With Pen In Hand

Theres still a place in the old land
where rails have never ground.
Where vapor trails and rooster tails
have yet to be unwound.
Where muffler's drone and telephone
are still an unknown sound.
And the Big Nianqua River has never been to town.
By Pete Rice

My father was a journalist when he was younger. My Aunt Viginia said he would write and send in articles to the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City, when he was twelve years old. They didn't know how old he was, but he would get paid for the articles. When he was older and after the War, he worked for the Daily Oklahoman, and wrote many articles. Most of these articles were sports. He covered a lot of baseball and football, and he also covered the boxing scene. It was also here that my Great Uncle George Tapscott, another writer and photogragher for the Daily Oklahoman, introduced my Mother to my Father. My father later worked for the newspaper in Enid, Oklahoma, and that is where I was born.

He quit the newspaper business, after awhile, and became a traveling salesman. He traveled eight states, and that is when we moved to Missouri, so he could be centrally located. It was here that my father fell in love with the Ozarks hardwood trees, the many rivers of Southwest Missouri, and the panorama of the dogwoods in bloom in the spring. My family camped and fished most of my childhood days. Every chance we got, we would escape the city to the wilds of the Ozarks Hills.

The "Missouri Conservationist" is a monthly magazine that the Missouri Conservation Commision publishes for residents and non residents. My father wrote two articles for the magazine back in the sixties. The first article "You Brought It.....You Carry It Home" was published September 1, 1966. The article was about littering our streams and rivers. He may have been a little ahead of his time talking about such issues in the mid-sixties. Although Ladybird Johnson and the President had enacted the "Beautification Program" in 1965. I don't think anyone was listening then, and our environment is a big issue now. Funny how things change.

The second article was called "Nianqua Patrol", published November 1, 1968. That was my birthday, and I was fourteen years old. My father was a friend of the Conservation Commision, although he was civilian, he rode with many Conservation Agents in Southwest Missouri. At times he was deputized during Deer or Turkey season, and helped the Agents with checking tags and licensing. The story is about my father and his friend, Conservation Agent Don Ross, making a float down the Nianqua River , some 60 miles in a day.

I can not post the entire stories here, but I have some highlights of each story for your musing.

You Brought It.....You Carry It Home - September 1966

My favorite time to fish Bennett Spring in the height of the season is, believe it or not, is Sunday afternoon. After the weekend hordes have departed for home, the rainbows seem to be so relieved by the sudden absence of all that hardware that they frolic in the fast water and boil the slicks of the deep holes to take almost any offering of a dry pattern or a small (size 16 or 20) unweighted drifting hackle fly. Sometimes the fish cooperate to the tune of 25 or 30 an hour. That's when I find a shady casting position and have fun. What Hatchery Superintendent Clarence Holland calls "giving the trout a sore mouth".

In just less than fifteen minutes, just circling the hole above and below the main bridge, I took a heaping tubfull of beer and soft drink cans, whiskey bottles, empty cigarette packages, motor oil cans, a mud flap off an ole jalopy, and two old shoes ( un-mated, incidentally).

When I returned to my fishing spot, I'd been joined by another fellow I hadn't seen on this stream before. He had a first-class outfit and cast a good dry fly. Like myself, he was releasing a fish about every other drift. Obviously he was no greenhorn at fly fishing for trout.

I'd learned he was a Fort Leonard Wood officer who had grown up on one of the delicate trout streams of New England and appreciated the rainbow for what he is......the most pleasurable fish in the world to outwit with a dry fly. The style he'd learned as a boy on the Beaverkill could still be cashed in on any trout stream in the world. But his attitude on litter was completely out of date.

We can sit around the mid-morning coffee and make jokes about Lady Bird Johnson's Beautification program, but lets face it: people are sometimes a bunch of hogs. And we have to start somewhere and sometime to improve the situation.

You're just one of thousands but remember the little girl on TV who preaches " Every Little Bit Hurts". Well, every little bit you pick up helps too.


Nianqua Patrol - November 1968

We're on the water before the sun gets over the ridges, three men in a 19 foot canoe heavy with the day's food and drink, plus five and a half H.P. motor. Our put-in is six miles above the Bennett Spring Branch on the Nianqua River in Dallas County.

This will be a long day. Resident Agent, Don Ross, is in the stern with Agent, Charley Guthrie, of Brookfield, on loan from the North Central District, riding his Bowman and me --- a civilian and friend of the Department, in midseat. We will check Permits of Floaters and Bank Fishermen, cut out illegal Trot Lines and keep an eye open for noodlers and evidence of Trammel Net and fish trap activity.

We glide under the big Bluff of the Christain Church Camp and no matter how often I go on this stream, I am always awed and inspired by the stark serenity of the surroundings. A huge Cross marks the Camp's outdoor Chapel a few hundred feet above us. What a place to meditate for those who come here from the concrete jungles and great Masonry Mausoleums of the Urban Communities.

Checking two boatloads of Floaters, I wonder to myself if they know how the Ozarks were formed by the leading edge of the Great Glacier in the Ice Age and whether they really appreciate the beauty that surrounds them even today in this age of man's destruction of his environment.

There is a downed Willow where I caught a three pound Smallmouth two weeks ago. I released him, as I do all the Brownies I'm fortunate enough to boat on my homemade Sassafras Lure (Buffalo Special). Largemouth are abundant here, too. On one weekend float last year, my 14 year old son and I caught 49 on Top-water Lures.

Bennett Spring Branch looms into view and we put in to eat Breakfast at my camp where my wife, Louise, has prepared Hot Cakes, Eggs, Bacon and lots of Coffee. We camp here as often as possible with our Teenagers and their friends. I can't think of a better place for them to be in this hully-gully era of sophisticated living.

If I had 50 Million Dollars, I'd buy up this long downstream stretch and the adjoining Timberland as Missouri's first State Scenic River and Forest Preserve.

This is truly wildnerness in the affluent society of today. Dallas County has never had a railroad, has no lakes for speedboaters to chrun, no hard service airplane runways, no super highways. Just a priceless heritage of hardwood forest and cold, clear spring-fed streams.

The water has cleared fast since we left Bennett and as we motor through the eddys, you can see dark forms run in all directions from beneath the speeding canoe. Fresh timber is down in every hole of water, another example of what an excellent job nature can do if we just leave the chores to her.

Here come Big Guthrie Bluff, where not only gear, but canoes and boats are frequent casualties. A steep, swift riffle catches a craft, the occupants lean the wrong direction, and before you can say square-stern, it is filled with water and wrapped around the huge boulder blocking the outlet where tons of water rush by hourly.

We sail for hours now with little evidence of civilization. Lush, green hardwoods line the banks of deep eddys flowing placidly past stark, sentinal limestone bluffs. Coon, possum, fox and deer water here and man in canoe is but a curiosity to a bonanza of birds. Too bad we can't load up the "God is Dead" advocates and bring them here where He still lives, performing daily miracles just as since the beginning of time.

A recap of the day's activity shows more than 100 Fishermen checked where but a couple of years ago, 25 would have been a big day. The people-explosion is everywhere.

When our Parks are paved with asphalt
and our streams have all been damned,
When each wondrous woodland acre
has been raped by human hand.
Oh, where will we take our children
when they ask if they can go
To see old Mother Nature
And the wonders of her show?
I dont know. But it bugs me!
By Pete Rice

Song of the Week
I think that my father and Cat Stevens had the same vision. "Where do the Children Play", song and lyrics.

Where Do The Children Play?

Well I think it’s fine, building jumbo planes.
Or taking a ride on a cosmic train.
Switch on summer from a slot machine.
Yes, get what you want to if you want, ’cause you can get anything.

I know we’ve come a long way,
We’re changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass.
For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas.
And you make them long, and you make them tough.
But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can’t get off.

Oh, I know we’ve come a long way,
We’re changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

Well you’ve cracked the sky, scrapers fill the air.
But will you keep on building higher
’til there’s no more room up there?
Will you make us laugh, will you make us cry?
Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die?

I know we’ve come a long way,
We’re changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

Have a Great Week
Daniel