Dean Ertel and Naomi Love

[00:02] NAOMI LOVE: Hi. My name is Naomi love. I am 26 years old. Today is Wednesday, May 11. We are in the Ozarks in Missouri, and I'm here with Dean, who is one of our lovely participants.

[00:16] DEAN ERTEL: Hi, I'm Dean Ertel, age 76. I live here in Springfield, Missouri, and this is May 11 to 2022. The name of my partner is Naomi, and I'm glad she's here.

[00:43] NAOMI LOVE: Perfect. So why don't you tell us about what brought you here and a little bit about your story.

[00:49] DEAN ERTEL: Okay. Basically, what it comes down to is, during the pandemic, I sort of got bored, and I wrote a book called Memoirs of a Fish whisperer. And it basically covers roughly 70 years of my 76 years. And basically, it's just 82 short stories, all of them true. And it's just sort of fun to do. And I guess I might as well go ahead and explain a few things to beginning with, I grew up in a little town called Titusville in New Jersey, right on the Delaware river, kind of a unique place. The Delaware river was on one side of the town, the Delaware ran Canal was on the other. And the town had about 500 people in it, and it only had one main street. So when you came out of your house and you jumped across the road, you just jumped right into the river. And being a kid, sitting there with water on both sides, fishing became something that was a very early thing that you ended up doing. I might also mention that the house that I grew up in, in 1776, when George Washington crossed the Delaware to attack train, when he was in the middle of the river, he was right in front of my house that I grew up in, which was kind of fun. I might also mention that the stories in this book start when I was a kid, covers times like when I was in high school, four years in the air force, four years in college, ended up with a degree in zoology, and 40 years working for the Boy Scouts of America. And in the process of doing that, I got to cover a lot of different places and live in a lot of different places and catch a lot of different fish. And so what I might do is I'll just go ahead and one of the stories in there is called the first fish. And what it amounts to is that try and imagine again being caught between two bodies of water. My dad, my grandfather, and my uncle liked to go on Sunday afternoons, and they would go fishing in the old Delaware Railroad canal. They walk across these railroad tracks and go down the other side, put their lawn chairs out, and they would fish. Well, five year old kid was kind of being a pain. And I wanted to fish too, but they didn't want the kid on the railroad tracks anyways, what it amounted to is, I guess I persisted long enough that they turned around and said, okay, you can come over. So they got me over the railroad tracks. They gave me a six foot long cane pole with about 5ft of line on it, a cork and a little minnow on the end. And they put it out there and I'm sitting there holding this pole and they figure, well that'll keep the kid quiet, right? Well, not actually. Cause about five minutes later I end up dragging in about an eight inch sunfish. And they put the sunfish in a bucket with the idea that hey, this will keep the kid out of trouble. He'll play with the sunfish in the bucket. No, I want another minnow. So they give me another minnow and probably 510 minutes later my uncle hears this funny sound. He turns around and he screams at my dad. He says, grab Dean. Turns out that I had a fish on and I was waist deep in the Delaware canal and would not let go of that pole. My dad grabbed me, my uncle grabbed my hands in the pole. And the outcome of that particular story was a 22 inch largemouth bass. The biggest fish of the day. And that was my. Those were the first fish. Another story that's in this book has to do with the great flood in 1995. The Delaware river rose 33ft and Titusville, the northern end of the town, was really in big trouble. I watched an empire barn float down the Delaware river and crash into the Washington's crossing bridge.

[05:30] NAOMI LOVE: Wow.

[05:30] DEAN ERTEL: And it was kind of scary, except that if you're nine years old, it's not quite as scary as your parents and everybody else seems. They were all out there on the railroad tracks, putting sandbags on the railroad tracks because they were trying to keep the canal from overflowing and connecting with a river because then the town would go anyways. Again, keep the nine year old kid off the railroad track, keep him out of the way. They turned around, my grandfather says, hey, why don't you just see if you can catch a few fish? So they said, you can sit right there on Grandpa's back porch and fish in the garden. Because there was water. There was water all over the place. So to get out of the way I went back there and I'm sitting there on this porch and there was a can of worms there and an old fishing pole. And about three, 4 hours later they came in that late afternoon for dinner and have any luck I told them, I said, well, kind of slow, but I got a few. And they all looked kind of puzzled, you know, fishing in the garden like this. Anyways, they looked in the bucket, and there were three silver shiners, which is a big minnow, and two little catfish that I caught in the garden that were there in the flood because it was calmer water. And it was at that point that my uncle turns and tells my dad. He says, I swear, I think this kid talks to the fish. And that was the beginning of the fish whisperer at age nine. Another place that I thought I might cover. I call it my secret place. If you're going chronologically, there is a place in northern Jersey. Most people think of New Jersey as just being a big city. Lots of people. The Worthington State forest in northern Jersey is 44,000 acres of nothing but wilderness. Mountains, no roads. And there's a little creek up there that I call my secret place. I won't give you the name of it, but anyways, this is a place where, when I was about 17, had my first car. I drove that 75 miles from my house to this place, went up there, and hiked about 3 miles into this wilderness. And in fishing there, I caught a. A whole bunch of wild brook trout and a couple browns and a couple rainbows in the lower reaches where they used to stock in. And what's interesting about this place is 20 years ago, first of all, I caught 98 trout that day, which was, like, my personal high school record. And nowadays, that same place is sort of weird and neat. They don't stock it anymore. They haven't done that for 20 years, and it's just considered a wild trout stream. People don't think of New Jersey as having wild stuff anyways. Now it's pretty much browns in the lower reaches, brookies in the upper reaches. And there's a funny thing that happens in this creek. It's a very small, very clear stream, and there's 26 waterfalls in the last mile. And each below one of these holes, you end up with pockets of water, perhaps maybe the size of the room that we're in right now, which is not very big. And if you end up with a brook trout and a brown trout in that hole, and it becomes that time of year, and they look at each other and say, hmm, it's hanky panky time. And they turn around, and the next thing you know, you have a thing called a tiger trout. And the last time I was there, I caught five of those tiger trout below one hole. I caught a brook trout and a brown trout. The hole above them and the five baby ones below, they were only like six to ten inches long. But a tiger trout is weird. It has stripes on it like a zebra or a tiger. Anyways, that's one of my secret places.

[09:49] NAOMI LOVE: Did you ever bring anyone there?

[09:52] DEAN ERTEL: My brother knows where it's at. And the uncle that took me and taught me how to fish from the time I was twelve on, he knows where I was at. He has passed away since then. I guess another thing I might do is wander away from the fishing just a little bit in the book, because I talk about a lot of times when I worked with the Boy Scouts, for example, trying to imagine being here in Missouri in the early seventies, driving a car late at night between Warsaw and Lincoln, Missouri, and you're behind a truck with a bunch of crates in it. All of a sudden, here comes this big puff of white out of this crate, runs right, lands right in front of my car. And when it goes into my car, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like this. And I hit the brakes and I stopped, and it was a big white turkey, and it's getting up behind my car. And I thought about getting out and going to grab this thing. This is two months before Thanksgiving, by the way. It would have been a free turkey. But anyways, as it turns out, the car behind me stops and I can see this guy chasing this turkey down the road. So I just kept going. About 15 minutes later, lo and behold, it dawns on me. Each one of these crates has two birds in it. Here comes the second bird. I stopped in time. I didn't hit this one. I go out and I grab this turkey. Try to imagine a 20 pound big old white turkey, okay? And not being real smart, I took a piece of clothesline and I tied his legs up, and then I tied his wings shut and I put him in the back seat. I take him home. Well, about ten minutes later, the turkey gets loose, flies over the back seat, hits me in the back, sinks his claws into my shoulder and starts pecking the crap out of me. So I didn't have an accident. But I can tell you when I got the car stopped, me and that turkey had a nice battle, and I tied him up again and I put him in a trunk. Well, for whatever it's worth. Even though the turkey did make it to Thanksgiving, he still had the last laugh. You can only imagine what a turkey will do to the backseat of your car and your trunk poop all over the place. Anyways, he just kind of wrecked things, such was the turkey or the Thanksgiving turkey. Another thing that I might mention was the boundary canoe waters area in northern Minnesota. When I worked for the scouts in Minnesota was a really neat place, if you like wildernesses and lots of lakes. I was there with two future brother in laws and a couple other friends. There were six of us, six people in two canoes for two weeks, floating in the wilderness. And I had a brother in law who was in charge of the food, and he was so convinced that I was going to catch enough fish to feed him for two weeks that the only thing he brought with him was a five pound bag of rice, some flour, pancake mixed, and bacon. And we were out about three days and had not caught any fish worth eating. And the troops were getting a little bit po'd at that time, and things were getting kind of hot and heavy there. And I finally decided, I said, okay, I'm going to go out tomorrow morning, and I won't come back until I bring back food. So I go out and I leave about daybreak. You gotta understand that at that time of year in the boundary canoe waters, it'll still be light at 1030 at night up there, just getting dark. So I'm out there, I spend the whole day messing around, and I catch a couple little bitty fish. And then I had an accident, a good one. I had a minnow and a cork, and I threw it out, and there's this big explosion, and I set the hook, and there was nothing there. I get in, and the minnow was perfectly fine, but the cork had holes in it. Okay? Something came up and hit the cork floating on the water. So I go to shore, and I catch a whole bunch of frogs. I had them in an old coffee pot that was in the canoe, turn around and start throwing these frogs around the lily pads. And long and short of this part of the story is I caught six northern pike that were about 30 inches long, and that's a lot of food right there. I had them all in a stringer, and I was down to my last frog. Well, my last two frogs, I had a great big giant frog that I thought would make frog legs. So he was in the pot, and I had one other frog, the last frog I had. There's one spot I'm going to fish, and I'm going to quit. I threw the lure out there, or the frog out there, and he went splat up against this log. Didn't do the frog any good, so I go over there to get him off the log. And I'm in this canoe and trying to imagine that you're in a canoe and you're sitting in water that's about 10ft deep, but it's real clear. I saw something. Here comes a huge, monstrous northern pike out from under the lilies. He's going under the canoe. He was huge, huge. This is one of those 20 pounders. Anyways, he goes under the canoe, comes out the other side. And when I thought he was out I went to lean back over to get the frog off and his tail was still on the other side. Anyways, long and short of it, my little frog was not going to do me any good. So I turn around and I open up the coffee can down there, coffee pot and I take out this great big giant bullfrog and I gently put the little hook in his little back like that. And I hand threw him out into the water and lo and behold he pushed and went three or four pushes and here big explosion. Froggy was gone. Anyways, I kind of let him run and he ran about 20 or 30ft and stopped. And when you do this, a big fish like that, when they stop they'll chew on it. And then when they start up again, that's when you set the hook. I set the hook. Try to imagine you're sitting in the back of a canoe and you're fishing forward. Next thing you know you're being towed by a fish backwards. And it wasn't so bad in the COVID where I was at, but he towed me back out into the main lake. This is a lake that you cannot see the other side. That's how big of a lake it is. The waves are crashing over the back of my canoe. I'm getting wet and I'm thinking you're gonna drown. And I thought maybe I need to cut this line and give this thing up because I don't want to end up in bad shape. And it was at that point it dawned on me he was moving back into that cove, got back into the COVID and lo and behold, I came to the conclusion that this is something that's, you know, this has been going on now for 20 minutes. I'm just getting towed around, turned around and got a little ornery with him and really put a lot of pressure on him and made him mad. I don't even think he realized he was hooked. Made him mad and he took off and all of a sudden my line went limp and I thought, well, he broke my line. Well, I wound up the line and lo and behold, he didn't break my line, but my hook, he straightened the hook out.

[18:02] NAOMI LOVE: Wow.

[18:03] DEAN ERTEL: And at that point you would say, well, the story's over. Not quite. Bloop. Up comes froggy and he hits the surface and he's. Poor froggy was not in too good a shape. One leg was sort of straight out, and one side of his eye looked kind of red. And he pushed and he could push with just one leg. He went in a circle. The second push, he disappeared. The big pike came up and got him. And that's how that story ended. But I ended up going back and getting in about 1030 that night. And it was quite obvious that the troops were very angry. It seems that there was two canoes and six people, right? So me and one canoe took off. Well, I didn't realize I had all the paddles to the other canoe in my canoe. And they've been stuck on this island.

[18:54] NAOMI LOVE: Oh, no.

[18:55] DEAN ERTEL: All day long, hungry. And they were a little irritated when they saw the six big, long pike that I had. Suddenly they were all happy. And that's kind of how that one ended. Another story that I might mention. I'm going to call this one the bear that tried to eat me. Okay. The Magee river is a stream in Minnesota, south of Duluth that salmon or steelhead trout will come up and spawn. They come up this muddy old river, and then they go up a spring creek called the Black Hoof. And when they go up the black hoof, that's where they would spawn. So I get there. I parked my car next to an old iron bridge. I am 20 miles away from the nearest building. It's a paved road and an old iron bridge, and it's about 50 yards straight down to the river. And I turned around and put my waders on and I weighed up the stream for about maybe 35, 40 minutes. I get to where the black hoof comes in and I start to fish. Well, the fishing part didn't work out, so I end up with five little trout. There were none of the big ones left in there, just the little hatchlings. And I came to the conclusion that the stream had taken this huge, turned back, and I said, well, it takes me 45 minutes just to get back to the main river. Unless I cross over this mountain, go over the top and come down, I think maybe I'll just hit the river right there. So I did it, and I was right. I saved a lot of time. Except that when I got down to the other side, trying to imagine, you come to where the two creeks come together and you see your boot tracks going up the river where I had gone up? Well, lo and behold, on top of my boot tracks were these huge, giant bear tracks, and the mud bubbles were still coming up in the tracks. He had just gone up there. It was like he was following me. So I turned around and decided, no, that's not smart. I'm glad I didn't go back the other way. I crossed the main river barely with my waders, almost got wet because it was really quite deep, and hiked back to the car and kept looking over my shoulder. When I got back to the bridge, I looked off the bridge and, gee, nothing there. So I go to the car, and the next two things I did were really smart. I took the waders off, put them in the trunk, had the passenger door open and had a cooler on the floor, got a can of pop out, walked over to the bridge, leaned on this iron bridge, looking upstream, opened up the can and went to take a drink. And there was the bear. I'm 50 yards from the car. The bear is 50 yards from the bridge. So I got 50 yards to run. He's got 100 yards to run. They could do 40 miles an hour. I can't. Anyways, I ran toward that car, dropped the can of pop, and I knew the bear wasn't far behind because he was a making noise. And as I got to the car, I leaped in. As my knees hit the dash, my hand caught the door. There was a sound like this. The first whack was the door going shut. The second whack was the bear. That close? One strike. Anyways, long and short of this story is it's one of those things where you turn around and you say, okay, I got lucky there. And I pulled out, and as I went down the road for about a mile, the bear was sort of trying to chase me. But when he got done, he tore the mirror off my car, dented the door, tore the windshield wiper off, scratched the heck out of it. And the worst part is, in those days, we were using a thing called a leased car. And the leased car means that when I was doing Boy scout work with it, that was fine. If I was on my own time, I had to pay so much a mile, which was fine, except that the next day I had to explain to my boss what I did to the Boy scout leased carp.

[23:07] NAOMI LOVE: Oh, no.

[23:08] DEAN ERTEL: And I couldn't tell whether he was angry with me or underneath, just laughing like heck because he thought it was pretty funny. But anyways, I got one or two other little things I'm going to cover here. One is a story locally here in Springfield, Missouri, that happened some years later on my way to the scout office early one morning, car in front of me. There's only two, me and one other car. The car in front of me, I see him. He sort of half slowed up but kept moving. I saw something fly in front of this car. Well, when I got up there, lying in the middle of the road was a hawk. And I went around it and it dawned on me, somebody's got to come over and squish this thing. Somebody ought to at least get it out of the road. So I turned around, came back, parked my car with my flashers on, bent over to pick the hawk up to put him over on the side, and he's looking at me. He wasn't dead. So I went back to the car, got a cardboard box, took my shirt off, wrapped this hawk up in my shirt and put him in the box. And then I made my next big mistake. I took him back to the boy scout office, took him in the building, went in my office and called the conservation people and said, hey, I've got a wounded hawk here. And they said, well, you know, bring him over, whatever. Well, I said, fine. I thought, well, wonder if he's dead. So I tried to peek in the box. Lo and behold, he leaps out of the box, starts flying in a circle around the room like this. And that's not real good, by the way. No, fortunately, it was a small room and the door was shut and he hit, landed on top of the bookcase and then pooped all over the bookcase. And at that point in time, I took a big fish net and I ended up capturing this guy with a fishnet and then put him back in the box, took him to the conservation people, and a couple days later they let him go. He was fine. But anyways, such is the case. One other thing I was going to do in this book where it's called memoirs of a fish whisperer, when people say, what is a fish whisperer? Well, you know what a horse whisperer is, Orlando dog whisper, somebody that they talk to them or whatever. What I turned around and did is I just tell people that, well, what I do is I walk up to a stream or a lake or a pond or whatever, and I take my pointer finger and I put it in the water and I go real fast in a circle and the ripples come out and every fish there feels that. The lateral line on the side of the fish feels the vibrations. And they all say, oh crap. The fish whispers here because they all know that once they have been warned, there's only two options. Two options. The first option is, everybody pick a number, line up. I catch gobs of fish, I'm happy, I let them all go. Second option, give me a hard time, I will fish harder. I'm going to still catch some of you and I'm going to take you home and eat you. That's the two choices. And for whatever it's worth, the only time that I ever got skunked fishing, meaning went out and fished and didn't catch something, was when I was 17 years old. My first car. I drove way up to north Jersey to fish this little creek that was supposed to be a great trout stream. Fished it for 3 hours and did not get a bite. And an old geezer in a beat up old pickup truck is on this bridge as I'm coming back and putting my stuff back in the car. And he said, any luck? And I told him no. And he laughed at me. And he says, well that's probably because the sewage plant overflowed the day before and killed everything in the room.

[27:13] NAOMI LOVE: Oh no.

[27:14] DEAN ERTEL: So that's the only time that I got scummed. I'm going to go ahead and kind of end this, I think at this point by saying that if someone wanted to read this book and you wanted to know things about let's say the vampire mouse or UFO's, fireworks or any of that kind of stuff, that I think that it would be one or let's say another hundred streams that you could learn how to fish are great places to go, covering Montana, Colorado, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Florida, Missouri and a bunch of other places. And at that point I think I'm gonna go ahead and close this thing off rather than bore you with 100 more stories. But I would tell you one other thing. I mentioned UFO's. If you read this book, there is two UFO stories in there. And I can tell you, having spent four years in the air force in communications, UFO's are real. And I think that's where I'll close at this point. That's a.