by Dave Crehore
Dad called from a distance. “Did you get it?”
“I’m not sure,” I lied.
“Well, I’ll be over there in a minute to help you look,” Dad said.
Good old Dad.
The horror of the situation soaked in. Stupid, greedy me, I had
shot a sitting bird, I already regretted it, and now I couldn’t even retrieve it. The tree was too big to shake, and too bushy to climb.
Looking around, I saw a piece of dead wood about the size of a
baseball bat. I put down my gun, grabbed the stick, and hurled it toward the top of the spruce. It fell short. There was plenty of dead wood around, and I threw one chunk after another, but nothing
could dislodge that grouse.
Then I heard Dad’s voice behind me.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, in a conversational tone. “Sometimes that happens. You shoot ’em and they fall right into a tree.”
That was the lie I was about to tell him! My face burned. How
much had he seen?
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The Fine Art of Forgetting
Dad struck a match and drew the flame down into a fresh bowl
of Walnut. We looked at each other. There was a little smile around the corners of Dad’s eyes. He knew! He must have been watching
the whole time. And he knew I knew he knew.
“So it goes,” Dad said. “We’ll never get that bird down. Let’s
hunt ’em up; maybe we’ll find some more.”
But we didn’t. We hunted out the cover and trudged back to
the car. I deserved ten minutes of I-told-you-so, but Dad never said a word. Bless his old heart, not a word. And I never shot another sitting bird.
Dad and I hunted grouse together until 1982. The day at the
Sandhill cover was never mentioned, until I brought it up on an
October afternoon as we drove home from one of our last hunts. A light rain was falling and red leaves scuttled across the road. I told him the story I’ve just told you, and I thanked him for being so kind.
“I don’t remember that,” Dad said. “I don’t remember that at all.
But if you say so . . .”
I glanced over at him but he was busy filling his pipe.
Dad’s gone now, and my wife and I have raised a daughter and a
son. You’re probably wondering how I dealt with them when they
screwed up. But you know, I’ve been lucky. My kids have never done a single dumb thing. Not that I can remember, anyway.
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The Secret Smallmouth Lake
in the U.P.
T he story of the secret smallmouth lake in the U.P. began in the White House Lunch on a June noon in the mid-1950s.
The White House Lunch was on the north bank of the river,
surrounded by the shipyard and the White House milk condensery.
It was small, noisy, hot in all seasons, and incredibly busy when the yard was working three shifts.
The White House always smelled pungently of fried onions and
cigarette smoke, which darkened the walls and even the pictures of pretty girls and bird dogs on the calendars. When you walked in, Rich, who owned the place, would point to an empty stool at the
counter, yell “hamburgeronion” to the kitchen, and slap down a
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The Secret Smallmouth Lake in the U.P.
ruby-red plastic glass of ice water. You didn’t want a hamburgeronion? Tough. Hamburgeronions were du jour at the White House.
Trouble was coming, but Dad didn’t sense it as he left his swel-
tering office at the shipyard and headed for lunch at the White House that day. Even the hellish spit, pop, and flash of welding in the yard’s fabrication shop didn’t seem like a warning.
But when the screen door of the White House banged shut
behind him, Dad saw that the only vacant spot at the counter was next to Clifford. That was an omen.
Clifford was a thin, lonely, red-headed welder and a breathless, nonstop talker. He lived to fish, but not at local places like Pigeon Lake or the Coast Guard pier. For Clifford, real fishing didn’t start until you were at least a hundred miles away, somewhere north of Highway 64, as far back in the woods as possible, and in the company of a good listener.
Clifford saw Dad, smiled, and patted the empty stool beside him.
Knowing that Dad was a bass fisherman, he shifted smoothly from
perch, which he had been discussing with a grizzled pipefitter, to smallmouth bass in the North Woods.
“Dammit Dave you know that little smallmouth lake up in
Michigan I’m always talking about well I was thinking the other day I said to myself dammit I’ve got to get Dave Crehore up there because he’s the only other guy I know who likes smallmouth and why should I keep it to myself I just got a new tent so why don’t we drive up there Friday night and camp out right on the lake we won’t need a boat and we can take my car so what do you say?” Clifford said.
Dad loved to talk, but he was careful and thorough and no match
for Clifford in words per minute. He thought the proposition over as he began the ritual of filling and lighting his pipe.
“Well . . . ,” Dad said, between initial puffs.
“Well that’s great dammit y’know I found that lake way back in
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The Secret Smallmouth Lake in the U.P.
the woods when I was working for the CCC in 1935 we built a little road to it but nobody’s been in there since then dammit Dave you’re going to love it I’ll pick you up after work Friday jeez I’d better get back to the shop,” Clifford said.
Dad worked six or seven days a week when the yard was busy,
and he had to take his fishing how and when he could get it. And so it came to pass that on the following Friday afternoon, he sat on the porch with his waders, tackle box, bedroll, frying pan, coffee pot, “6-12” mosquito dope, flashlight, and axe. Atop the pile were aluminum tubes holding his treasured nine-foot Wright & McGill Granger Special fly rod and an equally precious six-foot, five-sided Airex bamboo spinning rod. Canvas bags held a Pflueger Medallist reel for the fly rod and a Bache Brown spinning reel loaded with fifty yards of the latest braided nylon line. What is so rare, he thought, as a day in June on a wilderness bass lake that hasn’t been fished since 1935?
But when Clifford pulled up, almost on time, Dad’s sunny op-
timism began to cloud over. For one thing, Clifford’s fishing car was remarkably old, a prewar Hudson with faded paint and a rotted muffler.
“By golly Dave you’re all ready let’s get your stuff in the trunk dammit this is going to be fun careful the door latch on your side doesn’t work,” Clifford said.
“OK,” Dad said.
And off they went, west on Highway 10 to Appleton and New
London, north on 45 to Antigo, where they bought Michigan licenses at a bait shop, and on to Land O’ Lakes.
It was midnight when they crossed the Michigan line and en-
tered the U.P. Bats and bugs fluttered in the headlight beams as they drove through young plantations of red pine. Then Clifford slowed down.
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The Secret Smallmouth Lake in the U.P.
“Dammit Dave I’m pretty sure we take the next right and go east
about five miles or so woops I think that’s the road but I’d better drive on and make sure it isn’t the next one—no that doesn’t look like it I think it really was the first one so I’ll turn around and go back,” Clifford said.
Clifford turned off the highway onto a narrow gravel road. After they had climbed the first couple of hills, the road turned into a two-rut logging trail. As they ground along in first gear, the ruts narrowed, the grass between them got taller, and the hills got steeper.
And the Hudson began to slow down. Finally it stopped altogether halfway up a hill.
“Jeez Dave I wonder what’s wrong I su
re am glad you brought a
flashlight my God the mosquitoes are thick you’ll have to hold up the hood for me dammit the accelerator cable is busted no wonder it won’t run suffering Christ how are we going to fix it?” Clifford said.
Dad dug his tackle box out of the trunk and found a wire musky
leader. With his fishing pliers he cut the leader to size and spliced it to the stub of the broken cable with a pipe cleaner. It worked perfectly.
“Dammit Dave it sure was a good idea to bring an engineer along
now listen to her roar the old girl hasn’t run this strong in years well let’s get going the road to the lake is just over the top of this hill I think we’re almost there,” Clifford said.
The road to the lake wasn’t over that hill or the next one but they finally found it, a faint track leading off to the left, almost invisible in the spill of light from the headlamps.
“Dammit Dave I’m pretty sure this is it let’s stick our nose
up here and find out jeez it’s rough look at that popple right in the middle of the road the bugger must be three inches thick ’course I haven’t been down this road in twenty years,” Clifford said.
Out came the axe and down went the popple. “Dammit Dave
you’re a regular Paul Bunyan wow here comes the wind was that
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The Secret Smallmouth Lake in the U.P.
lightning off there to the west yup there it goes again well we better get a wiggle on it’s only about a mile to the lake,” Clifford said.
It was two miles to the lake, two miles of overgrown trail blocked by four more popples that had to be felled and about a dozen smaller ones that Clifford pushed down with the car and ran over. The
branches of the last popple tore off the Hudson’s exhaust pipe and left it lying on the trail.
Liberated from its muffler, the Hudson snarled like a P-51. The
western sky was livid with lightning, branches of overhanging trees clawed at the car, and a rain of biblical proportions began to fall.
The windshield was soon covered with wet leaves and twigs that
jammed the feeble wipers.
And then, deliverance. Jolting and bouncing, the Hudson
splashed into a small clearing and its lights shone onto open water.
“Sonofagun Dave we finally made it dammit I knew this was the
right road well let’s get the tent set up before we drown she’s a brand-new rubber-covered Canadian army surplus mountain tent guaran-
teed waterproof I don’t suppose you’ve ever set one of these up ’cause I’ve never had her out of the bag jeez it’s windy dammit there goes the instructions.”
With Clifford holding the flashlight, Dad stuck Pole A into
Slot B until the reeking, crumbling tent assumed a rough inverted V-shape. Grabbing their bedrolls from the car, they shoehorned
themselves into the tent. Exhausted by driving, talking, and watching, Clifford fell asleep instantly, but Dad remained awake to reflect on life’s rich tapestry.
First of all, it was obvious to Dad that Canadian soldiers had run small in the ’40s, because the tent, advertised as a two-man, was only big enough for a honeymoon couple. Never a touchy-feely type,
Dad spent the first half hour trying to edge away from the snoring Clifford, who kept snuggling up like an affectionate golden retriever.
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The Secret Smallmouth Lake in the U.P.
Second, he noted that like most items described as “waterproof,”
the Canadian mountain tent did a better job of keeping water in
than out. Before an hour had passed, the condensed sweat and exhalations of two men began dripping down on him from the tent’s roof.
Third, he wondered about the persistent, snuffling, bad-smelling thing that was trying to open the Hudson’s trunk and steal the
bacon. A skunk? A bear? Or—this was Michigan—a wolverine?
Morning came early. Driven by an overwhelming need to escape
Clifford’s clutches, brew some coffee, and light his pipe, Dad gave up trying to sleep and crawled out of the tent into the gray-blue light of false dawn.
It wasn’t hard to find a little dry birchbark, and within a half hour he had a quart of lake water boiling over a small fire. Sitting on the Hudson’s front bumper, Dad sipped a tin cup of gritty camp coffee, sucked down refreshing puffs of Walnut, and watched fanciful towers of ground fog drift across the lake.
The rain had washed the clouds away, and as the eastern sky
turned to yellow, Dad could see that the lake was a jewel, about a hundred acres of iron-stained water surrounded by dense stands of cedar. Maybe, just maybe, it will be worth it, he thought, as he put the Granger together, threaded up the line, and tied on a Dr.
Henshall bass bug. Maybe a couple of naive wilderness smallmouth would join them for breakfast.
“Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,” sang the white-throated
sparrows as Dad made cast after cast into the beautiful little lake. No bass were forthcoming, but it hardly mattered. The sun and a gentle breeze eased over the eastern horizon together and brushed golden ripples on the water.
Hypnotized by the birdsong, the glittering lake, and the rhythm
of casting, Dad hardly noticed the first flash of light from the opposite side of the lake. The second flash, on the periphery of his vision, 107
The Secret Smallmouth Lake in the U.P.
got his attention, and he stopped fishing to watch for another. In a few minutes there was a third flash. It was the reflection of the rising sun from the windshield of a fast-moving car.
“Clifford,” Dad said, as he prodded the tent from the outside,
“there’s a highway on the other side of this lake.”
“I’m up I’m up jeez Dave there can’t be because I fished all the way around it in ’35 and there wasn’t no other road.”
“Well,” Dad said, “there is now.”
After two hours of fishing which yielded one angry, stunted rock bass, Dad and Clifford packed up and headed for home. They
stopped for gas at a station in Watersmeet, and while Clifford took his turn in the men’s room, Dad asked an elderly mechanic for a little Upper Peninsula lore.
“About five miles east and two miles north there’s a lake back in the woods that used to have real good smallmouth fishing. Know
anything about it?”
“Oh God, don’t bother going over there,” said the old-timer. “It was our secret bass lake in the ’20s—took half a day to walk back into it. But the government cut a trail to the south side in ’35, and those CCC boys about fished her out. Then after the war when the new highway got built along the north shore, she just went to hell.
Ain’t good for nothing but rock bass now.”
The following Monday noon, as Dad lingered over his ham-
burgeronion at the counter of the White House, he heard a familiar rapid-fire voice from a booth in the back. Clifford had found another victim.
“Dammit Fred I just got back from the best doggone weekend of
fishing I ever had you know Dave Crehore well he and I drove up to Michigan to a little bass lake I found when I was working for the government by golly we had to chop our way in but we caught
smallmouth like hell wouldn’t have it say you know there’s a little 108
The Secret Smallmouth Lake in the U.P.
spring pond not too far from there and nobody’s been to it in years it’s just full of brook trout and I know you’re crazy about them hey let’s drive up there this weekend I got a brand new tent just used once and we can take my car I’m telling you you’re gonna love it what do you say?”
“Well . . . ,” Fred said, as he tapped a Pall Mall on the side of his Zippo . . .
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The Butternut Buck
W hen I was a boy in the 1950s, my Grandpa Crehore gave me three gifts that weren’t toys or books: a faded
photograph of himself carrying a whitetail buck, the buck’s mounted antlers, and a story that went with them. The photo and the old rack are going to stay in the family, but here’s the story.
Grandpa and his friend Wally crested a cutover hill and stopped
for a rest, their breath shooting out in clouds of steam. It had snowed about an inch that morning, and the afternoon was cold,
crisp, and windless.
The tracks of a rutting buck they had jumped an hour earlier cut diagonally down the slope before them and disappeared into a cedar swamp.
“We could spend a week in that swamp and never see him,
George,” Wally said. “I’ll bet he’s gonna circle around in the swamp 110
The Butternut Buck
and try to sneak back out to his lady friend. There’s a couple hours of good daylight left. Why don’t I go down to where his tracks head into the swamp, and you go over about a hundred yards west, and
we’ll just wait and see what happens.”
“Sounds good to me, Wally,” Grandpa said. Grandpa trudged off
downhill, then turned and took a stand on the edge of the swamp
where he could see into the cedars.
A half hour passed. It got colder. A chickadee hung upside down
from a branch a foot from Grandpa’s rifle barrel, sang a quiet “dee, dee, dee,” and flew off.
Suddenly, a stone’s throw back in the swamp, something moved.
Was it another chickadee, a jaybird, or the buck? Grandpa froze and stared. “I figured there was a fifty-fifty chance the buck was there,”
he said later. “I couldn’t see him. All I could do was hold still and wait him out.”
A hundred rapid heartbeats went by. Finally, the buck took a
cautious step forward and Grandpa saw its outline against the green and brown background of the swamp. He thumbed back the hammer of his Winchester 94 and eased the little rifle to his shoulder.
The buck took another step and turned, looking directly at him.
Grandpa lined up the sights on a spot behind the buck’s front leg and fired.