Trout Fishing in Hood River

It’s hot. It’s 100 or 200 degrees or so. It cooks your brain.

The locals are cranky because all the windsurfers are wandering around town and taking up space. The windsurfers are cranky because there’s no wind and they’re all stuck wandering around town. Thomas the Tank Engine is cranky because it is so hot his train whistle can only shimmer like the puddles of water on the tracks. All the kids are cranky because Thomas is just a train, not a real tank as promised.

The ice cream truck music plays strange counterpoint to Santana.

People are out and driving mean and crazy, but it’s not their fault because it is so hot that all the stopsigns have evaporated and the streetlights are melting and running thick in the gutters.

Here’s a good thing to do: Walk out on the sandbar until you can see Mount Hood peaking over Hood River. Watch out for fossilized ripples in the sand and pools of steamy bathtub water. Dive in where the sailboats died and swim a spell. Hurry up and do it now before the River melts.

How do we keep the wind from ever dying again, you wonder. The answer is simple. First we pave the desert. Then, every night we send a fleet of liquid nitrogen trucks to Portland and freeze the town like a giant beer sno-cone. The wind will funnel through the Gorge with a fury unknown since that of Woden himself.

The trout will save their shiny muscles and get blown upstream.