Carol and I wanted to get outdoors one last time before the rain came in. “Let’s go fishing,” I said. So we grabbed our fishing tackle and went down to Sawyer Creek. We didn’t catch anything except weeds.
A man walking by told us, “You’ll probably do better if…”
“If we go buy fish at the market,” I said.
“If you go downstream to the bridge,” he said good-humoredly.
“Honestly, we don’t really want to catch fish,” I said. “We just wanted to get out of the house.”
Somehow that got us in a conversation with a man who was wading in the creek. He was wearing swim goggles, the water almost up to his chin. He was pulling out flying discs lost in the creek by golfers on the disc golf course on the opposite bank.
“You probably heard about me on the radio,” he said. “I’m the homeless guy who sells the discs he pulls out of the creek.” He’s no longer homeless, he told us, but he still makes good money selling the golfing discs he recovers. “That’s my son over there,” he said, pointing to a man who’d been in the water with him earlier. A friend of theirs was helping out, too.
“What do you make, 25 or thirty dollars a disc?” I asked.
He said he’d sold some discs for more than a hundred dollars. One particular disc he sold for over two hundred dollars.
He wanted to move down into the section of creek we were fishing, so we moved upstream. We didn’t catch anything there, either. Which was still just fine with us.
“I just felt a drop of rain,” said Carol.
The sky looked threatening. “Let’s get going,” I said. I quickly broke down my rod, and we walked quickly down the creek.
We saw our friend still in the water. “I’d tell you to get out before you get wet, but that won’t work,” I said.
He laughed. “If you see lightning, you’ll see me get out of the water quick,” he said. We all agreed that a day on the creek — or in his case, in the creek — was a good way to spend a day.
The rain started coming down harder. We got pretty wet before we got back to Carol’s dad’s place. It was still a good day on the creek.