According to the National Park Service, there are no steelhead trout in the Smoky Mountains, which leads to some confusion over exactly what to call the big silver trout anglers pull out of some of the park's mountain lakes each fall. I came across a fisherman not long ago who had laid two of these suspicious-looking bluish-steel-colored trout up along the bank of Lake Cheoah.
"Steelhead?" I asked.
He gave me a wary stare, walked slowly and carefully all around me, looked up and down the shore of the lake.
"Ain't no such fish hereabouts," he said. His voice had the firm authority of a slammed door.
"Sure looks like steelhead," I said.
"Naw, just a couple of ol' trash fish. Hard-luck bass with a bad sickness. Use 'em for fertilizer. Everybody knows there ain't no steely-head trout in these parts."
He took his big spinning rod and threw a long cast out over the dark lake water.
"Where is it, fellah, by the way?" he asked.
"Where's what?"
"The wire," he said.
"Wire?"
"You're one of them park boys, ain'tchya? All wired up to record me saying something about steelhead. Well the only steely-headed thing I knows of around here was old man Cratis Hensley who used to have a place down past the Beaver Creek Church. My daddy told me the top of Mr. Hensley's skull was a piece of quarter-inch steel. Rustproof stuff. Kept his mind from a-wanderin'. My daddy told me that a German grenade bounced off Mr. Hensley's helmet and exploded, giving his head a skylight. Mr. Hensley was somethin'. On Sundays, up at the churchyard, he would play the spoons on his noggin. Two big ol' metal servin' spoons they was. He played hymns that came out soundin' like the crack and crackle of lightning hitting a tin roof.
"Cratis Hensley. He was the only steely-headed living thing I ever knew of around here. Really."
© Article copyright Pruett Publishing.
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