by Jim Harrison
After fishing in the Florida Keys for a number of years it becomes obvious that guides do not make a lot of money despite their high daily fee, and certainly not much commensurate with their abilities as men. A fully equipped skiff with motor costs at least $5,000, there are the many blown-out charters, and the rigor of the job equals that of a jackhammer operator. But there is a dignity and grace in the profession unavailable in all but a very few areas to very few men. You have to be good or you don't eat. Few of the guides could imagine doing anything else. At least until they simply wear out.
And there is the rapport that the guide, no matter the repetition, shares with his customer: the sheer fun and excitement of the sport. It is most palpable early in the morning. At dockside the customers are talking with strenuously subdued giddiness, trying to act offhanded and experienced. The guides gas up the boats and double-check the gear. They are wary and gruff, concealing their nervousness in all the details of preparation. But the nearly crazy unvoiced hope of all is that it might be one of those special days to be talked of with awe through all the boozy nights to come; say jumping twenty tarpon or a first permit on fly or a dozen bonefish. Or even the unmentionable—breaking Apte's record of a 154-pound tarpon on a fly. No wonder he's arrogant. And no matter that the boats will probably return in eight hours with the guides grim with uneven success and the customers looking as though they had just spent eight hours in a sauna under a sun lamp. When it is bad for some and good for others the anger of the losers is nearly primitive. The guides shuffle and grimace around the dock in the late afternoon sun wondering why they aren't doing something sensible for God's sake. The unsuccessful anglers lunge for their cars, which have heated up like ovens. But the lucky ones—and luck is always a factor, along with skill and good guiding—don't want to leave just yet. They move around the boat slips in sort of a peacock trance, talking to anyone who will listen for even a moment about their experience, certainly among the top few that angling—or life—has to offer.
1973
Canada
Among the strangest customs of fishermen in northern Michigan are frequent trips to Canada. I say strange because the fishing has been so good right here for the past few years, especially in Lake Michigan, which is only a mile or so from my farm. One cold evening in May, casting from shore, I caught an eight-pound brown trout and a twelve-pound lake trout. I fished for a total of twenty minutes. Not that this happens every evening, but limits occur with regularity. And Lake Leelanau is only a mile in the other direction. It yields good catches of brown and rainbow trout and smallmouth bass. If you like to troll in the big lake, chinook and coho salmon are available in late summer, and fall brings some sturdy steelhead runs. I can also name three reasonably good brown-trout streams within an hour's drive.
So why go to Canada? It's not just to escape the Indiana farmers and arc welders from Detroit who clutter up northern Michigan to fish in the summer. Some of my friends even go to Canada in the dead of winter to ice-fish, if that can be imagined.
I think, rather, that in going to Canada you recapture a sense of what the sporting life was in northern Michigan (or Wisconsin, New York, Minnesota) from the late forties to the mid-fifties: a sweet peacefulness with fairly abundant fish and game, threadbare cabins and kerosene lamps, war-surplus sleeping bags and musty tents. And even more pleasant, you bring back a time when woods, lakesides and riverbanks weren't littered with Day-Glo “No Trespassing” signs, when campsites weren't on the verge of computerization, when the big tract owners and farmers didn't care if you pitched a tent, under the entirely reasonable assumption you wouldn't muck up the land.
So in Canada is this sense of something we have largely lost. Like tourists in England, you are shocked by the politeness and affability of the people. And in all the roadhouse stops that seem to accompany sporting trips, you don't feel that cold, ozone-tinged sense of violence so common now in American bars. This may sound like propaganda but it isn't. It's simply a reaction to a fine surprise.
Driving north in late May, as I did with three friends last spring, you see spring gradually disappear into the tentative beginnings of a few weeks past. The darker greens around your farm fade into paler greens until at the end of 400 miles you see only buds a few days old, and in the total landscape earth colors predominate. The last leg of the trip, from Thesalon, Ontario up toward Chapleau, is a sort of Appalachian feast, only without people—sheer rock faces, hills on the verge of becoming small mountains, fast-moving creeks—until you round another corner and see the great Mississagi River. Your trance is disturbed by the knowledge that the Mississagi is dammed at Aubrey Falls, which has diminished the fine fishing. But the Aubinadong River just up the road isn't dammed and you mean to have a go at the large brook trout it's rumored to hold.
When we reach a sign announcing Alvin Armstrong's Mashagama Lodge, we learn that we have to walk the last two miles—the rough trail won't accommodate our low-slung car. A Jeep is sent to pick up our gear, and the four of us (four fatties) are a little embarrassed as Alvin stares at the vast load of food and drink we've brought along for our week's stay, including cases of wine and ale. Though we have assured each other that we will eat fish all of the time, we have brought along chickens, a whole filet, an eight-pound chuck for chili, pastrami, lots of asparagus—just for starters. Too many of my camping trips have been marred by lack of protein, by fish that stay in the water unwilling to be eaten.
At first in the gathering dark Mashagama Lake looked small, but quick reference to a map showed that it is irregularly shaped, with only part of it visible from any single point. That first evening I was surprised to see a family of common loons swim by the dock less than a hundred feet out. Male, female and six little ones in gliding tow. I had not seen loons so close since my childhood. Later we heard their long tremulous wails far out in the lake, surely the strangest of all bird songs. I decided before sleep that if there was a bird living on the moon, that was the sound it would make.
The next morning we were all grumpy. We had announced to each other that we would begin fishing at dawn and we had barely finished breakfast by noon. No one had gotten up to stoke the fire and it had been cold.
But this was only an initial awkwardness, as was the slow fishing. It took two days to change our methods. For instance, there was no point in dry-fly fishing when there wasn't an active insect within a hundred miles because of the cold. The other three switched to trolling with light tackle using small Mepps spinners and a variety of spoons. I switched from my fancy dry-fly patterns to streamers but without much luck. The others caught enough lake trout between two and five pounds to keep us in wonderful breakfasts. Mashagama Lake trout were much better tasting than those we were accustomed to from Lake Michigan. They were fine-fleshed, virtually fatless, and their flavor resembled that of the Rocky Mountain cut-throat. Lake Michigan trout feed heavily on smelt and alewives, and though they're beginning to reach a grand size they lack that pure trout flavor.
After a few days of concern bordering on depression I began to catch both lake and brook trout on a large Spuddler Streamer. No matter how often one insists that fly-fishing is not properly a competitive sport it rankles to be outdone by spin fishermen. Despite the obvious grace of the sport, how can you proselytize for fly-fishing when you are a failure? Thus I was close to ecstasy when I went out alone and returned with a three-pound brook trout, flopped it on the table beneath cynical eyes and walked out the back door to get yet another ale from the cases we stored in the burbling spring behind the cabin. My pleasure was leavened a bit when I found out the others had brought back half a dozen brook trout from their trolling expedition. I wanted to be critical of the béarnaise sauce that accompanied the roasted filet that evening but it was perfect. I sniffed the cork and was studious about the wine but that, too, was flawless. We were humble cabin dwellers in the vast north. Alvin had mentioned that he often heard the howling of wolves in the winter while tending his trapline.
Oddly enoug
h I nearly lost the brook trout—out of general pessimism I had neglected to bring a landing net with me. But when my sloppy, diffident casting finally was rewarded, I tailed the fish after three successive lunges with my frantic hand. For some reason my luck changed after that afternoon, probably because the weather broke and spring finally arrived in the far north.
In addition to fishing, the area offered some fine walking terrain and a profligate amount of birdlife. We counted eight different types of warblers in a single afternoon and stalked a loon that slid from its nest like a plump feathered otter. The local grouse were evidently unused to people. I chased several in circles and was unable to get them to flush. They were the kind of grouse I prayed for in my youth when weeks would pass without a single flying bird in the bag.
Only one other of the lodge's twelve cabins was in use during the week we were there. It was occupied by some hunters from Colorado who had come all that way for the spring bear season. One day they struck a mildly discordant note by bringing in a bear that appeared definitely cubbish to me—it was not all that much larger than my Airedale. I'm no real enemy of mammal hunting, but the black bear, as opposed to the grizzly, has always appealed to me as a huge, reasonably docile form of my daughter's teddy bear and not a fit thing to shoot at.
On our last evening, staring down at the bony remnants of a fine trout dinner, we noisily agreed we would come again. Canada was a ready-made time capsule into our sporting past—gentle, affable and not all that far away. No matter that we were tired and fly-bitten, our dinner tinctured with the odor of kerosene and mosquito dope. I walked down to the dock and watched the northern lights, experiencing if only for a moment that great flow of wilderness, the peopleless territory ranging thousands of miles from the dock to the North Pole, full of rivers, forests and fish.
1974
Night Games
The picture on our calendar this month is Ghidrah, a three-headed, winged dragon busy tromping a small Japanese village into bits and pieces. The calendar is there at the insistence of my preschool daughter. It frightens her over breakfast. She likes to be frightened. I envy the purity of her fright, mindful that adult monsters are weapons, institutions, neuroses, that lack the visceral beauty and immediacy of Ghidrah. The tonic reality of an actual Ghidrah entering Leelanau County trumpeting screams and celluloid groans and spewing fire is a bit too distant to be tasty, like a fantasy of catching and releasing a sperm whale on a streamer fly.
On the outside, though, I know what I will do for a little fright, what I have done to reach the nexus of feeling surrounding this emotion, what dubious adventures I've conceived that have sent me reeling around the world mostly in the name of consciousness to get that familiar jolt of awe and wonderment. But mostly I just use night. It's far easier and obviously cheaper than jumping from a plane. And up near my small farm in northern Michigan there's some interesting night fishing to do from May until October, not to speak of ghostly winter walks under a full moon.
Night fishing. In The Snow Walker Farley Mowat says the Eskimos have over a hundred compound words to describe variations in the condition of snow. The conditions of night own as many variations but there's never been a call for the thesaurus. Night is just night, not certainly for most a time to be walking around in the woods looking for a river that you were sure abutted the end of a particular path. Your ears strain for the sound of rushing water. Nothing. You turn around and the path doesn't look like a path anymore. Above the whine of mosquitoes you hear your heart beating. If you pause long enough the owls will begin again. You make another careful tack into the woods, steaming from the exertion in your waders. Your sweat mixed with mosquito repellent stings your eyes. Your fly rod catches in the tag alders and bends dangerously. But then you spot a landmark clump of yellow birch and stop long enough to hear the river just beyond.
There is a strange fragrance to a river at night that I've never been able to identify, some water-washed mixture of fern, rotting poplar, cedar, and the earthen odor of logjams. If you fish long enough at night alone and are a trifle unstable anyway the moon that guides your casts across the river smells vaguely metallic just as the sun that burns the first dew off after dawn smells copperish. This will sound farfetched only to those who haven't been there. I knew a young Ojibwa Indian once who demonstrated to me how he could find deer by their scent. Then he got drunk one day and went to Vietnam and hasn't been heard from since.
Night fishing is best, though, with friends, barring those times obvious to anyone when you want to be alone and clean out your head. I fish mostly with a friend I used to work for, Pat Paton, who is a carpenter and block layer. He is very good at starting fires and it's a solace to sit looking at a fire when the fishing is slow. If we're camping and the night is particularly dark and impenetrable we drink a lot of whiskey. If either of us is in a violently hasty retreat from what is popularly known as the “real” world we cook a steak in the middle of the night. This is an unabashedly primitive coolant to a troubled mind—to eat steak and drink too much whiskey out in the woods in the middle of the night. But it works in the same way as anyone's psychiatrist, I suspect. Maybe even better, assuming you stay out in the woods.
One night I caught a bat. The bat swallowed my fly and under the shaft of my penlight the bat was clearly suffering from the hook. The booze made it even more garish. I couldn't put a bat in the creel with my trout. I couldn't call Pat who as a hardened country boy is afraid of bats and snakes. Luckily another friend was with us that night. This friend is somewhat of a gun nut and he was packing a .357 sidearm for no real reason other than he enjoyed doing so. Everyone knows that a .357 will blow a hole through an engine block and that police use the weapon in some cities because it shoots for keeps. It is good for close-range whale and grizzly attacks and for cutting down trees if you've forgotten your axe.
“Put this miserable bat away. He's swallowed a number eight muddler minnow.”
“Hold the light and stand back,” my friend said.
There was a billowing blue flash and the kind of roar associated with a thunderstorm a foot away. We were covered with riverbank mud. The bat had vaporized. At least we couldn't find him.
“That's a handy piece you got there.”
“Sure is,” he said.
If you get enough trout it's best to cook them immediately. We usually take along a little fat and an iron skillet and salt. The only better way to cook a fresh trout is au bleu, poaching the fish with a little vinegar in the water and serving it with cucumber mayonnaise, watercress, French bread, and white wine.
Night fishing for lake trout on the shores of Lake Michigan is even more susceptible to hard-core buffoonery. It's best to have a driftwood fire because the water can be very cold. In this sort of fishing you get a definite release from the refinements of your sport, and that's one of the best things about night fishing. You can forget the long, delicate casts with a $200 bamboo rod, the minuscule fly drifting toward the water on a pound-test leader like the bug it's supposed to imitate. The sophisticated trappings disappear and you're young again with a spinning rod and plug, on some elemental but fun gathering mission. The legal limit is now three but a few years back it was five and the trout often average over ten pounds. We caught ten one night, over a hundred pounds of lake trout, then discovered that my old station wagon had lost its brake fluid a half-dozen miles from the nearest house. It was fine caroming off trees on the logging road on the way out. The main thing was to make the blows glancing rather than direct. You return to the yellow light of the tavern or home like a blinking creature wakened from a sleep in which he has been given back his health.
We forget our ears or only use them casually except while listening to music. My first memory of night fishing was as a boy in 1946 on a small lake we shared with a half-dozen other cabins. One of the cabins owned a small war-surplus diesel generator, while the rest were lit by kerosene. I would row my father around at night while he plug-casted for bass. After the doctor turned off hi
s generator our ears would slowly attune to the plop of the bass plug hitting the water, the creak of oars, perhaps a loon's cry and the frogs and crickets along the shore. Denied one sense, another is enlivened until you can hear the fish strike and know when to strike back. Without sight the world becomes almost unbearably tactile. The clownishness that creeps in is a reaction to a near embarrassment over how deeply the experience is felt, an escape from muddiness into clear water.
I stood one night in the Bechler Meadows in the southwest section of Yellowstone Park. There were no people for miles and in the moonlight I heard thousands of migrating herons calling. I had a bad toothache, the best toothache I ever had. My friends were asleep and despite a mixture of codeine and whiskey sleep escaped me. I tried to fish on a branch of the Bechler River but my attention was overwhelmed by the sheen of thousands of acres of marsh grass in the moonlight, my throbbing jaw, the noise of the herons and imaginary grizzlies. I was a night creature as surely as I was a few years later in a boat with a broken-down motor out in Lake Okeechobee. There is a very particular “I don't care” abandonment mixed with a raising of the hairs on the neck that Matthew Arnold described as the test of good poetry. This contrasts with dipping smelt off creeks emptying into Lake Michigan with mobs of other mostly drunk men filling tubs with the small fish which we sometimes cook without cleaning. The coldness of the water makes you think of night fishing off Little Torch Key in Florida. You stand in the water which seems to approximate body temperature, feeling on your bare legs the subtle pull of tide. The fish cast phosphorescent wakes. You are a pure sense mechanism with the easy arc of your fly line repeated so often that it has entered the realm of the instinctive. You are so far “out of your mind” that you are rather surprised, and not necessarily pleasantly, when you return. But that's what sport is supposed to do, and night fishing is a sport with an umbilical connection called play that colors all your other movements. The boy catching bass at night to the man repeating the gesture three decades later is an inexhaustibly sensible step through time.