by Jim Harrison
The true force behind ice fishing is that it is better than no fishing at all. In extremis, an addictive fisherman will shoot carp with bow and arrow, set up trotlines for carp and suckers, spear dogfish on Pig Trotter Creek, chum nurse sharks within rifle range. He will surround the crudest equipment with a mystique and will maintain to the uninitiated that there's no sport quite like fishing rainbows with bobber and marshmallows.
And ice fishing has its strenuous converts. Pat told me that a year ago in April, just before the ice broke up, he was chugging out on the bay when a Coast Guard helicopter came over low and motioned him off the ice. He stayed until he got three fish and the helicopter returned. Then he noticed that the ice beneath his feet was sinking a bit. He grabbed his fish and ran and the ice for a mile around began wavering and rippling and heaving. The groans made in this situation convince one that there are prehistoric monsters under the ice trying to get out. It is chilling.
One day I drove up along the water through Pshawbetown, a small enclave of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians who are much the worse for wear. Naturally at one time they owned all the land around here. Now there is little or no running water, few indoor toilets, a ghetto shabbiness if it weren't for the fact that there is space to roam. Most of them are kept busy in the winter cutting wood for their stoves. An uninsulated shack can use an astounding amount of wood. I glassed a small cluster of fishermen about a mile out. In the tavern the night before someone anonymous (I must protect my sources) had claimed he had taken seventeen lake trout with a combined weight of over 100 pounds in just a few hours. This is well over the legal limit, but there is simply too much ice for the game warden, Reino Narva, to cover adequately. Concern is minimal, however, as the lake trout population is approaching the vastness of earlier in the century through concerted plantings, lamprey control and stringent but perhaps unfair regulation of commercial fishing.
I cut across the peninsula to Leland, a beautiful little harbor town. People here are upset over the government's acquiring 70,000 acres of local land for a National Seashore. Of only slightly less concern is Bill Carlson's attempt to regain some of the commercial fishing waters taken away by the Department of Natural Resources. An additional severe irritant is the state and federal DDT regulation: most varieties of Great Lakes fish have close to ten parts to the million, which is above the legal allowable limit for shipping. I eat all the fish anyway because I am young and fat and reckless and love the forms of danger connected with eating. I feel sad, though, when I watch the magnificent steelhead leaping against the dam in Leland: all subtly poisoned, though expensive equipment is needed to determine the fact. They still look like steelhead. The breakwater is mountainously covered with ice, but still some waves break over the ice, pushed by our third gale of the season.
Bill Carlson is a fourth-generation fisherman. The nets around his shack remind me of Cape Ann. But far out beyond Cape Ann the swordfish are gobbling mercury below waves dotted, according to Heyerdahl, with eraser-sized gobbets of oil. And then above them a storm petrel or sooty shearwater or plain old herring gull wheels in ordinary gyres carrying a special freight of poison. There is a certain boredom in anger.
I was down on Good Harbor Bay when the ice was breaking up. The bay is about five miles wide and the equal of any tourist-photo bay I know of, though ungraced by Noel Coward and suchlike who go to Montego. A few days before I had walked out two miles on the ice to see Richard and his father Dick and Bruce Price. I followed Bruce's footprints as he weighs nearly 300 and I wanted to feel safe. I stepped over a two-foot-wide crack and peeked for a moment down into the dark clear water. They hadn't had any luck. And Richard was angry. He had dropped a twelve-dollar augur while spudding a hole, and there it would rest permanently 100 feet below us. I said that I had stepped over a crack and they said the crack hadn't been there in the morning. But there was no offshore wind that would drive the ice out toward South Manitou Island. I felt edgy and got the creeps as if Lon Chaney were under the bed, turning into a man-wolf hybrid. I neatly tiptoed back to the car, listening for any rumbles or giant sighs that would announce my death by cold water. POET DROWNS, the local paper would read. Or probably MAN DROWNS, as there is a prevalent notion in the upper Midwest that poets are invariably “dead people.”
Back on shore a man was whistling hopelessly at his Labrador, who was busy sniffling around the juniper bushes that abut the shore. Dogs. I had recently apologized to a neighbor about my male Airedale Hud “covering” his own dog, but he said it was okay because his dog was male, too. Nature! Then the Labrador came over and sniffed my leg, smelling my penned bitch Justine. He looked at me soulfully and I quickly removed my leg to the safety of the car.
I drove to the tavern in the evening, and Richard said he had called the Traverse City Chamber of Commerce and asked about a petition that would attempt to keep the oil freighters out of the harbor during the prime fishing months of February and March. An unnamed party suggested that the malcontents should be out looking for work. Bumpkin vigilante action has been talked about—say a string of snowmobiles in a freighter's path. Count me out. The ice fisherman is low on the economic totem ratings for logical reasons. One can equip oneself for five bucks. And ice fishermen aren't big spenders in the tourist operations. A five-dollar frozen steak is for Detroiters.
I got up at 5:00 A.M. to go steelhead fishing, but when I got there my rod guides kept icing up and the line wouldn't move freely. But a week before I had stood on the discouragingly thick ice and cast my fly, a mylar dace, and lost it to a floating iceberg. Oh well. Last year I had broken a rod trying to cast strongly in the bitter cold. Will real spring never come? I said to myself, echoing the poets of yore. I meditated on the difference between a fly rod and a chugging paddle, which resembles a fraternity (or sorority) paddle with no initials carved on it. Pulling a fish in hand over hand has an atavistic glee to it; the fish imparts directly to the senses his electric struggle far below. Meat on the table! The provider! The “little woman” will be right proud of her jolly though indigent hubby. Pull that lunker out on the ice and cover him with snow to prevent the effects of dehydration and fish sunburn. I wandered around the creek estuary until I tore a foot-long hole in my waders. The water pouring in was horribly cold. I walked up the shore to an empty cabin, and a thermometer on the porch read twenty-four degrees. How stupid. I built a small fire out of driftwood and warmed my foot, watching some buffleheads circle above. From out in the bay, the birds were barely visible. I could hear the tremulous cry of two mating loons. I was frankly tired of cold weather and I imagined that the loons were also tired of running into icebergs, and the steelhead were tired of dozing in the cold water with their brains asleep to the spawning run.
Now the ice is gone and the snowdrift on the hill across the road shrinks daily. I have had two fair weeks of steelhead fishing and am gathering my equipment for a trip to Key West. Fantasies of a record tarpon are rife, though as unlikely as a record starlet. I feel somewhat benign about the preposterous winter I have endured. A crocus has appeared in vulgar purple glory. I will avoid hammerheads and moray eels and rattlesnakes and other imagined dangers, and go through more winters not unlike this one, where the depleted imagination narrows to a singular point. Fish. Anywhere and almost anytime. Even when trees split open from cold and the target is a bowling-ball-sized hole in a lid of ice.
1972
La Vénerie Française
Apprehension. And not the simple white-knuckled variety but another sort of another degree: super-taut purple knuckles. The Leningrad airport was in the middle of a blizzard and the Aeroflot jet—I was sitting far in the rear, ideally the safest place—seemed to swerve and veer on a runway which looked much like a mile-long skating rink. Vodka my soul cried out, while my hand reached for a vest flask.
Then six hours later, after floating through the blue snowless air, I landed in Paris and found that the temperature was in the low seventies and my adrenalin glands had shrunk from their all-too-frequent
volleyball size back to the manageable configuration of Ping-Pong balls. I wandered around Paris for five days in the rare late October warmth, the sun creating a beautiful golden haze out of the auto exhaust, which seemed to exceed that of New York. I walked at least a dozen miles a day but only for the exercise necessary to create appetite. After a month of travel I was fatigued with all monuments excepting restaurants and those chichi girls who were strutting like cheetahs between and around the Place Vendôme and the Place de la Concorde. I spent two minutes watching the Soviet leader Brezhnev's motorcade pass and my thoughts were drawn to Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal. I felt very mysterious for a few moments, secretive and gloomy, but returned to the Lotti for a five-hour nap. Dinner would be extensive and required rest.
On my fifth afternoon in Paris Count Guy de la Valdène, a friend I fish with in the Florida Keys, picked me up for the ride seventy miles out into Normandy to his mother's place near which a stag hunt would take place. Guy usually eschews the title “Count,” claiming that it is mostly handy for making difficult restaurant reservations. The trip out of Paris seemed maniacally fast; even through the gentle Bois de Boulogne most Frenchmen think of themselves as Grand Prix drivers, even if in a humble model of Renault or Citroën. We talked of the coming tarpon season, still six months away, but the stag hunt, the knowledge of which was limited in my poor brain to old tapestries in art books, was also discussed. Guy kept using the French pronunciation for the word “equipage” (ek-kee-pajjh) and rather than admit my ignorance I chose to think of the word as a description of a malaise, say a virulent form of hiccups, though of course my associations fit into none of Guy's sentences. I had decided days before that my two years of college French, taken a decade before, were sloppily insufficient. All other attempts had been met by querulous stares from waiters, bartenders, the concierge, even the gendarmes, who after slight bows and responses would glare snottily at my long hair and Pancho Villa moustache. Perhaps they took me for a student bent on loosening a cobblestone to throw through the Van Cleef & Arpels window. Or perhaps in preparation for Brezhnev—there were a million Soviet flags flying—they too had read The Day of the Jackal and were sizing me up as a potential international bad guy. Most likely though, subtracting the drama, I was thought of as just another dumb-dumb tourist asking dumb-dumb tourist questions. I asked Guy what would happen if you walked up to one of those De Gaulle-sized cops in front of the American Embassy and called him a pig. He said that you would have to start running immediately, hopefully like Bob Hayes out for a sideline bomb from Starbuck. Guy was very irritated at missing the pro-football season.
We finally drew up to the small village of St. Georges-Motel, if drawing up is an accurate phrase for one hundred kilometers per hour. We stopped before an enormous iron gate and an old lady ran out from a rather attractive cottage and opened the gate. We drove down a long double aisle of trees and turned left, crossed a moat and entered a large courtyard. In the twilight I could see a huge dwelling which I recognized from years of moviegoing to be a château. My efforts toward nonchalance were rather weak, and when we walked in I uttered a not very appropriate “nice place you got here.” After changing my clothes and a quick drink-—I was wishing I owned a cape or something similar—we went out to eat at a pleasant little auberge down the road, the inside of which resembled a florist's shop. Guy and his lovely wife Terry ate rather simply but at their insistence I had a woodcock pâté, a heavily-truffled omelet, and a huge serving of wild boar, plus fruit, cheeses, a few bottles of wine and a tasting of several brandies.
The next morning I awoke early with severe indigestion. Why must good food in quantity exact pain? I meditated on Igor Stravinsky's fabled digestive powers and the gourmandizing of Balzac and Diamond Jim Brady, who had willed his enormous stomach to a medical school for study. Perhaps I am not cut from such cloth, I mused while shaving. I opened the drapes and looked out on some rather mammoth formal gardens and a colonnade a quarter of a mile in the distance. I tried to slip out but was slightly delayed by a kitchen girl with coffee and croissants. I was eager to walk around the grounds. Guy had mentioned in passing that his mother raised horses and I wanted to give them a look. With my years of familiarity with the animals (we keep three on our own little farm) I can instantly tell between a Shetland pony and a draft horse, and after many nasty falls and doggish bites I have settled on looking at these creatures from a distance as if they were ambulatory paintings.
I walked around for several hours. There were swans in the moat and several ponds and also a large flock of wild mallard ducks. A fair-sized river and several brooks meandered through the grounds which were covered with huge beech and oak trees. The stables, paddocks, and neatly fenced pastures appeared to take up several hundred acres and I counted some forty horses including foals, fillys, colts, and mares. In the stable courtyard I tried some of my French on a man who quickly explained in good English that he had received some of his training at racing stables in the United States. Guy's mother, Diana Manning, shares an interest in thoroughbreds with her brothers Raymond and Winston Guest. I decided I liked the horses. They trotted up to the fence to be lovingly petted and lacked the gestures of hostility I associated with some quarter horses (offer a carrot and lose a finger). Despite their gentility and beauty I still didn't want to ride one. A particular mare that had just returned from training and had proved a bit recalcitrant was running around her pasture at a speed that closed on fifty knots. Only a tenacious badger could have stayed on her back.
I returned to the château thinking of Hemingway's fascination in his Paris days with horseracing and how he often considered his winnings as “funny” money, like winning unexpectedly big at a poker game. He would treat a group of friends to a long meal and drinks. My single experience at Saratoga years before had lost me a considerable amount and purged me of this sort of gambling though I enjoyed the beauty of the track. I walked up to the third floor where there was a charming room decorated in the manner of a small American cocktail lounge, a place to escape from the elegance of the rest of the place. I had a not very moderate Armagnac and played Pink Floyd's “Atom Heartmother” on the phonograph which made me a trifle homesick. I momentarily longed for my Merle Haggard albums and my home where the grouse season was in full swing now, as well as the steel-head fishing I alternated with the grouse. I walked back downstairs and took one of Guy's fly rods and cast from a bridge into the moat for several hours. There were no fish other than minnows in the moat but I figured that I wouldn't fly cast in a moat very often during this short life.
That afternoon we took a long drive through the forest where the hunt would take place. There was a startling resemblance to some of the good grouse and deer areas in Michigan with swales and brambles and stunted oaks, the acorns covering the ground. Our drive ended at a pentagonal tower with a lawn in the center of the forest, the pavilion from which the hunt would begin. Just down the road from the pavilion we stopped at a white-stucco farmhouse with a huge kennel behind it and met Serge Hervé, the head working man of the hunt, and his wife and daughter. Serge Hervé exudes an impression of strength and incredible vitality—he doesn't walk, he struts and trots and bounces. We looked at the stag hounds which are called chiens de meute. I asked if they all were named and was quickly introduced to Massena, Sombrero, Rubens, Tintoret, Quasimodo, Plantagenet, Tarzan, Potemkine, Offenbach and Opium, among others. I asked to see the best of the hounds and Serge entered the kennel and brought out Kroutchev, a fourteen-year-old with grey whiskers. Serge hugged and kissed the dog before returning it to the pen. The latter is a gesture I find common among the best dog trainers the world over. The markings and tickings were varied—some of the hounds resembled outsized foxhounds and others looked like blue ticks and walkers—and sizes were impressive, running from sixty pounds up to one brute that struck me as weighing over a hundred. Their dispositions were sweet and Serge had complete mastery over the whole lot, something I hadn't managed with a single pointer or my t
wo current Airedales.
We entered the clubhouse to see some of the trophies, the largest of which was hanging over the fireplace. The head approached the size of an elk's though the spread and size of the rack wasn't nearly as large. Serge whispered, "C'est un Monsieur,” which is the ultimate compliment, meaning a noble and huge stag that provided a difficult hunt. Then Serge showed us another head collected only two weeks before. He cursed the rack with some humor and explained to us that the stag had tossed him high over its head with its antlers when he had “served” it. When a stag is brought to bay by the hounds part of Serge's job, certainly the most dangerous aspect, is to approach the stag and plunge a silver dagger into its heart. Often the stag isn't as fatigued as he might appear and Serge has been gored and tossed a number of times. The act of “serving” requires bravery of a rare sort. Anyone who has watched two male deer or elk arguing over a harem before the rutting season will understand the butting and goring power of these animals. Or if you're not familiar with these beasts try to visualize being charged full tilt by a four-hundred-pound mastiff with a set of well-honed horns on its head.
I loitered around for two more days, picking up information on thoroughbred breeding and any incidental lore I could comprehend on the hunt from the ancient books in the château library. But the weather was too splendid to read after a month-long dose of Soviet snowstorms. We made a desultory attempt at a duck hunt on some of the many ponds but the ducks were near the pastures and one doesn't fire shotguns near a dozen foals, the net potential worth far exceeding what I'll earn in my own lifetime. I was also apprehensive about scratching up a mint condition Holland & Holland, a shotgun that bore no resemblance to my own battered and overused bush double. There were a minimal number of brown trout in the river to cast to, most of them having been destroyed several years before by an effluent release from an upstream factory. How like home!