Flying Fish

It was a sunny, hot day as I drove out to meet my friend Greg Melton, better know to some as Straight Arrow. I had promised him I’d come out to the long forgotten mining town to help him shore up one of the wooden buildings whose foundation had started to crumble.

The town was named after Adolph Sutro, a Prussian emigrant who came to America in 1850. He built a tunnel to intersect with the mine shafts inVirginia City. But by the time the tunnel was finally completed, the Comstock Lode was playing out, so Sutro sold his interests and moved his family to San Francisco. The town died  soon after.

The town of tiny Dayton was in my rearview mirror and I was looking for Sutro Tunnel Road, on my left. Thats when I was struck by a heavy down pour of water. It came out of no where and even more amazing, several fish lay flopping in the roadway.

I stopped and looked around thinking I was the focus of an amazing practical joke, but there was nobody to be seen.

Then I picked up several of the fish, trout to be exact, and loaded them into the bed of my truck. I wanted proof as I figure nobody’d believe my story.

Within minutes I found the road and pulled up to the shack Greg lived in. I showed him the fish.

He mused they must have fallen from a water spout that had caught a gust of air. There was no other explaination, so I decided to go with that. To this day, I’ve never seen nor heard of this happening to anyone else on U.S. 50.

Oh, and by the way, the trout was delicious.