by Dean Kuipers
“I think he spit the hook,” he said after a while, reeling in unweighted line.
“You just can’t land a fish like that,” Dad continued, and then, “OH MY GOD, SON, THERE HE IS!”
And there it was, the heavy back splitting the creek, a big-bellied rainbow trout barreling downstream like an exposed submarine racing for deep water, right past Joe’s boots and then farther across the hole and around the next bend, line still firmly attached.
Not only attached but mostly untangled. It’s about as likely as having a fish handed to you by a bear. The line came in with sticks and algae winding onto the reel, but it came in and about half of it went right back out again, disappearing downstream. A fish heading downstream, however, is like a wounded deer heading down-mountain: if the deer thinks it will recover, it climbs up to higher ground where its eyesight and hearing give it an advantage over predators who will smell the injury; if the hurt is grievous, it gives up its advantage and heads down to water and sweet grass and the deeper cover of thickets. This fish was waving the white flag, and soon it was played out and Joe began the long reel-in. The whole fight lasted about fifteen life-changing minutes, and then the fish came dragging slowly to the shallows at Joe’s feet.
“We didn’t even bring a net,” Dad lamented, splashing into the dark river.
Joe grabbed the monster by the gills and hoisted him up, a beautiful, solid, twenty-five-and-a-half-inch rainbow (Dad had a tape measure). It was the essence of fish. It was the dream that fish themselves dream. Night had fallen.
Dad was nearly in tears. “I can’t believe it, Joe! I can’t believe it! Don’t drop him, son.”
Joe inhaled Dad’s excitement like a drug and just about pissed his pants; he shook in little quivers. Dad was normally so angry about everything that just to see him excited about a fish—his fish—was the pinnacle of Joe’s life at that point. Dad was standing in the river smiling and he rarely smiled in the river. The fish was hardly even the most important thing; the important thing was: my dad is smiling at me.
“I’m keeping it,” Joe quavered, struggling up onto the shore trying to manage the pole and clutching the fish as though Dad might take it from him and throw it back or somehow screw up this moment.
“Of course we’re keeping it,” Dad said, splashing after him. “We’re gonna eat it!”
“It’s a big fish, man!”
“Oh, it’s glorious.”
Father and son clambered up the bank with Joe holding the fish tight and spilled out onto a darkened meadow there with all their gear and relief. They laid the fish in the grass and admired it.
“The fish of a lifetime, Joe!”
Those were words that would never fade. Six years later, as we talked, he was living off them.
“That was the first time in my life I felt like a whole person,” Joe said. “That Dad accepted me for who I was. He didn’t attribute the fish to God or fate, it was just me. The river made that happen.”
Neither Brett nor I had ever had a moment like that. I couldn’t believe no one had told me this story before; they probably had, and in my own self-involvement I’d forgotten it. Joe had obviously come closer than any of us did to having a father-son moment with our dad, and I think it made Joe half-crazy with craving. Dad tried to teach Brett and me lessons all the time by hacking off our relatedness somewhere short of mature, but Joe had received a full charge. It changed everything to know that at least one of us had done something that earned unqualified praise.
“After that, standing in a river is all I want to do,” Joe said to me. “And I want to do it with Dad. That’s why I want to go to the deer camp. That’s how I feel good. I always want to feel the way I feel when we’re up at the North Branch.”
In November 1989, Joe went up to Dad’s new deer camp for Opening Day of rifle season. I didn’t think it would actually happen. When aunts and uncles asked him what he’d been up to, was he supposed to regale them with stories of the cool stuff he saw on acid? I asked him to call me afterward if he did go, because I was dead curious to know what it looked and felt like. Joe did call. Maybe he’d had a drink or two and then called me. November marks the beginning of the hardest time for depressives in Michigan, when the sun disappears until late April. He gave me just enough detail about what he saw of the land and the birds and clouds so that I could tell that the hunt had mattered to him.
Vern and Jack had put a trailer on the property, a pull-behind travel trailer that Vern had bought from a widow he knew. Jack told me they’d hauled it out there behind her short-block Dodge pickup, swerving and bucking like crazy. They didn’t have water or electric hookup, but it was a private camp. The 95 acres butted up to 120 acres of public land in the middle of the block, and there was no access except through private land, so they felt pretty sure they wouldn’t have yahoos walking through their hunting spots all day.
Card’s place had been like that, too, but we didn’t take it for granted. Most of the seven hundred thousand or so hunters who flooded into the Michigan woods for deer hunting that fall staked out a spot on public land and were almost certain to be disturbed by other people.
It took Joe three hours to drive up from Kalamazoo, and it was already dark before he left town. Dad and Vern were unhappy that Joe would arrive late, stirring up the woods when they’d rather it mellow, but he had to work, and among Calvinists work is sacred. He had just landed a job selling gold chains at a kiosk in the mall called the Golden Chain Gang; it was only for minimum wage and would end up lasting less than a month, but work was work.
He went up and down the remote road a few times trying to find the unmarked two-track that ran onto Ike’s little piece of sand. You didn’t want to go hammering into the woods on the day before gun season and test someone’s tolerance for trespassers. Finally he snapped his lights off and plunged the Rabbit down a trail. The two-track was frozen sand and the night air smelled of cold swamp and snow. Dad greeted him at the trailer door.
“Kemosabe!” he whispered. “You made it!”
The trailer slept four and the other hunters were Vern and his daughter Jennifer, who was Joe’s age and in his class at Mattawan. We have sixteen cousins on that side, so you never knew who might turn up. She was a serious hunter and a partier, too, probably the only other one in the whole Kuipers clan besides Joe, but even though she was a featherweight compared with him, the judgment she endured was worse because she was a woman. She fought back against the whole family with a kind of chipper resistance and love that made space for kids like Joe and her. She had bigger balls than the rest of us.
Joe lay awake for a few hours. It felt good to be hunting. It had been three years since the quiet debacle at Card’s, and it was important to him to be back on the land with Dad. At about four forty-five A.M. everyone got up to paint their faces and Dad filled a thermos with hot tea, and by five thirty they pulled coats over their coats and hoods over their hats and there was the sober sound of rifle cartridges snapped-to and one racked into the chamber, and they were standing outdoors in the smell of coming snow with clouds of breath ringing their heads. They smiled at one another and walked away in silence, each one to a separate piece of dawn.
“I went to the south … east, I guess, through a kind of swampy drain area and then up on a low ridge along the property line with the people on the east side. It wasn’t up high, really, but you can see up there off into that south twenty and back into the swamp and over onto the neighbor’s piece. Dad and them don’t have any blinds set up yet, so I just sat against a tree. It started to snow. There were cardinals and chickadees and pileateds.”
He smoked cigarettes and snow piled up on his hood. To the east, Joe could see through the trees to bits of a weedy pond of about eighty acres that was part of the neighbor’s camp, a shallow pan of ice stuck through with cattails and rushes and little islands where geese would nest in the spring. The wind blew out of the west and toward the pond, and only the neighbor’s cows would smell Joe’s smoke. Joe had
a left-handed .30-06 and thoughts in full stampede. He’d tapered off the LSD as the supply ran down, and started going to a day clinic run by Bronson Hospital in the town of Oshtemo. It was a group-therapy affair where mostly they’d sit around and talk about boozing, but he kept going back. He liked riding his bike into Oshtemo to get there, a ride of about five or six miles from Mom’s place past the horsefly swamps of Eighth Street, past the Boy Scout’s Camp Rota-Kiwan and the city water wells in the Al Sabo Preserve. He was getting in shape.
It was easy to commit to the rehab because everyone agreed he should go. But it wasn’t easy to figure out what to do other than that. By the end of the summer season, the guys he’d partied with had stumbled off to colleges and vocational schools and jobs—even Scott left to take a course in aircraft repair in Oklahoma. Nervous girls walked up to Joe all day in the mall and let him put gold chains around their necks and look down their shirts.
Dad sat in the darkness out to the west, watching the edge of Mr. Carter’s corn.
Dad was happy Joe was there, and Joe felt good about that. Out here, on the hunt, Vern and Jen and Dad all trusted Joe; his reputation as a sportsman was already well established: he was the catcher of giant fish. It was just everywhere else that they considered him messy. That was good enough for one morning.
“There was a lot of shooting all around us, but none of us saw anything,” Joe said. “But that was fine. It felt good. Very peaceful. Dad was so relieved I was there. We all came in around noon and talked about what birds we saw and stuff like that, where we thought the deer were. Dad was super disappointed we didn’t see anything. Especially when we used to see about thirty or forty every day at Card’s. But I didn’t care. I had to go straight back to work.”
“Would you go back up there?” I asked.
“Sure. Why not.”
When I called Dad about it later, he called that feeling “grace.” Joe had experienced grace, he said.
Brett went up the following weekend with Uncle Jack and Aunt Jane, and he found his redoubt in the blueberry bushes along the bog and listened to beavers slapping at the water. He smoked and drank coffee, and he told me he liked the place, too. No one shot anything that first year, and Dad was giving out about the smoking and so on, but Brett and Joe weren’t disappointed at all because they were allowed to sit in the woods. The place raised all kinds of possibilities. Maybe the next summer they’d be allowed to do some habitat work out there, or hunt a grouse. Like me, they were looking for a place that made them feel sane.
Three
The Big Chair
Love is made in a place and love is destroyed in a place. Maybe every conflict, human and otherwise, is about habitat.
I felt a little bit sick about missing the 1989 deer season. I was still living in New York, and I traveled to Scandinavia to write a Spin cover story on Mötley Crüe and to Amsterdam for another on Jane’s Addiction. Places still mattered. At one point, Tommy Lee leaned over to the guys in Mötley Crüe as we ate at the Strand Hotel in Stockholm and whispered, “I’m surprised the manager of this hotel has been so cool. Last time we were here, we destroyed this place.” I loved writing these stories, but for every music or pop culture story I did, I made a deal with myself that I’d write a big outdoors story. The authorities finally closed Tompkins Square Park at night. I started to look elsewhere.
Over the winter of 1989–90, the timber wars were ramping up in the West. Years earlier, when I was in college, I had lived in Philo, a tiny village with a weathered old store and a post office just north of Booneville in Mendocino County, so I knew California’s coastal mountains a little. I started to dig in. The big timber companies in Northern California, notably Pacific Lumber (Maxxam), Louisiana-Pacific, and Georgia-Pacific, were racing to cut the last of the state’s old-growth redwood and Douglas fir before a slew of November 1990 ballot initiatives could stop them. These were some of the last old-growth stands in the country. The logging was resisted by small mobs of local hippies and union members dressed as bears and endangered marbled murrelets and spotted owls stopping logging trucks on Highway 101 and protesting at timber company offices.
The people in costumes were greeted by their neighbors with death threats and attempted murders.
In February 1990, three lead activists named Judi Bari, Darryl Cherney, and Greg King, with whom I’d do a number of stories in the future, put out an alert for a summer of action they called Mississippi Summer in the Redwoods, or Redwood Summer for short. It was modeled after the call for Freedom Riders to come to Mississippi to register African Americans to vote in 1964. Their press release read: “It’s going to be a long hard summer in Northern California … We are putting out a call for Freedom Riders for the Forest to come to Northern California this summer and defend the last of the redwoods with nonviolent civil disobedience.”
That’s what Joe and Brett and I needed, I thought. To get dirty saving some trees. I made plans to spend the summer of 1990 reporting in the redwoods. Joe was drifting along, not getting better, not getting worse. Brett was in school. I was obsessed with the idea we should all get to Northern California.
Joe and Scott went up to the main branch of Michigan’s Manistee River for the trout opener in April 1990. They drove up in Scott’s old three-on-the-tree Ford F100 pickup and found a quiet bluff on the Deward Tract near the sacred headwaters of both the Manistee and the Au Sable, where one of the last stands of virgin white pine was cut to end Michigan’s timber boom. The man who had owned that timber, David Ward, stipulated in his will that the land could only be logged for ten years after his death, and so in 1910 the mill was dismantled and the town of Deward, which once had as many as eight hundred residents, blew off with the icy winter wind. Only a few chunks of cement buried deep in the grass remained. The big white pines had not returned.
It was cold so they sat in the truck and drank a twelve-pack of beer. Joe was still in and out of the Bronson Hospital talk-therapy program in Oshtemo and wasn’t drinking heavily. Scotty wasn’t supposed to drink, either, as he’d just finished a round of chemotherapy a few days before.
In the fall after high school, when Joe found short-term employment at the Golden Chain Gang in the mall, Scott started airplane mechanic school in Oklahoma, but it wasn’t long before he started feeling sick. Soon he was so sick with a pain in his stomach that he couldn’t stand himself, and finally he quit school and moved back to his folks’ house on Eagle Lake. He went in for a few tests—a CAT scan, an upper GI X-ray series, a lower GI X-ray series—but nothing turned up. Then one day he was so eaten up with it that he had his folks paged where they were shopping at the massive Meijer Thrifty Acres grocery in Kalamazoo, and they rushed him to the hospital.
Where, once again, their machines found nothing. But even at nineteen years old Scott was a tough old cob. He told the doctor, “Either you open me up right now and do exploratory surgery or I’m going to go home and kill myself. I’m done with this pain.”
The doctor said he had to do more tests.
“How long does it take to line that up?” asked Scott.
“Could be tomorrow,” the doctor said.
“I’ll most likely be dead by then,” Scott said, stone-faced. “Last chance.” They admitted him and did tests and then opened him up.
Turns out he might have been dead anyway, with a tumor the size of a grapefruit on his lower intestine, which was finally identified as a rare non-Hodgkin lymphoma called Burkitt’s lymphoma.
The chemo made the beer taste funny, but Scott figured the cancer would probably kill him in the long run, and it was the trout opener, so they sat in the truck and drank and told funny stories. They fell asleep in the truck and about froze to death, and when they woke up, there was a foot of new snow on the ground.
The water was high but they got out in it in their waders, and it kept coming up as the day got warmer. Pretty soon the air was about seventy degrees Fahrenheit and the snow was gone, but the high water had blown out the fishing.
It was bound to get cold again that night: they were camped right in the heart of that outlandish temperature sink south of Gaylord where it’s always ten to twenty degrees colder than anywhere else in the Lower Peninsula, so they decided to move.
“Let’s go down to your deer camp,” Scott said.
“I’m not allowed,” said Joe. “We’re not allowed to go there unless Dad or one of my uncles is there. Those are the rules.”
By that time, Dad, Vern, and Jack had bought the place from Ike, plus the other twenty acres to the south, too, and they put their rules on it. Joe, Brett, me, and Vern’s daughter Jennifer were only allowed when Dad or other elders were there, because we couldn’t be trusted, because we listened to rotten music like Judas Priest and Gang of Four. And for nondualistic thinking. But the other kids of these uncles and aunts, who were more pious and went to Christian schools, could go to the cabin unescorted and play hymns on guitars and that kind of thing.
“The uncles would freak out if they found us there,” continued Joe.
“Dude, I’m probably dying,” said Scott.
“I agree that it makes no fuckin’ sense.”
“Your dad is cool. He likes me.”
“Good old Laughin’ Bruce! Be that as it may, you are also banished. For your iniquity.”
“What do they think is going to happen?”
“That we’re going to go there with a bunch of assholes and drink and wreck the place like we did at Knollwood. Catch the woods on fire.”
“But we would never do that. We go up north to get away from all those guys.”
“I know it!”
“I don’t care what we do, but let’s go,” said Scott. “This river’s too high. We have to find another place to fish.”