It’s tough to tell an incredible story in Texas without it sounding like good, old fashioned Texas Bull Sh-t

                                                                   By Dave Hamby

              We had us a real Texas t__d floater last week.   Truth is, it been wetter lately than I can ever remember it being.   Makes you wonder about that “Global Warming” stuff.

              It rained so hard our driveway turned into a river.   My wife and kids went outside when the rains finally broke and were admiring all of the rushing water when my youngest daughter, Nanoo, spotted a fish swimming down our drive. “Look Daddy,” she hollered, “There’s a fish out here!”   I told her that if she thought I was dumb enough to fall for that one she’s just got another think coming.  I wasn’t about to relinquish my grip on the TV’s remote control for a fish story.  

            Being a native Texan herself she didn’t bother wasting her time trying to convince me that there was a fish swimming down our driveway, she just grabbed her fishing net and went and caught the darn thing. She came tromping into the house holding a minnow bucket in front of her and said, “See Daddy, I told you there was a fish swimming in our drive.”  

             Sure enough, in the bucket was a real tired, confused looking four inch stripped bass.   I grabbed our digital camera and went outside to take a look for myself.   It didn’t take long for my eagle eyed young’un to spot another bass, this one only about two and a half inches long.  

             After I took a few pictures my middle daughter, Kate, and I went to the ball game that night, which amazingly wasn’t rained out.   While we were there Nanoo caught another three stripped bass in our front yard.

              Now the reason I grabbed the camera was because I knew, living here in Texas, that if I were to tell someone about having fish swimming down my driveway, without pictures all I could expect in the way of a reply would be a“ Bulllll(oney)!”  

             Being a newcomer to this area, (we moved here when my Dad retired in 1966) it didn’t take me long to realize that with all the BS Texans dispense, most folks around these parts are what you would call a little skeptical.   One picture is worth a thousand “No really, I swear, honest, it’s true.”  The thing that really irritates me is when you produce the proof, the average Texan then claims to have seen the same thing somewhere else in this big state.   “Yeah, I saw that same thing in Nagadoches.”

              Right after my wife Teri and I got married, Grandpa, who hadn’t yet retired from American Airlines, gave us a couple of passes to go to Las Vegas.   We didn’t have a lot of money so we stayed away from the Casinos and spent our time seeing the sights around America’s adult playground.  After touring Hoover Dam we went down to Lake Meade, (which just has to be the biggest lake anyone could ever hope to find in the middle of a desert,) where I discovered one of my favorite wonders of the world.  Lake Meade has some really big Carp in it. (Hey Ed. I’m talking about the fish.  That’s not a misspelled word)   Tourists come down to the marina and feed these carp popcorn and bread.   This must be their only source of food as these fish get really excited at the prospect of getting a few bread crumbs.   Thousands of them will gather around anyone feeding them and they’ll get all bunched up, with their heads sticking out of the water and their little sucker mouths gasping and popping, begging for food.   They get so tightly packed that sometimes one of them will pop out, straight up like a rocket, and land on the heads of all of the other fish and then flop around till it gets to the edge of the swarm and is able to get back in the water.   The ducks living there sometimes just climb up and stand on the heads of all of these fish and intercept any bread crumbs they can get.

            When I came back to work after our little vacation and told my fellow workers about this, they accused me of making up tales and of being full of “Bulllll(oney)!”  

            There was only one way I could prove to these skeptics that this is not some Texas BS.

            Well I begged and pestered Grandpa for another couple of passes to Las Vegas and the next spring we got to go again.   This time I went with a camera.  My wife was convinced she’d married a real nut, (something Grandpa wasn’t going to argue with her about,) because all I wanted to do was go back down to Lake Meade and take some pictures of those fish.  

            When I came back to work holding pictures and proof of my “tall tale”, all my co-workers could do was say, “Yeah, I saw this same thing down at Lake Livingston,” or “That happens all the time at Lake Trinity.”

             Nowadays I always carry a camera when we go off on our adventures.   I know that anything except the commonplace will not be believed around here unless you have proof.  Of course now, with all this computer editing stuff, you can’t really believe a picture either.