The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  “That’s not true,” I insisted on Raina’s behalf. And mine.

  Lilly shook her head.

  I felt the levity of the evening leave me.

  Queen Anna came into my room as I prepared to go to bed. “I don’t want you traipsing around the world,” she said. “God gave me only one son.”

  “I have to go where the work takes me,” I told her. “But I’ll be careful.”

  “Like hell!” she said. It was the only time in my life I heard her use such language.

  3

  After classes began in September, I called on Professor Lloyd Nash, a Lilliputian man in his early sixties with long snowy hair, a flushed face, and a soft voice. His office was in the fifty-year-old Natural Sciences Building on the old campus.

  “You’re the student Luanne mentioned.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that she had talked to him, but I was.

  “She said you’d want to fish with me.”

  “No, sir. The fishing I can take care of myself. What I want is to learn.”

  “Bugs, eh. You tie your own flies?”

  “Not yet. I don’t know enough.”

  “Boring stuff, bugs. But if you want to learn about nature and trout, I can teach you.”

  I had gotten the scholarship Luanne recommended me for and had a fairly substantial courseload that fall term, but in fact I spent a great deal of my study time learning about insects and fantasizing about trout fishing.

  I wanted to learn, and Doc Nash was patient with me. The first thing we addressed was life cycle: how some species went from egg to nymph to adult and others from egg to larva to nymph to adult. Over the weeks we talked about size and color, shape and behavior and habitat. I had always thought that weather played a big role in fishing and Nash said it did, but mainly because meteorological conditions affected water temperature and clarity. In time I came to understand where certain insects would appear and when and how to look for them.

  Nash’s offices and labs were in the basement of the Nat Sci Building, just down the dingy hall from a huge, poorly lit room with a collection of entomological specimens that looked even older than the building. The Collection Room’s clutter was beyond description. Display cases had been knocked over, spilling their contents. Wooden storage boxes were coated with dust and huge cobwebs that looked like muslin. The air was stale and dry. Nash called the room “the purest of chaos.” We went down to the room from time to time so that he could show me something to bring home a point he had been lecturing on. He told me that the collection had been neglected for years and that time, disorder, and inattention had rendered it pretty much useless to the academicians. It would cost more to clean it up than to leave it, so there it sat. I volunteered to organize the room and Nash offered me twice the minimum wage to inventory the specimen collection. I agreed. I would have done it for nothing.

  I also had a new job that term with a chain store called Discount City, a huge expanse of can’t-live-withouts spread over several acres under one roof. My job was to be visible in my off-the-rack cop suit, but it was also made clear that I was not to do anything, my first experience with the principle of deterrence. I had no idea if my presence dissuaded shoplifters, but I tried my best to look fierce when people acted suspiciously. The pay was steady, I could pretty much name my own hours, and when I was on the job and things were slow I could hide out and study. It was one of those places where nobody talked about careers. What we had were jobs, a means of making the money we needed for what was important in our lives right then.

  Over time, I gravitated to working nights at Discount City. I had classes in the mornings, and studying and bugs and working in the Collection Room in the afternoons until it was time to go to work.

  It was Lloyd Nash who told me about the salmon “fiasco” (his word). The Department of Natural Resources had planted cohos in a couple of Upper Peninsula streams and they had taken hold, which apparently came as a surprise. There had never been salmon in the Great Lakes. The state’s fish biologists had been rearing salmon fry in a hatchery on the Upper Peninsula to plant elsewhere to relieve the alewife problem. Back in the 1940s and 1950s alewives—small, prolific Atlantic Coast fish—had moved up the Erie and Welland Canals to propagate in the Great Lakes. This wasn’t a problem at first because there were huge populations of lake trout to keep the alewives and smelt in balance. Smelt had been introduced accidentally into the Great Lakes from a private rearing pond in upper Michigan and also taken hold. Then, following the same route alewives took from the Atlantic, lamprey eels moved up and began to kill off the lake trout. As the lake trout died, alewives overpopulated and began massive spring and summer die-offs, washing up onto beaches by the tens of thousands to rot and stink, driving off tourists and disgusting locals. The cohos were intended to take care of the alewife and smelt populations for another state but some got out of the hatchery, swam out into Lake Michigan, and began to come back after that. The brood stock was from Washington State, where the fish were born in rivers, moved into the ocean to grow, and came back up the freshwater rivers when it was time to spawn. Here they were in fresh water all their lives and the fish biologists were astounded when the salmon thrived.

  “When man begins to tinker with nature, the results are not predictable,” Nash declared. “And they are invariably disastrous.”

  “Do the salmon take flies?” I asked Nash.

  “You should see for yourself,” Nash declared with a harrumph and told me where to find the fish. That was the end of that conversation.

  I knew a couple of guys majoring in forestry, Mike McGinn from Vermont and Eddie Moody from Georgia. It’s funny how people with similar interests gravitate to each other. I had met several guys during my years at MSU who were trouters and I had fished with some of them. Mostly I fished alone, but occasionally I went with McGinn and Moody, who were inseparable pals, good fishermen, and pretty good company. I mentioned salmon to them and both of them had heard about the fish but didn’t know much about them. I suggested we head north to take a look, so we loaded McGinn’s Volkswagen bus and drove to the U.P. It was mid-October.

  According to Nash, the fish were spawning in Thompson Creek, a two-hour drive west of St. Ignace and the Straits of Mackinac. There was a village where the creek dumped into Lake Michigan; upstream the DNR had a hatchery where the fish had been raised. We were miles away when we began to see campers parked along U.S. 2. There were lights and fires on the beaches and the running lights of boats off shore. The village of Thompson had a population of maybe a hundred people, but it looked like a Saturday-night crowd at Olympia Stadium when we pulled in around midnight. The boat launch was backed up for miles to the west. State troopers and county cops tried to direct traffic but were obviously overwhelmed by the crowds. Shadows crossed the road in front of us. We saw people running, shouting, and laughing boisterously. It was a grand and ugly carnival.

  At daylight we made our way down to the big lake. We had to hike over an expanse of dunes and when we got closer to the water we heard a low buzz, like a huge bee, and when we stepped over the last sand barrier I stopped and sank to my knees. There were hundreds of fishermen in the surf, all of them shoulder to shoulder, with long stiff rods. You could hear their lines buzzing as they threw heavily weighted lures. The air sounded like there was an electric current whipping around. Now and then someone would scream, “Fish on!” and the snagged salmon would cut across dozens of lines, tangling them all. Despite the mess, fish were being landed and tossed on the beach, where they flopped around, flashes of dying silver in the morning light, sand clinging to them like bread crumbs.

  There were two pickup trucks on the beach with aluminum beer kegs in their beds; beer went for a buck for a small paper cup. Guys in rubber hip boots stumbled around, screaming like animals. I saw two behemoths in red plaid hunting jackets suddenly grab each other and fists flew and so many other people were so c
lose that they started punching out of self-preservation. I backed away and stood there with my mouth agape. A cop car wallowed through the dunes with its siren wailing, only to get stuck. The deputies scrambled out and threw themselves into the brawl with their billies and I saw somebody grab a fish by the tail and smack one of the cops in the side of the head, spinning his hat away like a Frisbee. McGinn shouted, “Un-fucking-believable. This is great!”

  I did not fish. The surf fishermen were slinging treble hooks the size of walnuts; the hooks had been soldered to pyramid-shaped one- and two-ounce lead weights that cast like bullets and hit the water like depth charges. Several men had bloody arms, having been snagged on sloppy backcasts, and there was one man—somebody said he was a doctor—who stitched several wounds while the victims sat on blue-and-white ice chests filled with fish, their tails sticking out, shouting, “Hurry up, for Chrissakes, the fish are out there!” His fee was one dollar a stitch and he had a huge jar filled with dollar bills and dark bloodstains on the sand by his cooler.

  This was not fishing and these were not human beings.

  Not long after the sun came up, the wind began to blow at near-gale force. There were hundreds of boats off the beach, some barely beyond the reach of surfcasters. At the mouth of Thompson Creek there were so many boats that the surface of Lake Michigan nearly disappeared. There were thirty-foot cabin cruisers and varnished wooden Chris Crafts and aluminum boats and prams and two red-and-white dinghies that bobbed like corks and wooden rowboats and dented canoes, craft of every description mixed together in a giant flotilla. The bulging, rolling surf banged them together and metal thumped and scraped and grated and a pall of blue-gray exhaust raced over them as the wind intensified. Ragged whitecaps rose up and began to break against the beach. Boats began to roll and pitch as the swells grew to more than six feet and canoes flopped toward the beach like abandoned surfboards. The surfmen kept casting and reeling. A small cabin cruiser began to smoke and more cop cars and even a fire engine tried to come through the dunes, but sank to their axles. Uniformed men stumbled out of the vehicles and through the dunes, their service revolvers drawn, shielding their eyes against blowing sand.

  I had no idea where McGinn and Moody were and didn’t much care. When I got up to the road, there was a faded red bus with a hand-painted sign on the side that said pussy: $20 and a woman grabbed my arm as I passed the bus and said, “You want some?” As I pulled away she said, “You’re beautiful, honey, I’ll blow you for nothing.” I kept going until I found the VW and got in as the sky darkened. Ambulances and fire engines began arriving from the east. I lay in the van and I knew I had seen something that I did not care to ever see again.

  This was not sport. It reminded me of accounts I had read of buffalo hunting. I had witnessed something I’d previously only heard and read about: mob mentality, where some sort of group psychology overrides individual conscience. Intellectually I thought I could comprehend the mind-set of a lynch mob, or similar group, pursuing a killer, but a bunch of men chasing fish? It was frightening and I wanted no part of any of it.

  Most of the fish were being taken with snagging rigs. In the years that followed, snagging would be outlawed and the blood-crazed insanity of Thompson Creek would become a thing of the past.

  My companions eventually came back, dragging four huge salmon. There had been no room for them on the beach, but they had bought a few of the lethal weighted hooks, called spiders, off some of the butchers on the beach and, not wanting to risk eyes and ears, had gone upstream and made their luck there. The salmon were black and where the spider hooks had caught hold, there were gaping pink-and-white tears, chunks gone. They claimed to have tried flies to no avail and quickly abandoned them for spiders, reasoning that a twenty-pound salmon was a good reason to choose effectiveness over sport. When we returned to East Lansing I would never fish with them again. I thought I was immune to big-fish fever and didn’t want to be contaminated by those who lacked the willpower to resist. I was a self-righteous fool.

  Back at school when I next saw my bug mentor, Nash asked what I thought about what I had seen. There was so much inside me that I stood mute while he looked me over. He gave me his sternest look and said, “Therein lies the road to trophy fish. When the state gives the people what they want, this is how it turns out. Salmon don’t belong here. When we start to mess with the natural order, it always turns bad. Trust in nature, son. She provides all the miracles we can handle. If you want to chase big fish, you’re on your own.”

  The period before Christmas at Discount City was shoplifter season. A state trooper briefed the security team on surveillance procedures and once again we were told that despite our elevated knowledge, we should continue to refrain from any in-store confrontations. If we saw a theft, we were to call the Ingham County Sheriff’s Department and they would take care of it. Like many plans I’ve confronted in life, this one was solid on paper and that’s as far as it went. Ingham County was financially strapped. Cop patrols were reduced. Bodily harm might get a response in ten minutes, but shoplifting? Not a chance.

  There was a small employee break room in the rear of the building. It had picnic tables and several vending machines. As a rule, most employees were not friendly. We were paid barely more than the minimum wage, and turnover was high. Over the months I saw a few faces that seemed to endure, and we who endured naturally gravitated to each other. As with trout chasers.

  Security worked in pairs. My partner, Rick Fistrip, was a senior from Flint enrolled in the criminal justice program at State. I usually saw him when we punched in and again when we punched out. He was always in a hurry and worried about scuffing his gleaming black Corfams.

  From time to time I saw customers acting suspiciously; eventually I decided they were mostly just normal people made nervous around uniforms and badges. I’d relate what I saw to Fistrip at punch-out and he’d say, “Yeah, yeah, I saw.”

  The first time we met he asked if I was a student. I confirmed I was in journalism, which elicted a look of the sort reserved for a dog rocket on a Grosse Pointe sidewalk.

  “Why would you want to be one of those assholes? Reporters obstruct justice or get in the way.”

  We did not care for each other and over several months we rarely spoke. The funny thing was that even though we worked the same shifts I never saw him from punch-in to punch-out. It was one of life’s small mysteries, the sort that make you scratch your chin for a moment before you move on to other concerns.

  One Friday night I was in the break room when a woman from the jewelry department came in. Her name was Spruce Graham. She was thirty-one and had three kids. She didn’t look much over twenty. She had a fully developed figure, with a soft-roundedness I found appealing. Her husband was a Bootstrapper at the university, an Army enlisted man of promise sent off to get a college degree at taxpayer expense. Spruce had never finished high school. Married at sixteen, she was clearly awed by her husband’s current undertaking. She was from rural Alabama and had a slow drawl and relaxed air.

  “Nice uniform,” she said, lighting a cigarette. Her long fingers had perfect nails.

  “Clown suit,” I said.

  “No, it looks real nice, you bein’ so tall and all. I like a man in uniform.”

  I smiled and thanked her.

  “Seen your partner lately?” she asked.

  “Fistrip? He’s around somewhere.”

  It would be some time later before I would realize that she had been trying to tell me something.

  Spruce and I didn’t run into each other every night at first, but eventually we seemed to arrive at breaks at the same time. When she wasn’t there I wondered what happened to her.

  “Had a sick kid,” she’d say the next night. Or, “The cellar flooded.” She talked a lot about her children, three boys; the oldest was fifteen. She worked part time, six to midnight, Monday through Friday. “My man’s home by six. I make supper, bu
t he feeds the boys and puts the youngest to bed and then he studies. He has to study hard. I can pick up a few dollars to help out and he gets the quiet he needs to hit the books.”

  At the end of the shifts, I’d change out of my uniform and walk out to the nearly empty parking lot. I began to notice that after work, Spruce would go out to her car and sit there alone, smoking.

  I asked why.

  “Well, I sit here another hour to give my husband his space. School comes first, after the kids. It’s his future.” His, not ours, a curious word choice.

  I invited myself to smoke with her after work one night. A few days later we repeated the episode. By then I knew her pretty well. Her father owned a paint store in Eufaula and was a part-time Baptist minister. She had enjoyed high school, had been a cheerleader, two years varsity, “before I got knocked up.” I sensed unspoken regrets.

  She lived in married-student housing in a section reserved for Bootstrap families. The government paid their rent, which helped the students immensely. Of military life Spruce said, “It has its points. I can’t complain.” They had lived in Spain and Panama and in Texas just before her husband got his Bootstrap assignment.

  Several times she came to work with puffy, red eyes and was less talkative than usual.

  Nash, meanwhile, had stopped lecturing me. Instead he gave me books and handed over his dog-eared fishing log, in which he had recorded every detail of his outings, including sky conditions, wind direction (and sometimes velocity), air temperature, hourly water-temperature readings, estimates of water level, flow (in feet per second), and clarity, for which he had his own descriptions. He did not reveal where he caught fish. All streams and rivers were coded and the key wasn’t in the log, which I observed with interest. Nash meticulously used a stomach pump to check the feeding habits of his take and gave the usual details about length and girth. He did not specify which artificial flies he used; rather, he recorded which species were actually hatching and when and on what kind of water. It was a journal devoid of color and touched by paranoia. Passionate trout fishermen, I was learning, did not willingly give up their secrets.