Today we left Connecticut, leaving behind Shelton, which is a nice old town, a bedroom community of New York, and Irene’s nice family, now mine. The Sullivans have been there forever and will remain there forever, no doubt. Steve can’t go anywhere in town without knowing somebody, where I can’t go anywhere where I DO know somebody, so we’re even although different.

When Irene asked Steve what he would do if he suddenly had a couple of million tax-free, he said he would give a lot of it to his kids, and with the rest he would tear his house down and rebuild it right there, because he likes it there, and who can blame him? He’s Steve Sullivan, uncrowned King of Sullivan Avenue, and there are only three houses on the Street, and his daughter is in another of the other two, and probably if we wait long enough one of them will buy the third and there he’ll be again, King of Sullivan Avenue where I, on the other hand, am not even King of the Road, although I’m trying.

I have to say the extended Sullivan family (including Jack and Karen and Stevie and Danielle and Matthew and Jim and Jean and….did I forget anyone? Probably….) are a wonderful group of folks. What they have they share with us…food, time, love…and want to wait on us, which is rare for us as usually we only have each other to wait on or to be waited on by. The waiting on us part is largely unnecessary, but they don’t know that, and I won’t disallusion them, because, who knows, they might stop if I did.

Once we left we headed roughly West across 84, through New York and into Pennsylvania, then on 81 and at last on the big boy, Interstate 80, into Bloomington. Because we almost never reserve places in advance we of course had no park in mind when we started, and stopping where we could dump our black- and grey-water tanks, after dry-camping in Steve’s driveway for a week, wasn’t an option, it was a necessity. Eventually, Irene, on the air-card and cell as we traveled, found a place outside Bloomington, right off 80, and so about 5 PM we arrived at Indian Head campground, on the banks of the Susquahana River, and we immediately ran into Pauline, who had a spinning rod in the back of her golf cart, and she shared with us that earlier this year she had caught a 39″ Carp that weighed nearly 25 pounds, which is a lot of Carp. She said her picture was up in the office with the Carp. She said that her husband, who is disabled, hooked one that may have been bigger than hers but it broke off when they were trying to land it, but he’s still ahead of her in terms of total fish caught this year.

I went inside the office later, after we were set up and the dogs had been walked, because I wanted to see what a 25-lb Carp looks like. The answer is, it looks like a very big fish. Some people don’t consider the German Carp to be a game fish, categorizing it instead as a “rough fish”, and I can guarantee that when you supersize them like that they do look rough, and Pauline said it treated her rough, running all the way across the large river into the brush at the edge of the far side before she coud turn it around and eventually walk it up the bank, measure and photograph it, and release it. She said he’s still there, now bigger, no doubt, but alive and kicking. She seemed very pleased with herself and who can blame her? She’s getting an award from the State and is ahead of her husband for biggest fish of the year, a contest they always run between themselves, although he is still ahead by five fish in the “most fish” category.

What do Carp tell us about the meaning of life? I don’t know, not exactly. I do know that they were a very desireable food fish in Germany at the turn of the 20th century when someone imported them here. They found they liked it but somewhere along the way captured this “rough fish” designation and were subsequently disdained by “purists” who wanted the cleaner-looking, albeit much smaller, trout, bass, pike, pickeral, muscelunge, salmon and so on. The poor Carp…brought here to be something special and then ignored…at least until now.

I noticed in a fly fishing magazine that Carp are now a target fish for fly fisherman. I have never caught one on a fly but I could see it…they are a smart, opportunistic and talented fish quite capable of tearing a fly-rod in half and, along the way, scaring the wholy heck out of any poor and largely unsuspecting trout they may pass. The Carp is Back.

Their relationship to the meaning of life, again? Oh, I could make something up easily enough. I could talk about how everything comes full-circle. How we should throw nothing away as it will be back in fashion. About how perception colors reality….and how, when Carp were well-regarded, Pauline’s catch would have been considered the prize of all time, where now it’s marginal if, ten years ago, if anybody would have even admitted to catching one, and now we are here in times where it’s not fashionable to be exclusive, and ol’ Mr. Carp can certainly put a bend in any fly rod, and, now that I think about it, I wonder where she caught that one? I mean, I know it’s here in the river, but which hole, and what did she use? We may have an hour or two to spare in the morning, after all.