Roadside Rest

Roadside Rest Hooked on His Own Fantasy of the Irresistible Lure

By midmorning we are re-signed to a bleak reality: of 303 Arizona lakes, we have chosen one where the fish aren't biting. Into the sixth hour, we have gone through two dozen water dogs, lost several heirloom plugs, and paved the bottom of Bartlett Reservoir with plastic worms. We could be at Lake Powell, battling monster stripers. Or teasing lunker cats on the Lower Colorado. Or tempting walleyes at Lake Mary. Anywhere but here. Not that all is grim. The sun blazes. A cool zephyr nudges the skiff down points strewn with chaparral. Nearby, waterfowl feed. At hand are sandwiches and beer. The moment is ripe for creative thinking. "Buddy," says I, "one heck of an idea for making a massive fortune just struck me."

"Uh-huh," says Buddy. "It's a plot for a book which turns into a TV special, or maybe a movie. The story practically writes itself." "How so?" "Well, look at us here today, with a couple of tackle boxes bulging with lures costing as much as five bucks apiece, and multiply us times 60 million other American anglers. Now that is a tremendous potential readership for my novel, the working title of which is The Irresistible Lure. I'll hold out for a million dollar royalty advance."

I hurry on. "Just off the top of my head. The hero is a normal, easygoingJoe, and his hobby is whomp-ing up lures. And one night Joe fumbles a half-whittled wood-en plug into his son's plastic toy kit, which dumps over onto a feather duster. Joe stum-bles, and his boot mashes the plug, and by the time he re-trieves it, it is a wild thing eccentric, colorfully draped, and grossly fletched. Instead of just chucking it, Joe idly tosses chucking it into his tackle box. "So one day Joe is catching no fish at all, and out of sheer desperation he snaps on the oddball lure." Buddy interrupts, "Joe catches a fish." "A granddad mossyback. And another, and then another."

Buddy picks up the story line. "At home Joe makes mod-els of many sizes. They work on every denizen of the deep." "Exactly," says I. "No dummy, Joe covers the lure with an iron-clad patent, takes out a loan from the credit union, and starts production. He charges $50 a copy. And why not? It replaces every other lure. Joe's clear prof-it the first year is $3 billion: an average of one lure per domestic angler." "Beautiful!" "But there's a downside.

Fish and game managers are chal-lenged to keep streams and ponds stocked. Environmental-ists go ballistic. Sporting goods stores fold. All other lure makers belly up. "The commercial fishing in-dustry sinks. Canneries close. Supermarkets suffer. "Congress holds hearings and thereby incurs the wrath of 60 million lure owners. An ad-ministration moves to ban Joe's lure, and a President is driven from office. A lower court re-straining order is thrown out by the Supreme Court, whose justices all own one or more of Joe's plugs. The entire econo-my trembles." "Wait!" says Buddy. "What about Taiwanese imitations?" "Only Joe knows the feather duster secret, and he's not telling." "But wouldn't the establish-ment find some way to protect itself? Wouldn't Joe eventually have to bend or be broken?" "No. Joe is the epitome of the American Dream. The faith of the country is restored. Brother-hood crowns our good from sea to shining sea. Every Ameri-can child once again has an equal chance to discover an item in high demand, create a monopoly, and become fabu-lously wealthy overnight." Buddy is swept up in the wonder of it all. He suggests, "For the movie's final scene, kind of a soft-focus tilt angle, I can see Tom Cruise as Joe in hip boots, creel bursting with greenbacks, marching to Sousa, while a patriotic montage flick-ers in the background. Okay, when are you going to start writing it?" "I'm not. I've just changed my mind." "Why?" "I don't want to write The Irresistible Lure. I want to invent it."