Month: July 2010

Dead Fish & A New Day

29 June

This morning I push my boat away from Stockholm landing and let the wind take it. A night crawler on it’s 3-hooked harness drags along behind, but the chance of catching a fish is remote, at best. I lay on my back on my little deck…

Sustained only by a thin gruel of moonlight
And the knowledge that all was perfection outside my prison of skin.

I am reading McGrath when a seagull catches my attention. I turn the boat to see that it is with a large fish.

The eyes are gone, and the entrails, and color. It smells.

7 July

As I motor upriver, I am aware of a large serpentine weed mass running down the middle of the lake. I cross over and troll near the buoy off Point Au Sable.

Real men. Cloudless, determined men. Perfect boats.

I am a fisherman without much hope. Drifting with the current I drag a small minnow along the bottom. As I approach the serpentine mass in the middle I am surprised to find it is not a mass of weeds at all, but instead a mass of the empty hulls of mayfly nymphs and dead adults: a massive funeral procession making it’s way down the river. I had come three or four miles along it’s route and it continued, unbroken, the whole way. Sometimes fifty yards across, and sometimes less, but no number could describe how many mayflies there were.

I become aware of herds of carp tipping up their bodies at the surface so that their down-turned mouths could collect the dead.

(I had selected a cut of Junior Wells for this, but it made me nervous so I used Ode to Toothless Joe by Mark Krurnowski off a royalty free music site.)

At noon I dragged a large sucker minnow on a Prescott Spinner off the mouth of Pine Creek thinking there may be some rogue Northern Pike out there. I had caught a Northern Pike on this rig last fall, and this was my way, I guess, of trying to get back into the game. I was reading Thoreau:

Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the Gods to pardon this clear flame.

I felt an odd weight on my line and checked to find the minnow was gone. I still had two, so I hooked another and cast him in. Again, an odd weight. Not a fish, I thought, not a Northern Pike. They leave no doubt about a strike. This time when I checked the minnow was still hooked, and I could see he had been cut. So there had been a fish!

I had some idea of where this had occurred, and I began trolling back and forth. Again the odd weight. This time I lowered the tip of my rod and waited a few seconds before pulling back on the rod to set the hook. This time there was a fish. It was not the obvious tug on a Northern Pike, but instead the steady pull of a walleye. I remember the pulls of the different fish of my youth. I couldn’t believe it. I hooked the third and last sucker minnow, and as I trolled across again, another fish.

Later the photographs showed the fish to be Sauger. Finally, a seventh species of fish.

A new day. A perfect boat.