Missouri Eighteen - Text
Caucasian male, born 1975 in Springfield, MO. Reads The Rainbow Passage. Talks about noodling, an old-fashioned method for catching catfish. Contains a couple of mild swear-words.
Recorded by James Knight (on behalf of Louis Colaianni) 3-01 and edited by Shawn M. Muller. Recording length 00:05:33.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
Well, noodlin’ is a… rural Ozarks experience that results occasionally in loss of limb. (Uh) Noodlin’ is somethin’ that I learned about through a friend of my dad’s, Pat Shanks, an’… Pat’s a crazy bastard. He (um)-- he’s the guy who, when you’re out in the woods choppin’ firewood and the snakes comes out of the woodpile, would grab the snake an’ show it to everybody, and go, “Ooh, it’s a mean old snake,” an’ pinch its head off. So…
You know, I think that Pat’s childhood had a lot to do with how he (uh) acted as an older individual. An’ Pat had a crazy uncle, when he was a kid, who used to come home in a vicious drunk an’ get all the kids outta bed and take ’em noodlin’. An’ what noodlin’ was-- is-- is-- It’s an-- primitive form of fishin’. Person would get down into the (um)-- git down into the water, and--
See, a lotta the rivers in south-- southwest Missouri have mud banks, and… What would happen is a big ol’ catfish’d get in front o’ the mud banks, an’ swish his tail back ’n’ forth. And-- and that big ol’ catfish’d sit there aswishin’ that tail until-- Just a moment, please. Until there’s a hole in the mud bank. An’ this hole goes back into the bank, an’ the catfish’d go up ’n there. It would lay eggs, (um) an’-- an’ it was basically just a littl-- a li’l hole for the catfish.
An’ so what people would do was-- Th-- the adults would git down in the river, while the kids stayed up on the bank, an’ the adult men would get down in there, an’-- I-- I assume that a few women probably did this too, but I think most of ’em were smarter than to do this. (Um) They would git down in there, an’ reach an’-- reach deep into that hole, an’ tap on the side o’ that fish, an’ the fish would come out, hit ’em in the chest, and they’d grab it an’ throw it up on the bank. An’ that was noodlin’.
It’s illegal, an’ (uh) I-- I’ve never been able to figure out why, but… So they would do this, an’ then the kids would drag the fish away from the bank an’ clean them, but Pat’s uncle was an innovator… at noodlin’. He-- he-- he was a visionary. And he thought that there was no sense in stickin’ your hands into the cave in the mud bank, because that was the way that you lost limbs. Because, you know, that ol’ catfish may ’a’ moved out o’ there. A big ol’ snappin’ turtle might ’a’ moved in, or a big nest o’ snakes. I mean, you know, there’s a who-- whole realm of possibilities. And so, you reach your hand up in there, an’ you know, two fingers are suddenly missin’, an’ there you are, noodlin’ with two less fingers.
An’, so, he was thinkin’ of a way to s-- thinkin’ of a way to… advance the cause of noodlin,’ an’ he came up with the idea of-- of-- a-- a gig, a gig on the end. Like a frog gig, like you’d use for froggin’. Came up with the idea of a frog gig that was put on the end of a rope line that he had tied around his wrist.
So he comes home in a ragin’ drunk, an’ gets the kids up because he’s excited, to take ’em all out an’ show ’em his new noodlin’ invention. An’ they go down to the river, an’ he’s got this gig tied around his wrist, an’ he gets down into the river, an’ he gigs up into a hole, an’ I guess he didn’t realize how big the catfish was that he gigged. But it dragged him to the bottom of the river an’ drowned his ass.
And (uh), I think that that was the last time that the Shanks family went noodlin’, but it just proves that even the most innocent fishin’ sport can prove deadly.