by Jim Harrison
What we eat depends on where we live and how we have come to look at ourselves. An increasingly smaller part of our population has been raised within an age-old agricultural cycle where hunting and gathering are still a dominant, if waning, force in life. I find it disturbing to see recently all the life-style Nazis afoot prating about what one should drink, eat, read. Of course there is no dialogue. Given a choice between the NRA and animal rights I'll choose a rowboat anytime.
In his wonderful new book of essays, The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder says, “Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable, and distinctly more ignorant.” Snyder is a Zen Buddhist and I doubt he would condone hunting except by native populations. The point is our “distance.” I question the virtue of not knowing where your food comes from, whether it's the chicken on the conveyor belt clucking its way toward the knife, the steer waiting for the stun-gun, the fish gasping in foreign air among hundreds of others. On the goofy outer edge, researchers at Yale discovered that plants react when a shrimp is killed in their presence. Of course there is nothing so immediately rewarded in America, in the arts, entertainment, or public life, as a shrill and limited consciousness.
To be Christian, or something, maybe the Russians need the thighs more than we do. Once they're dead they may as well be eaten and for reasons involving the lack of soul we're not doing the job. I just worry that the Russians don't have the proper condiments—the fresh garlic and herbs, peppers, hot sauces, BBQ sauces, the wild mushrooms, leeks, and cream.
HOT TIPS—New product by Tabasco to make more-than-presentable chili quickly, called “TABASCO 7 Spice Chili Recipe (Spicy).” It will enrage the legion of chili bores we've all met. The best human thighs are visibly owned by Stephanie Seymour (Sports Illustrated calendars) and Madeleine Stowe (actress). As Pai Chang said a thousand years ago, “Just melt the inner and outer mind together completely.”
1991
TRAVEL & SPORT
With all its eyes the creature world beholds the open.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
A Plaster Trout in Worm Heaven
I admit I woke up grousing; a lick from my Airedale pup Hud, named Hud to offend all people of good taste, did little to improve my mood. I reached up to the radio from the floor, where I must sleep forever since a 1,000-yard tumble while bird hunting savaged my spine. A newsman was reporting the accidental death of Herb Shriner, my favorite boyhood comedian. A girl in New York City once told me I talked like Herb Shriner. It takes many generations of rural indigence to make a Herb Shriner voice, long evenings of pinochle around a kerosene stove trying to pick up Chicago on a ten-dollar radio. There was a light rain against the windows, and I thought of a statement once made by a statistics nut to the effect that Michigan receives less sunlight than any other state.
I walked out to the barn and tried to look at Lake Michigan—on a clear day, few though there may be, you can see over thirty miles, way out beyond the Manitou Islands, and the hills are conceivably full of the sound of music. Because of the obtuse presence of the media, I often think of myself as living within a giant, beautiful, scale-model cigarette commercial. I sang a few bars of “It's Great to Live in the Great Lakes Country.” The landlord looked at me quizzically from a tool shed. I waved. No time for embarrassment. I was going to a festival.
There appear to be a lot of small hat sizes around here, I say to myself, perhaps unfairly, entering the hotel bar in Kalkaska (pop. 1,475). One learns to mistrust locations where even a good hamburger is not available. But the drinks are extremely large and cost only fifty cents. Getting drunk here would be punching inflation right in the nose. The man sitting on the stool next to me in the crowded room announces himself as a former marine.
“Once a marine, always a marine!” I reply, attempting to placate his obvious hostility. The same may be said of Harvard graduates. They simply never let you forget.
Then the marine says, “If you don't love it, leave it,” quoting the great Merle Haggard tune and eyeing my rather trim Pancho Villa mustache. His lips are flecked and stained with one of those nostrums used to combat stomach acid.
“Leave what?”
“The U.S. of A.”
“I looovve it,” I say, rolling my blind eye counter-clockwise, one of the few skills I picked up in college.
“Damn ajax,” he replies, drinking deeply. Beer drizzles down onto his faded fatigue shirt.
“Do you favor the cattle prod as a fishing weapon?” I say, taking out my little steno pad and turning to him on the bar stool. He shrugs and leaves.
I reflect on the pioneer spirit and how it made our country what it is, and the odious Bumppoism that emerges for events like the National Trout Festival. The slogan of this year's festival, the thirty-fourth annual, is “This Land Is Your Land—This Is My Country,” which is typical of the sort of hysterical chauvinism and contradictory rhetoric one finds in rural hardhats. At Jack's Sportshop, where the fish in the contest are to be weighed in, flag decals are for sale. It brings back all those articles I've read in the past twenty years celebrating the sportsman as a modern conquistador:
WE FIST-FOUGHT HITLER’S LUST-MAD LUNKER TROUT
“It seems that I was asked to go up in the High Lonesome with Bob, Bob Sr., and Bob Jr., partners in a Dairy Whip/insurance/real-estate/kapok-flailing operation in a little town next to the Big Woods in our state. We left at dawn after a hearty breakfast of fresh country eggs, country flapjacks, country bacon and country toast, all washed down with many cups of hot black java. I sat in the back of the nifty camper with the three white police dogs that would be used to guard us against those terrors of the local woodlots, porcupines. The dogs were named Rin and Rin Tin and Rin Tin Tin to keep things simple. Next to a holstered 357, Bob Jr. wore a machete that he claimed made an excellent fish priest. We were towing a boat and an all-terrain vehicle and in addition had brought along four trail bikes, a dozen varmint rifles of various calibers, fishing gear and a case of good old snakebite medicine . . . yuk yuk yuk . . .”
This might be called the brown-shoe-white-sock syndrome and is, I fear, the predominant attitude of fishing- and hunting-license buyers.
In what might be called the town square of Kalkaska, except that nearly all of the town is on one side and the railroad tracks are on the other, there is a statue. Not a Confederate general, a Union general, an Indian chief, a bronzed howitzer or a limp tank. It is a trout. I am told that it is a brook trout, and it is nearly twenty feet high. Curled and flexed, its enraged plaster strikes out of the smallish fountain at an imaginary giant fly, or more likely a worm dangling from worm heaven. Actually the fish looks like a cross between a smelt and a moray eel, or a sick alewife with a tinge of green creeping along the dorsal and the dread death spots beginning to appear.
But that is not the point. People passing on Route 131 may glance to the right and see the fish and muse aloud, “This is fishing country.” The trout is continually bathed by water jets, but today there is a malfunction in the fountain. I cross the street with Cliff and Clint to see what's wrong. Clint Walter is to receive the Citizen of the Year award and is a benign and dedicated conservationist. Cliff Kimball is the president of both the festival and the Chamber of Commerce and is an unabashed booster. It seems the pump hole for the fountain is filling with water and if something is not done immediately the electric motor will short out. Cliff says it took a lot of pancake suppers to build this trout shrine. In small towns in Michigan, and probably elsewhere, pancake suppers, perch fries, ox roasts, chicken-gizzard barbecues, square dances and raffles are used to raise money for statues, PTA tea services, bank uniforms and school trips, like sending the senior class to Chicago or Milwaukee on the Clipper. Anyway, the fountain is fixed after some tinkering. Emergency ended. The fountain will spray throughout the festival.
The fire whistle blows and Cliff and Clint hasten off, both members of the Volunteer Fire Department. The bandstand, with its red, white and blue buntin
g, is deserted. I climb up the steps and walk to the microphone. My chance! There is a crowd slowly assembling for what the program calls Youth on Parade, with floats, pets, clowns, bands and attractions. I feel like the dictator of British Honduras and have a dark desire to bray some nonsense, such as, “The trout on my left is rabid!” or “The war is over!” But I recognize my urge as literary and blush.
I spot a man I watched a week ago in Leland snagging steelhead with gang hooks, a custom a bit more stealthy and subtle—and popular—than old-fashioned dynamite or gill-netting. I could yell at the oaf and expose him, but then the point would be missed on the gathering crowd, which now numbers at least 200. Cliff mentioned that approximately 70,000 people would be here or “in the area,” as many as attend the Shenandoah Apple Festival but not nearly as many as are said to attend the Traverse City Cherry Festival. There are fibbers afoot in the heartland.
It is a glorious day, the mildest opening of the trout season to come to mind. A few years ago I sat huddled on the banks of the Manistee with a mixture of snow and sleet flying in my face, my hands red and numb from tying on streamers, and the guides on the rod icing up every few casts. The first day always seems to involve resolute masochism; if it isn't unbearably cold, then the combination of rain and warmth manages to provide maximal breeding conditions for mosquitoes, and they cloud and swarm around your head, crawl up your sleeves and down your neck, despite the most potent and modern chemicals. Early in the season the water is rarely clear, making wading adventuresome. The snags and deeper holes become invisible to a fisherman. You tend to forget that stretches of familiar water can change character within a year's time—last season's safe eddy below a pool measures a foot above the wader tops this spring, surely the coldest, wettest foot conceivable.
I walk over to the Chamber of Commerce office and have coffee with Cliff. He is pleased pink about the weather. Questioned about the crowd possibilities, he replies obliquely. He says that Kalkaska is the smallest town in Michigan with a full-time Chamber president. He allows as how his duties are so pressing, he does not have time for trout fishing—perhaps a little pike fishing later in the season in the Upper Peninsula when “things slow down.” I reflect on this. It would be hard to create a slower village. Driving around Kalkaska County, you are reminded of those Jonathan Winters routines involving a hound with a bald tail sleeping near a gas pump and chickens scratching in a bare yard. But such places have an undeniable charm nowadays. Much of the popularity of country music is surely due to nostalgia for those drowsy days when “we didn't have much, but we had fun.”
The village is beginning to fill. Some of the people are farmers in bib overalls on their traditional Saturday visit to town with their pickups full of sacks of feed and groceries. But there are many out-of-county and out-of-state license plates, and the bars and restaurants are full. I talk to dozens of people, and their reasons for coming are varied, ranging from “I never missed one” to “I like the parade” to “a chance to visit the hometown.”
Everyone seems to know everyone else, but this is the sort of camaraderie caused by good weather and the prospect of a parade. It occurs to me that nothing really happens at a festival, no daring feats of excellence, but that no matter how artificial the point of celebration might be, these events provide entertainment, an excuse to go someplace, a break in what up here is the arduous process of making a living. Now that much of our country-side is less intensively agricultural, festivals compete with county fairs in popularity. A great number of misplaced farmers have gone south to the factories of Flint, Grand Rapids, Lansing and Detroit, and they look for any excuse to return to the country with their aluminum campers and pale city children dressed in what are considered locally as outrageous costumes.
I decided to take a short tour of the streams to see how the fishermen were doing. There are three reasonably good trout rivers within twenty miles of Kalkaska: the small Rapid, the medium-sized Boardman and the large Manistee. In addition, inside of a two-hour drive you can reach the Pigeon, Sturgeon, Black, Au Sable, Betsie, Platte, Pere Marquette and Pine, plus innumerable smaller creeks. A large stretch of the Au Sable has been brought back from relatively degenerate conditions by an organization called Trout Unlimited, which is the fly-fisherman's court of last resort. This provides adequate fishing for all but the most adamant whiners, among whom I number myself.
I was horrified in Livingston, Montana, last year to hear Joe Brooks, the famous angler, say that Michigan fishing was fine. After all, I had traveled nearly 2,000 miles to hit the honey buckets. There is no question that the streams are not what they were, say, before 1955. The reasons are the usual ones—newly developed resorts, cottagers, road builders, oil interests, industrial effluents, virulent pesticides.
None of these need cause irrevocable damage, but getting government aid is difficult. Other forms of fishing—trolling for lake trout and coho salmon, for example—have a larger constituency and command a larger share of the money and the attention of the state's Department of Natural Resources. And so the charter business is booming and the boat manufacturers are happy. Large coho and chinook are being caught in quantity, and it is difficult to begrudge their advocates the fun of catching them, though trolling seems to be a desperately boring form of fishing. The coho, however, have disturbed the steelhead fishing by jamming the mouths of rivers emptying into Lake Michigan with spawning fish in their death throes.
All the fishermen encountered on the Boardman complain about the warm and sunny weather except a young boy who has three nice browns, about fourteen inches apiece. Most of the anglers are using worms, and none flies. I drive over to Sharon (pop. two or three, seriously) on the Manistee. The story is the same—too much heat and light. It has often troubled me that, no matter, truly cunning fishermen invariably catch fish. Their methods must be plastic and unconstrained, perhaps unsporting. During July and August on the Boardman, when I mostly catch spiritless hatchery fish, a few crafty old men catch large browns by chumming the stream with quarts of grasshoppers, then placing a small hook to make one of the bugs a fatal meal. Though effective, this seems, to my way of thinking, a bit low.
Ernest Hemingway fished the Boardman as a young man and complained in a letter home that the swiftness of the water made wading difficult. I think this was part of the novelist's imagination, because there were, even in his time, four dams on the last twenty miles approaching Traverse City. The final two-mile stretch is now murky and exudes a shameful stench. And it is not simply a matter of saying that things “aren't what they used to be,” which is neither helpful nor interesting. I am privately in favor of the death penalty for any form of pollution not speedily rectified. If you are keen on trout fishing, I advise that you log thousands of hours a summer, because the signs, short of radical ecological surgery, point to its demise.
When I return from my streamside tour around noon, Kalkaska is choked with people, though a wombat most assuredly can choke on a single kernel of corn, and I have no idea how many people there are. I park in a shady residential district and walk the five or six blocks to the center of town. The lawns are neat, the houses modest but in good repair. What do people do? Take in each other's laundry and throw festivals? Our land is full of incomprehensible wonder, and nay-sayers should be raspberried.
On Main Street, Cliff is up on the bandstand in a boater and a string tie. Hank Snow's country music blares from a public-address system that tweets and howls and screeches, drowning out the lyrics. Cliff makes some garbled announcements. He is a mixture of booster and carnival barker. I remember he once lured the International Sled Dog Races to Kalkaska for the slow winter months.
Perhaps in an age heavily flavored with the artificial and the often very distant spectator sport, a celebration of trout or dog is a good thing despite the heavy dosage of sheer hokum. A Silent Majority spring rite laced with streaks of yokel patriotism.
In front of the hardware store there is a kindly old man who tells me that many years ago a
rainbow weighing over twenty pounds, caught at Bailey's Rapids, won the contest. Bailey's Rapids is a stretch of the upper Manistee near Fife Lake and not far from town. I have fished the area with some eagerness. It is unlikely that this fast, shallow stretch of water can offer good fishing much longer; too many cabins have been built on its banks in the past decade. The waters will inevitably degenerate from seeping septic tanks.
I feel melancholy reading the Official Program, which announces such events as a canoe race, a Grand Royal Parade and one last item, a Buick Opel Paint-In. I plan avoiding the latter but allow my mind to revolve wildly around its possibilities. I begin to think numbly of the many small communities in Michigan that throw one sort of festival or another to draw dollars before winter sets in. (Climate may soon be no hindrance; a few months ago there was a snowmobile festival.) We have a Bean Queen, a Strawberry Queen, a Cherry Queen, a Smoked Pickerel Queen, an Alpenfest Queen and a Red Flannel Queen from Cedar Springs, whom I am to meet later to-day. The new Trout Queen is Pat Christian, an appropriate name for a lovely girl from the north country. I wonder if in the swine provinces of Iowa they have a Pig Queen. Or if somewhere in our country there is simple Queen Queen. And do they have Queens in England other than the honest-to-God one?
At lunch there are many local politicians, and virtually everyone is applauded and gets an award except me. The fried trout is good. Fred Bear of Bear Archery is announced King of the Festival, and there is a hearty round of applause for King Fred and Queen Pat, who sit together in purple robes with bright-yellow paper crowns. Fred Bear has slain elephant, grizzly, polar bear and Cape buffalo with bow and arrow; he looks gaunt and fatigued, like a member of displaced nobility or an actual sultan at a Shriner convention.