by Gary Paulsen
All these lakes were thick with lily pads. It was difficult to fish by casting over the pads because they would snag the plug and ruin the return. We would wade in, moving slowly, until the water was waist deep and we were at the edge of the pads, and then cast up and down the side of the pad bed, working the plug along the sides in smooth runs. The plugs would go deeper the harder they were reeled, and that gave some control of depth so the speed could be held to keep the plug two or three feet down, scooting and wobbling like an injured fish.
The northerns hid back in the pads, cruising there while they hunted panfish and minnows, and when the sun hit the lure they would come out like tanks, slashing and hitting so hard that if a boy wasn’t ready they’d take the rod out of his hands.
Not huge—up to four, five pounds—these fish. But they fought like tigers and the plugs never hooked them that securely and often they would get off. And it seemed always the big ones would get away; always it was the one to tell about, the one to hold up hands about, the one to lie about that raised its ugly green head and slashed this way and that in the sunlight and the plug was gone, shaken loose to cartwheel away while the picture, the same picture as on the cover of every Field and Stream and Outdoor Life, the picture, burned itself into the eyes and mind forever.
Bobber Fishing
When a thing is done in the summer it is really never done; the fishing cycles, feeds back on itself and returns, so that the summer roars by and seems endless at the same time. When walleyes have been fished for it is time to do northerns, and then bullheads and northerns again and walleyes once more, around and around until it is not possible to say it is summer or just time to fish—until summer is fishing.
There is one other kind of fishing to make the summer—that is when we fished not to fish at all, but to be resting. It is perhaps not art then, but there is a kind of great joy in it.
Hole fishing.
Some of the boys sneered at it but there came a day each summer when somebody mentioned “bobber” fishing. It took courage to say it—we had become purists by then and some of us even filed the barbs off the hook to make the fish harder to catch—and the idea of throwing a line out with a red-and-white wooden bobber seemed to lack purpose.
But the truth was that fishing that way was too alluring not to do, and so we snorted and made fun and joked and teased but still went to fetch our cane poles and lines and bobbers and bicycled out of town to the best panfish hole.
A small hook set three feet below the bobber with a light sinker and a gob of worms brought up sunfish and bluegills by the hundreds, and it was mesmerizing watching the bobber as it hung there on the glass of the afternoon water. Then a nudge, another nudge, and suddenly it would go under as the fish ran, and a boy would pull up another sunfish flashing gold in the light—a calendar picture—swing the pole back and around and put the fish in a bucket of water to fry later.
Mostly to lie back, bobber fishing; mostly to soak up the sun and daydream. The fish are a minor part of it, a thing to justify lying back on a summer bank in deep grass, watching clouds make summer pictures in the sky and talking of what will come with life, with age, with time, and now and then to see the bobber sink and to pull in another fish.
“You know,” Willy said one time when we were lying there. “All the thinking parts of living must be like bobber fishing. You lean back and your mind gets all flat and bam, you discover electricity.…”
Willy was the one who later found out about fly-fishing and started a craze that went for nearly half a summer. He read in an article in Outdoor Life about fly-fishing for trout on rivers in the Rocky Mountains and thought the boys should try it. The problem was there were no mountains and no streams and no trout. But Willy wasn’t one to see the problems, only the solutions, and he rigged up a kind of fly rod with a cane pole.
Nobody had flies so he made some with hair cut from his mother’s poodle. She found out about it even though he took it from underneath where it didn’t really show and that was nearly the end of fly-fishing, and in a way it was just as well. Once all the boys got into it the poodle wouldn’t have had enough hair anyway. But about then Jimmy found an old stuffed deer head in the attic of his garage and that gave everybody enough hair.
The hair was crudely tied to small hooks with wrapped, braided fishing line, painted with airplane model dope, and then we had to find some fish.
Of course not all fish will rise to a fly and it would be many years before trout were stocked, but Willy tried along the lily pads one day when we were bobber fishing, and the sunfish and bluegills rose.
That’s all it took, and for the rest of that summer fly-fishing was all the rage. None of us had fly rods or the right kinds of line or reels but that didn’t stop anybody. We made flies with anything we could get—the deer hair, tinfoil, bits of old diapers, string, even bare hooks painted gold with dope.
The fish rose to them all. They would hide back under the lily pads from the northerns who cruised the outside edges looking for food, and when the fly plunked down between two pads they couldn’t resist and came barreling out to hit it.
That was the same summer that Wayne found an old pair of rubber swim goggles and we took turns swimming around the lily pads watching the sunfish and northerns until Wayne saw a musky that ran maybe twenty or twenty-five pounds but looked like it weighed a hundred. He wouldn’t go in again. Said it looked too mean, like it could take something right off you, and his fear was infectious enough that it scared all the boys and that stopped the diving.
Fishing Madness
Some fished for fun and some for something else and a few were driven crazy by it, so that they became complete purists. As summer ended the true addicts, the ones who even when young knew they would be fishing for the rest of their lives, restlessly moving along a bank or working out of a boat—as the last weeks in summer came, those who thought of only fishing prepared for the kind that almost always ended in failure.
Musky fishing.
Muskies are a cousin to northern pike only usually much larger. Thirty- and forty-pounders were not uncommon then (although they are rare now) and they fought hard enough that they sometimes tired the fisherman before they could be brought to shore or alongside the boat.
Everything about them was myth. Size, the way they fought, what kind of lure they struck—all rumors, sayings, dreams. It was said that it took a thousand casts to get a strike, ten strikes to get a fish, and a hundred strikes to get a big one. Many (this author included) have fished for muskies with lures for years, all their lives, and never landed one, and so everything known about them comes from somebody else. Somebody’s cousin who knew a friend who met somebody who was using a large silver spoon for a lure and had a thirty-, forty-, fifty-pound musky take his rod completely away, over the side and gone and done, though he was strong and held hard.
The method was simple. A good reel, stout line (thirty- to forty-pound test), a steel leader (muskies’ teeth cut through line like butter) and a good lure. The lures were very expensive and we could not afford more than one, so care had to be taken to get the right one. Many said the best lure was a large silver or golden spoon with red-jewel bug-eyes and everybody knew somebody who knew somebody who had had a strike on this bug-eye. The problem was that they were steel and weighed close to a quarter pound, and when they hit the water you had to start reeling as fast as you could because they sank like a stone and would catch every snag there was on the bottom. Another lure that worked well, or that was said to work well, looked like a baby duck with big treble hooks hanging out its bottom (muskies loved to eat baby ducks and loons) and little orange legs that rotated when the lure was pulled across the water. The advantage here was that the lure floated and was controllable and wasn’t so easily lost, but it cost so much that many either went with the bug-eye or tried making their own baby ducks. The procedure was the same in any event. Cast out as far as possible and reel in as fast as the crank will turn.
Then do it again.
And again.
And again.
Alone in the hot sun on the bank, over and over until your arm seems about to come off, until it is agony to cast even one more time.
Then again.
And again.
Musky fishing, along with fall fishing, is the purest form—not just of fishing but of torture. To stand for hours, days, casting and recasting and never a hit, never a strike, never a follow-up.
It’s madness.
And everyone who tries it must go back; though they live forever, they always must go back and try it one more time. There’s always the chance that on the next cast, the very next cast, a green-backed submarine will come up from the dark weeds and the line will hiss out so fast it burns your thumb and it’s—all—right—there, on the next cast.
Madness.
• • •
Finally summer is done, not suddenly, but with a last flurry of fishing, a last time at the hole with cane poles, a last night of bullheads, a last try at the walleyes or working the rock bass down by the Ninth Street bridge. A day comes when leaves start to dry and curl up and there is a coolness in the air. Fishing begins to end.
Except for some.
With the first frost, and first ice on the edge of the river, the sane ones quit. The ones with lives, with families, oil their reels and wrap them in soft rags for the next year; prepare themselves for winter fishing.
But there are a few diehards who know the secret that the old-timers talked about sometimes sitting around the smokehouses eating salty smoked fish and drinking beer cooled in a tub of water.
Just as the ice comes, just with the first hard freeze and when the wind starts bringing storms down from Canada and there is new snow starting to show and stay—just then, when all the boats are put away and motors drained of oil and people are settling in for winter …
Just then the big northerns come out to play.
It is a hard time to fish. Nothing goes right. It is best to use lures and work where a river runs into a lake or where a stream runs into a river, working the lure across the opening. The lure must move across the current at an angle and seem to be sliding sideways while it moves, slipping along with a jerk and wobble. Again, a bug-eyed spoon seemed to work best, but most couldn’t afford them and so used homemade plugs. Brightness seemed to be most effective and a flash-white plug with a red head, reeled in as fast as a hand could turn a reel handle to make it run deep and keep it wobbling and jerking as rapidly as possible, could be made almost irresistible.
Each cast was torture. The weather had to be cold for the big ones to come and that made it almost impossible to fish. Bundled in coats, we would stand in ice mixed with water in old five-buckle overshoes, and every time the line came in it had to be squeezed between thumb and forefinger to compress the water out of it or it would freeze on the reel in a solid lump. This meant that water was constantly dripping down the hand and freezing on the fingers and in the cuff along the wrist. Feet wet, frozen, water freezing all down the front, snow falling and winter coming, and one more cast.
When they hit, and they hit often, it was with the complete savagery of desperation. Either from instinct or knowledge, the fish knew winter was coming, and knew that they had to eat and build up fat for the lean times; and the old ones, the big ones, knew it better than the small young ones. So almost every cast brought a strike from a large fish, and the strikes came from the side or bottom—it was hard to tell—and seemed to drive the lure sideways or up as if it were getting hit by a train.
Soon the fingers were numb, and the hands, and feet, and the pain came, and everything inside said quit now, quit, the year is done, summer fishing is done.
But something held, something pulled, and it seemed always there was one more cast, and one more strike and one more big northern until it was the last day, dark on the last day, snow falling heavily and people getting ready for Thanksgiving and still a part says it isn’t over, summer can’t be over, and still one more cast.…
Fishhouse Dreams
Sometimes cold weather came long before snow and there was enough time for the rivers and lakes to freeze without snow accumulating on the ice. This period would not last long but when it came, as soon as the ice was thick enough to hold weight, we would skate on it.
Not to just skate or play hockey but to go and see country. The rivers became ice highways that led to lakes, small frozen streams, openings into the wilderness that usually lasted only a week or so and demanded exploration. Skates allowed speed and we flew through the early winter, and while most of these explorations were for hunting, now and then they led to fishing.
Light brought the fish to the surface, or as close to the surface as they could get, rubbing their backs along the ice, and skating above them we could see them. Somebody thought of chopping a hole through the ice—usually only a couple of inches deep—and trying to “herd” the fish into the opening where they could be netted, and after trying for hours we finally caught a northern in a dip net, and after that we always tried to do this when the ice froze before the snow came.
When the ice finally became thick enough to hold serious weight—usually by early December—the ice fishing season would start. There were two methods. Nobody could afford fancy augers so usually an old axe was used to cut a hole in the ice and we fashioned homemade tip-ups to use for rigs. A tip-up was just a stick across the hole and another across that, the two bolted or tied in the middle to make a cross. From the end of one, a line was tied with a sinker and hook, and it hung about six or eight feet below the ice with a piece of raw chicken or a silver pickled minnow (if they could be afforded) bought from the bait shop.
Then everybody went to shore and gathered firewood enough for a bonfire, which was made on the ice not too far from the hole. The boys would stand by the fire watching the tip-ups and waiting for a fish to come along.
When a fish took the bait—usually a panfish, crappie or bluegill—the one stick would flip up in the air and the fish could be jerked up. It was simple and not really fishing so much as just taking fish.
The other method involved using a fishhouse. In the winter people would put small houses on all the lakes and rivers, huts really. In the floor of each house a hole was cut and a similar hole cut in the ice beneath the fishhouse. Inside the fishhouse it was kept dark, and hours could be spent watching down in the green hole, jigging a lure up and down to draw northerns in where they could be speared with a ten-tined, foot-wide spear.
There were many dreams in fishhouses. Dreams of summer, dreams of ends and beginnings and of how it all started when the car fell through the ice and would all start again next spring. A little stove burned sticks and shavings and kept the fishhouse toasty and comfortable, and all that had to be done was to sit and stare down in the emerald-green hole, watching the lure and waiting for the northerns. When they came it was suddenly, impossibly quick. One second there was the lure, the next a huge fish either nosing it or taking it—slash, and it was there—and then the lunge with the spear, trying to put the tines across his back and missing often. So fast, so lightning-fast that they could move away while the spear was on the way down.
And then the green again; the deep green from the water coming up through the hole while we waited, waited for another fish, waited for deep winter, waited for the end of the white blanket that covered all things, waited for the end of cold, blue cold.
Waited for summer and fishing to start again.
Camping
Running the River
There came a time in the almost exact center of the summer when, as impossible as it was to believe, fishing paled. Not permanently. Not even for long enough to measure.
“Let’s go down to the Ninth Street bridge and catch some rock bass,” somebody suggests, and everybody shakes his head.
“We did that yesterday.”
“We could go out for frogs. There are bullfrogs just thick out by Peterson’s slough.…”
“We’ve got all
the frogs we need.”
“Well then, what?”
A pause, a breath, because this cannot be wasted—this time, this only time when the sun is still there and the sky is still there and the soft days and softer nights are still there, and if there is no fishing and it is still too fine and wonderful to stay inside, to stay in town, well then, what?
“Let’s go camping.”
And there it is. How could nobody think of it each summer until this moment, when it is so logical, so right? And suddenly there is nothing else, no other thing in the whole world than to go camping.
But first, as with hunting and fishing, first there is the planning.
Where to go?
Hours, days, spent on just where to go when always, never changing, there is the river. It is the highway to all things, the river, winding muddy and slow and inviting, a road to all the adventure in all the books. Books by Twain and London and Burroughs, books about rivers and of rivers and in rivers, read and reread, dreamed and redreamed, and so there is never really any choice, and talk goes on until somebody at last says it:
“Let’s run up the river.”
And then more planning. How to get a boat when there is no boat, this time not even one to borrow from Wayne’s aunt, nothing but the old bait boat with the boards nailed across which never works but is all there is, and it is dragged up on the shore at the edge of the swamp and all the boards renailed and bits of rag tucked in the cracks with a screwdriver.
“Don’t worry,” somebody says. “It’ll leak at first until the wood swells and then she’ll tighten right up.”
“Hell,” another one says. “Columbus crossed in a boat worse than this. We’re just running the river for a couple of days. It’ll work fine.”
And everybody nods and nobody asks how four boys and gear are going to fit into the old flat-bottom bait boat.
