The Red Flannel Rag

Randy Crawford with twice his legal limit of trout.

He taught me to fish the mountain trout streams and to fish for small mouth bass in

the rivers that ran through the farml and. “You can only catch these fish by knowing how to

bait them,” he said as he searched along the riverbank. “Small mouth bass like

hellgrammites, and trout like cheese balls and worms.” Hellgrammites were larvae found

under rocks at the bottom of streams. They were ugly creatures with several legs with

pincers on each side of a jointed body. I was scared of them, so he placed me in the river

with a net tied between two poles while he went upstream about fifteen feet and turned over

rocks and kicked up mud. The hellgrammites floated downstream and caught in the net.

Once we got a dozen or so, we were ready to start fishing. I always asked him to bait my

fishhook when we were using hellgrammites.

136