Koi spotting leads to memories, tears

The casualty count was extraordinary.

Careless handling of herbicides at weed-phobic Blacksburg Country Club resulted in the death of 10,335 fish along a 1.4-mile stretch of the once sweetly gurgling North Fork of the Roanoke River last month.

A tip of the golf hat to the club for taking steps to ensure it won't happen again. Still, what's done can't be undone. We fishermen tend to take this stuff personally. Similar accidental mass murders have taken place in recent years with trout and other species in Big Stoney Creek in Giles County and with a variety of finny critters in Roanoke County's Mason Creek.

Happily, the North Fork tragedy didn't spread farther. That was confirmed by a recent twilight angling excursion to Lafayette, just downstream from where the North and South Forks converge in Montgomery County. And as the endangered Roanoke logperch (169 were counted among the deceased) swims, it wasn't far from the deadly spill.

It was devilishly hot even at sunset, but the fishing for the usual assortment of bass and bluegill was brisk.

Swarms of suckers, some of them running multiple feet in length, created small mud clouds in the clear water as they nosed their way through the silt noshing on bottom dwelling food. Carp, some easily topping 30 pounds, cruised through the traffic, carefree as princes and dukes among the commoners.

It was getting dark when I saw something that at first looked like a very large piece of orange plastic. Being in the habit of taking as much garbage as I can carry out every time I fish, I moved toward the orange glow.

Then the orange object moved in an unexpected way before it headed calmly upstream.

The "litter'' was actually a koi, a huge one, every bit as hefty as the smaller of the carp. The koi almost glowed, so intense was its color. No telling how it got in the river, koi not being native to these parts.

In any event, the big orange fish had unexpected impact on me. It made me think of my parents, my father still living and my mother who is dead.

Both of them were writers, too. When I was small, both wrote for this newspaper -- Daddy as a reporter for the old World-News, the afternoon paper, and Mother for the morning Times.

I was a frequent visitor to the newsroom and often was my parents' guest for lunch. Back in those days, a favorite lunchtime haunt for the newspaper crowd was right across Second Street in the basement of the old Ponce de Leon Hotel.

If memory serves, the eatery was called the Pipe Room. One of the features of the joint was a stone pond, really nothing more than a hole in the floor, made possible because a substantial stream flows under Roanoke's downtown and right through the foundation of the old hotel. There swimming around in that little pond were a number of monster orange koi. I never once failed to go over and stand at the rail to peer in amazement at the giant goldfish.

As for the restaurant, the cheeseburgers were righteous, which I recall vividly, and the beer was very cold, of which I have no firsthand knowledge.

The memory brought to mind a story one of my colleagues, now retired, liked to tell.

One night, word arrived via the police scanner in the newsroom that a car crash had taken place right there on Campbell Avenue outside the newspaper office. The photographer grabbed his camera and headed for the stairs. Before he got there, somebody stopped him.

"You can't go shoot that wreck," the photographer was told.

"Why not?"

The crash involved one of the editors who was driving, after having a couple too many at dinner.

Sadder stories came out of the beer joint in the basement of the Ponce. That's where Daddy and some of his fellow reporters were having lunch one late fall day when somebody from the newspaper came rushing in and told the guys to get back to work pronto.

"Somebody just shot President Kennedy."

The news didn't get to me until later that afternoon when Mother was picking me up from first grade at Crystal Spring Elementary School. I knew something was wrong at once.

It was the first time I ever saw her crying.