stopped to take a look at a small creek in a campground called Buck Meadow, which sounded like a porn stars name to me, and a good reason to take a look. The creek had a nice and quite visible population of wild trout so we broke out the gear again and started fishing. Their were a few clouds overhead and the temperatures were at least 10 degrees cooler and the creek was lined with trees.

We split up and fished for more than an hour, the fish were typical of small creeks, 7-12 inches and quite hungry for anything that looked like a bug. Eric caught 4 or five and Joe and I each landed 2 trout. At one point I met up with Eric and pointed out that the clouds moving in from the east looked pretty ominous and we could hear thunder. The wind picked up, the thunder became more frequent and it was obvious we were going to get rained on so we broke down and decided to find Joe and have lunch before the storm hit.

By now the temperature had dropped even more and it actually began to feel nice. We finished up lunch just as the rain began to start and decided to enjoy the change in weather and drive even higher up the mountain to 8000 feet. Summer storms are common in the mountains and they usually hit hard and fast, dumping heavy rain and hail for no more than 20 minutes before moving on.

As we drove the rain got harder and harder until it pounded the car so much that we couldn’t hear each other talk. We kept expecting the storm to pass but it got heavier and heavier. We drove to a lake above 8000 feet and after doing a quick recon mission for future fishing turned around and started down the hill. At one point the car’s outside thermometer read 58 degrees. It began hailing and the rain kept coming. After more than an hour the downpour stopped and we pulled into a gas station in Shaver Lake where I called Anna. “It’s 62 degrees and just stopped pouring,” I said. “What’s it like down in Fresno”? “It’s 113 degrees, “ she answered.

To put this in perspective, Shaver lake is 50 miles from Fresno. By the time we has driven down the four lane highway back to the valley just16 miles. the temperature had risen from 62 to 100. By the time we got home at 9:30 it was down to a Toasty 104.