On the Trail

Well — a dead fish story.

This isn’t about the one that got away, but the ones that came to stay and stink and rot along an otherwise beautiful stretch of roadway in the Santa Monica Mountains more commonly redolent of sagebrush.

It’s way beyond me why (or how for that matter) someone could possibly be so industrious as to drive a load of reeking slippery slimy unfortunate fish up into the mountains then (with fairly good aim) toss them overboard on Mulholland Highway in Agoura where some became grotesquely impaled on sharp branches of roadside shrubs while others ended up amply "breaded" with dust in a huge heap.

Now there are lots of questions here, and I’m afraid not too many answers.

I suppose I could camouflage myself in the roadside shrubbery night and day and wait to catch the perpetrator in the act, but with my luck, I’d end up catching some 11-pound walleyed mackerel in the mouth when the Fish Pitcher goes into his wind-up.

This fishy dilemma has actually been going on for some time along Mulholland Highway, even inspiring me to name a dirt turn-out basically in the middle of nowhere Dead Fish Flats for the regular appearance of several charred carcasses of fish the size of skateboards.

Gradually, the fish dumping moved farther down Mulholland, ominously towards civilization, i.e., homes with windows and residents with breathing apparatus like noses.

But it was always these bizarre, enormous burnt offerings that were left. The fish hadn’t even been gutted, sliced or diced in any way, just torched. You could smell the location 200 yards before reaching it, 400 yards if the wind was playing foul fish havoc on unsuspecting olfactory systems.

So my recent discovery marked a new trend — these gargantuan guppies were not burnt, and there were dozens of them, making malodorous merry in 90-degree-plus heat.

My inquiring young dog actually made the discovery. To a dog, there’s no such thing as a bad stench.

All scents no matter how vile — no, no, the viler the better — are interesting to a dog.

If she had had her druthers, she’d have gleefully rolled in the fetid fish heap. I had been gagging on the bad odor but couldn’t even imagine the source until I followed the dog’s eager gaze.

Oh, yuck.

A fleshy fish about 14 inches long and probably weighing 9-11 pounds stared up at me from the parched brush. Behind him, a mass of his brethren had come to rest in a pile stacked six ways from Sunday.

After the initial yuck reaction, my thoughts turned to the possible danger these foul fish might pose to the coyotes, turkey vultures and domestic dogs and cats in the vicinity. Had the fish been poisoned? If not, would the normal rotting process make their flesh toxic to wildlife? A call to the Los Angeles County Animal Control office in Agoura Hills directed me to check with the Department of Fish and Game in Long Beach first then get back to them.

I didn’t understand the connection. This wasn’t a fish problem, it was a fish-dumping situation.

Fish do not naturally occur in big dead heaps on dry mountain roadsides, and God help us if fish this enormous filled our little seasonal streams and manmade lakes. (These mystery fish make salmon look like minnows.)

But I made the long distance call to Fish and Game, where flustered personnel said that even if the situation were within their purview, they certainly weren’t about to come out and remove the fish. They might analyze a corpse if Animal Control would collect them and freeze one for them, they offered without a whole lot of conviction.

"We’d really only be interested in catching the perpetrator in the act," Fish and Game said.

Yeah, wouldn’t we all.

A call back to Animal Control received an equally adamant refusal: we don’t do dead fish, lady. Maybe you should try the Health Department, they suggested. Somehow in the scheme of things I reasoned the Health Department was just not going to rate fish removal as a high priority, and if they then handed me off to another agency–

Which leaves me stranded with my concerns for area wildlife and this stench that occasionally wafts down to my garden, though I’m a respectable distance away from the dump site. I contemplate donning hip boots, rubber gloves, surgical mask, my ex-boyfriend’s size XXL hooded rain slicker and thus cloaked, hoisting the fish out myself and into the back of my truck.

But then what am I going to do with these poor sorry stinkers? And you know, you just know with absolute 100 percent certainty that there I’ll be up to my hip boots in dead illegally dumped fish along Mulholland Highway in Agoura and then, only then, will:

A CHP officer, a Department of Fish and Game Warden, an Animal Control officer, and an animal rights activist simultaneously arrive on the scene.