Confessions of a Novice Deer Hunter: Day One (cont.)

Since the wolf had been eradicated from northern Wisconsin, deer hunters played an important role in maintaining the ecological balance. But I wasn’t out hunting out of some new-found sense of ecological responsibility. That merely helped me to overcome my aversion to killing or hurting anything. The reasons were many and complex, and I wasn’t about to analyze them all the way down to the phallic level. One reason was that even though I had lost my lust for killing, I had never lost my unfulfilled fascination for guns and weapons. This fascination lay dormant, I suppose, for decades. It was not until the events of 9/11 that the latent warrior-hunter inside began to awaken.

Like most Americans I was angry. Like many Americans, it made me feel a little afraid to think anyone could, much less would, hijack a plane and fly it into a building. I had seen that in a nightmare once, and it still frightened me. What was the world coming to? Not that I expected terrorists to come skulking down our driveway in the Wisconsin north woods, but we’d all seen or read countless visions of a lawless future. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road still beckoned me from the shelf, though it was not published until five years after 9/11. Was this a sign the end times were near?

At the very least, I wanted to learn to shoot. But the passivity in my warrior nature did not admit of confrontation and gunplay at close quarters. We already had the .22 revolver. It was the art of sniping that intrigued me. How much more intelligent could a soldier be than to learn to kill an enemy from beyond the enemy’s reach…undetected. The sniper was a marksman, but he was so much more than that. He was a master of camouflage and wood lore. He could track without being tracked. He could see without being seen. He was a warrior and he usually worked alone. I coveted the tools of his trade, mostly the rifle.

I scarcely need detail the pains of my research. I simply wanted the most sniper-worthy gun and scope I could afford. Most so-called experts recommended the .308, which was universally recognized as one of the most consistent munitions made, regardless of manufacturer. I was never able to determine just why, ballistically, but it seemed to be accepted as fact. Just about every accuracy worshiper also recommended a bolt action rifle, as opposed to a pump action or a semi-automatic. The Remington seven hundred .308 varmint rifle came highly recommended. You could spend more for a gun, but it was doubtful you could pull a more accurate gun out of the box at almost any price. The barrel was at least two inches longer than your standard deer rifle, which slightly enhanced accuracy and muzzle velocity. More importantly, the barrel was thicker and heavier, dampening vibration from the incredible explosion of metal and hot gasses funneled through it. This made for more consistent shooting, and that was what every accuracy nut strove for. Not every bullet went precisely where the barrel aimed it, but you wanted it within what the nuts called a “minute of angle,” which is approximately equivalent to a quarter inch at a hundred yards. Properly aimed, you should be able to blow out a match from a hundred yards every time. The Remington would do that…but not in my hands without being strapped into a stable bench rest.

About a hundred yards down the trail, it veered left. I stopped and listened for any sounds in the woods. The traffic noise was especially irritating, but most mornings I contributed to it. I heard a few nuthatches, a crow cawed, but nothing stirring the leaves or the forest floor, not so much as a squirrel. I would have to be especially cautious and quiet now. The apples I’d left drenched in Buck Jam, along with a few scented logs, were about two hundred yards ahead. Supposedly, deer weren’t necessarily alarmed by every sound or footfall, but rhythmical steps would get their attention. I took another step and stopped, then another, as quietly as I could, listening intently. I usually charged through the woods like a bull, seeing and hearing little, at least by comparison.

I tip-toed my way up the trail, mostly taking two or three steps at a time before stopping when I should have been taking one. Fifty-seven years of life hadn’t taught me much patience, but maybe serious hunting would. Why wasn’t I hunting “seriously” this morning? I wasn’t sure. I still had a reasonable chance of getting a shot, but I wasn’t doing my best. The woods were still quiet. I passed an obvious deer crossing, which came from the woods toward the house and passed beneath a “No Hunting” sign I’d nailed to a tree. When I came to the small aspen (which we call popple) that I’d flagged, the apples were gone. That was a good sign, but the deer were gone. I stood there motionless for several minutes. No sign of anything moving. This was another crossroads. This deer trail too passed directly beneath an old “No Hunting” sign that had been bleached white and black by the sun. Maybe the whitetail wasn’t as stupid as I gave him credit for.

I continued my stalk. There would be few good shooting lanes for another hundred yards or so, where the trail veered down to the creek, a frequent bedding area for deer. The turn was also near another well-used trail deer used to cross the black ash swamp. We’d cut our way over to it to connect the trails, so there would be a clear view that direction too. No deer in sight, and I heard nothing moving. Slowly I slipped down toward the creek. I wasn’t flattering myself that I’d flush a deer from the long grass there, but I was ready just in case.

On my left the black ash trees, late changers, had already lost their leaves. The sun was pouring through them. The air was almost still. On my right stood mostly popple and balsam, trees good for little but making paper and providing habitat. Just before the bedding area a large popple had fallen across the trail. Popple were good for that, falling full-length and making a mess of the forest floor. In most places they were being supplanted by the red maple, a far more welcome tree in my opinion. Fallen maple was at least excellent firewood.

I knew the beds were empty long before I stepped over the fallen popple. Up until a couple of weeks earlier the creek had been dry, but clear water was flowing through it now. It would attract deer.

I sat on a stump and rested the rifle. After about an hour it had become a load to carry. I had waited seven long years for it. This year a several events converged to finally convince me to buy it. One morning this spring I’d heard my wife say “there’s a bear in the yard.” I went to the living room window to see a black bear heading for the steps to our deck. We’d had bears on our deck before, and most of the time they’d used the stairs. When it comes to food, the American black bear is one of the smartest animals alive. This time the birdseed was gone from the big trash can that still wore a dent from a hungry black bear, but the grill was outside. Maybe I hadn’t cleaned it was well as I should have.

The bears in our woods were notoriously shy of people. I stepped out onto the deck and yelled “get out of here.” The bear turned and loped to the edge of the yard, where she surprised me. I decided she was a sow based on her small (150 pounds or so) size and muzzle. I’d frightened off far larger bears than this. But instead of bolting off into the woods, as I was accustomed to seeing, she stopped, turned and stood up. “Get of here!” I yelled, waving my arms. She just stood there looking at me. This was highly unusual behavior. Alarmed, I retreated back into the house. She eventually made her way back across the yard and into the woods, where she stayed, according to my wife, scarcely seventy-five feet from our back door until well after I’d gone out to my car and gone to work. I knew she was there then, because I could still hear her. I’d wasted little time in leaving.

It was only later that I found out about the scat that had already been left in the yard before that morning, one pile near the driver’s door of the car our daughter drove. This bear, or a bear, had visited us before. One explanation for her behavior, stopping and rising, doubling back across the yard, staying so close to the house, was that she’d had a cub or cubs that we hadn’t seen. That was the only explanation I could accept, but it still alarmed me that our yard had been recently visited before this morning. Black bears weren’t known to be aggressive, but this kind of familiarity I simply could not accept. Nuisance bears were to be reported to the DNR for trapping and removal, but what if there wasn't time to prevent property damage or injury? A .22 magnum was only good for noise. Only the stupidest of us would consider shooting a bear with one.

(to be cont.)

Confessions of a Novice Deer Hunter: Day One

The darkness outside our living room window was lifting. I looked for deer, because they often stopped to graze in our front yard. Not this morning. I was almost ready, but I was late. Deer hunting was legal ten minutes ago, and the deer were making their way back to their bedding areas, as conventional wisdom had it. I unzipped the case to my Remington seven hundred .308 varmint rifle and hoisted it out. The gun was a beast, nine and a half pounds, twenty-six inch heavy barrel, the sportsman’s equivalent of a military sniper rifle. It fired the standard 7.62 mm NATO round. I knew how to use it, but its real capabilities were beyond me.

I was fifty-seven years old and had never hunted a day in my life. Not unless you count plinking birds with my BB gun in the bloodthirsty days of my boyhood. It wasn’t much of a BB gun, a Daisy Cub, but it could kill. We were city dwellers, but I sometimes sneaked the muzzle out my bedroom window to pick off a few unsuspecting sparrows or starlings from the telephone wire. I found hunting heaven on the occasional trip out to my grandparents’ dairy farm, where birds flocked aplenty. Phffffttt the little gun went. Most of the time I missed, but I knew about the trajectory of a BB and sometimes I did not.

I can’t explain what primal urges drove me to kill for no reason, except perhaps to prove my mastery over a quick, small, wary foe. I’d watched plenty of war shows and westerns on TV. We men were supposed to be warriors. I learned to shoot a bow too, down in our basement, punching target arrows into a box stuffed with newspaper. I just liked shooting things. Then one day out at the farm, something happened. It was a clear, beautiful sunny summer day. I was sitting on the front step of the sidewalk caressing my Cub. A small bird lit on the phone wire about twenty feet away. I aimed, and the gun spat a BB. I often missed small targets from this range, but this time it dropped like a stone off the wire. I went over to admire my handiwork.

It was dead. So suddenly lifeless. Blown off its lofty perch. Only a moment before it had been alive, free and as happy as I to exist. For the first time, I saw the life of another creature in terms of my own. Oh my God, what had I done? I had destroyed life. I had visited death on another living thing for no other reason than because I could. I had the gun, the bird had flight and a song. It had no idea everything it knew would be obliterated in an instant. What crime had it committed other than to be a bird upon a wire? My moment of triumph turned to horror. I put my Daisy Cub down and never again fired upon another living thing.

How rare it is that wisdom strikes us like a rifle shot and our lives change forever, like St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus. I was about ten but suddenly so many years wiser. I’d been struck down by a blinding flash of compassion. No longer was I the center of God’s universe. No longer was I the sole receptacle of His light, life and love, but He dwelled in all creatures who felt joy and pain and even love in equal measure to mine. How precious it all was. This one small bird had not given its life in vain. I would make sure of it.

So what was I doing now almost half a century later, armed to the teeth with a high-powered rifle in my hands and a .22 magnum revolver and two gutting knives on my belt? I was a veritable killing machine about to turn myself loose upon our peaceful woods. Had I lost my compassion somewhere and gone over to the dark side? Had I changed? What was wrong with me?

Nothing. I hadn’t changed at all. I didn’t want to see anything die, much less be the cause of it. But the reality was that I caused death every time I ate a hamburger or a steak or a sardine on a cracker. I just didn’t witness the act. We all cause death in countless ways. Thus we also have an obligation to foster life.

For every deer that died in the woods this season, perhaps another animal would live. Perhaps another deer would live. The deer were over-populated. I saw them in the yard and along the roads every morning, sometimes dead. In a harsh winter many would die of starvation. The deer were also the bane of foresters, because they loved to browse on seedlings. Scarcely a young cedar tree still grew in Douglas County.

I pressed the cold, heavy bullets into the magazine of my rifle, then one into the chamber and slowly closed and locked the bolt, making sure the safety was still on. This morning I would “still hunt,” which meant a slow, quiet stalk through the woods. I’d washed all my clothes in Scent Away, but I’d drawn the line at showering in a descenting body wash. I only had freezer space for one deer, and if I shot one, I wouldn’t be able to set up the new blind the FedEx man had delivered two days before. I was in no hurry for a kill, nor was I taking it for granted does would be leaping into my crosshairs. This October season was an “antlerless” hunt only, and I had three days left.

I left the light on, as I normally did in hunting season, so that disoriented hunters would have a chance of seeing the house, and I stepped into the chill morning air. It was barely light enough to see. In the pockets of my blaze orange vest were disposable field dressing gloves, my bright green deer tag, string to attach it as well as to tie off the rectum and urethra during dressing, a tool to pull out the rectum for tying, a deer dragging harness and a freezer bag for the heart and liver. One of my knives had two extra tools, a gut hook to slit the skin without puncturing the intestines and a saw, in case I wanted to cut through the pelvis or a couple of ribs to get a higher cut on the windpipe. I’d read several articles on field dressing a deer, printed one out, and even watched a demonstration on UTube. I’d sharpened my knives as well as I could. I dreaded the thought of plunging them into recently alive flesh.

My new boots clumped across the deck and down the stairs. I hoped I didn’t step into any donations left behind by one of our Golden Retrievers. Not that the smell had seemed to bother the deer who munched on our lawn. The deer were gone now, hunted already for a day. The trail was thick with damp leaves, deadening my heavy footfalls. I was no wolf in blaze, but I’d expected to make more noise. There was little breeze. The woods were quiet as I stopped and listened. The noise from County Highway P, a half mile to the west, was annoying, but this was Friday and people were going to work.

Highway or not, this was still wild country. Walk in the wrong direction and you could go for miles before you found a road. The wolves were coming back, although I had mixed feelings about that, as did many. Our neighbors had seen them. Some farmers had lost livestock. There had even been a few cougar sightings in recent years. We were careful with our trash and birdseed, or we would have bear problems. In fact, a bear was partly responsible for my being out in the woods this morning, hunting for the first time in my life.

(To be continued.)

The Woodcarver

The superior work of art proceeds from a hidden and spiritual principle which, in fasting, detachment, forgetfulness of results, and abandonment of all hope of profit, discovers precisely the tree that is waiting to have this particular work carved from it. In such a case, the artist works though passively, and it is Tao that works in and through him.

Thomas Merton writing of Chuang Tzu’s “The Woodcarver” in The Way of Chuang Tzu.

I came across this gem when I was reading Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing, taken from his earlier work, cited above.

THE WOODCARVER  Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand Of precious wood. When it was finished, All who saw it were astounded. They said it must be The work of spirits. The Prince of Lu said to the master carver: "What is your secret?" Khing replied: "I am only a workman: I have no secret. There is only this: When I began to think about the work you commanded I guarded my spirit, did not expend it On trifles, that were not to the point. I fasted in order to set My heart at rest. After three days fasting, I had forgotten gain and success. After five days I had forgotten praise or criticism. After seven days I had forgotten my body With all its limbs. "By this time all thought of your Highness And of the court had faded away. All that might distract me from the work Had vanished. I was collected in the single thought Of the bell stand. "Then I went to the forest To see the trees in their own natural state. When the right tree appeared before my eyes, The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt. All I had to do was to put forth my hand and begin. "If I had not met this particular tree There would have been No bell stand at all. "What happened? My own collected thought Encountered the hidden potential in the wood; From this live encounter came the work Which you ascribe to the spirits."

 

Of Time and the Word

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
-- Henry David Thoreau

I apologize for the long letter, but I didn’t have time to write a short one.
-- Mark Twain

Have you ever polished and buffed a piece of your writing until you thought it was as perfect as you could make it, then got up the next day and wondered how you could have written such junk? Or at the very least found a few more things you wished to change? It makes you wonder just what goes on in a writer’s mind between one session of words and another. Why do our artistic perceptions seem to change overnight without the least provocation?

While I’m no expert on the psychology of literary aesthetics (is there anyone who is?), one explanation seems to be that time spent away from a piece of writing can be as essential to the process as the writing itself. In fact, our growth as writers does not stop when we turn off the computer or close the notebook. Quite often the work needs time and space to quicken and breathe on its own, while we need some fresh air to cleanse the chambers of our mind.

John Gardner once said: “I’ve often labored with ferocious concentration on a scene, polishing, revising, and tearing out; rewriting, polishing, and revising again until finally I realize that I have no idea what I’m doing, can’t even recall why it was that I thought the scene necessary. Experience has taught me that, unpleasant as it is to do so, I have no choice but to put the manuscript away for a while – sometimes it takes months – and then look at it again.” He went on to say, “It is hard even for an experienced writer to throw away two hundred pages of bad writing, or anyway it’s hard if one is still close enough to the writing to remember how much time and work it took. A year or two later, taking a fresh look at those bottom-drawer pages, it is easy --- even satisfying – to be merciless.”[1]

When I was young, I was incapable of this. I was impatient and far too close to the work. Now that I am older, I find myself almost infinitely patient and almost infinitely cruel, yes even merciless. I don’t know what has changed other than the passage of time. We grow, whether we like it or not.

But we first must plant the seeds of that growth. We do not become writers simply by becoming old. We must till and plant and not be like the farmer who pulled on the shoots to make them grow faster. We must be patient and let things run their course. Gardner is, once again, ever so quotable:

“I think there really is no other way to write a long, serious novel. You work, shelve it for a while, work, shelve it again, work some more, month after month, year after year, and then one day you read the whole piece through and, so far as you can see, there are no mistakes. (The minute it’s published and you read the printed book you see a thousand.)” He said there is no substitute for slow, slow baking.

That is true for almost anything we write, not just novels. The same principle applies. If you don’t work under a deadline, then don’t impose one on yourself. Let the work tell you when it’s ready to be born.

---

[1] On Becoming a Novelist.

On Writing, Fatherhood and the Olympic Ideal

O’Hare International Airport is about as far removed from the peaceful waters of Lake Three or our quiet forest home in northern Wisconsin as any place I can imagine. Yet last week that’s exactly where we found ourselves, sitting in the waiting area of Gate C16. Our daughter, Alicia, was talking with a friend, who suddenly looked at my wife and me and asked, “How did you get past security?”

“It wasn’t easy,” I joked. Melba and I were probably the only people there not about to board United Flight 851 to Beijing, China. Alicia and a few of her friends from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point were going to Beijing as volunteers under the auspices of Community Collaborations International to help with the Olympics. I had been dreading this day for months.

When your child asks for help to volunteer at the Olympics, how do you say no? No was never an option, and yet there were times when I hoped she would change her mind, even if it meant forfeiting thousands of dollars. I am not an intrepid traveler, and Alicia had only traveled by plane once, to Orlando with her high school choir, amply chaperoned by parents and her teacher. Even then, I monitored the flights there and back on the internet, breathing a sigh of relief each time the plane safely touched down. At Gate C16, I was cheered that she had run into a few friends, that we would not be putting her on a plane entirely alone to fly halfway across the world to the most foreign of lands. I was finally beginning to relax a little.

Gate C16 was a potpourri of races, nationalities and styles of dress. Announcements prattled on in both English and Chinese. Several men clad in the bright yellow, blue and red of Colombia, with matching sport bags, were talking business-like near the entry. Immediately behind us, Gary D’Amato of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel was interviewing the family of our youngest Olympian, ten meter synchronized diver, Mary Beth Dunnichay. Of course, at the time, I only knew there was a large contingent of people wearing matching logoed sport shirts proclaiming “Mary Beth, Our Olympian,” who were being interviewed. I had a number of things on my mind. I later stumbled across Gary’s article almost by accident.

For the past several months, I had not been at all unmindful of the many reasons for discomfort sending our only daughter to Beijing. First, there was the matter of conscience, of China’s involvement in Sudan, its policies in Tibet, its human rights record. There was the threat of terrorism. There was the matter of the air pollution. I had concerns for her safety in general as an American traveling overseas. I had the usual concerns of a parent when one’s child (actually, at 21, a young woman) travels to a place where her parents could be of little assistance in case of emergency. And then there were all of my own manufactured anxieties. I did not consider putting her on a flight from Duluth to get her to O’Hare; we would take her, via Madison where we would stay quietly and cheaply with Alicia’s grandmother. Yet, I had never driven to O’Hare, and had little idea of what to expect. Our daughter did not even know from which terminal her plane would depart, much less which gate.

Our adventure had not unfolded without a few hiccups, but in the end, after waiting in many lines, a kindly woman saw fit to bend the rules slightly and give two nervous parents security passes to reunite with their daughter across the security line. We waited at C16 until the place was empty and the huge plane taxied away and out of sight with Alicia on board, and then we waited some more until we saw it roaring down the runway and out of sight again. In the mean time seeing dozens of planes flawlessly taking off and landing had soothed my throbbing nerves just a little more.

Two days later Alicia called to say they had made it safely to their apartments. There were about ten of them, and they had just gotten back from watching the spectacular opening ceremonies, which we did not watch until later that night. As that spectacular event unfolded unbelievably before my eyes, I began to remember back to the late 70’s when the Olympics had meant something special to me, when I had tried to apply my narrow vision of the Olympic Ideal to my writing.

Between jobs, with a little savings, it seemed like the time was right. I was still inspired by the ’76 Olympics of the year before. I leased a one-bedroom efficiency apartment overlooking the lower campus of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, which I liked to think of as my garret. For six months I had nothing to do but write, to see just how good of a writer I could be. I would apply the singular dedication of an Olympic athlete to the tip of my pen. This was my time.

In retrospect, it would be easy to conclude that I wasted my time. Six months of my life vaporized like a dream. Sure, I wrote, but only about three hours a day. Hardly an Olympian feat. Afternoons I read the classics, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment. Must-reads for any aspiring novelist, I admit, but in retrospect, something of an escape from the far more difficult task of writing. I sneaked into the Natatorium a couple of days a week to lift weights, or I jogged to keep my body in shape and my mind fresh and creative, or so I told myself. Evenings I took a course in researching local history or attended readings…or sometimes I really broke training and walked downtown for a few beers. One night found me in the tepid light of The Bull Ring talking with a young black man I’d just met, and he asked me what I did. The words tumbled over my tongue. “I’m a writer.” He was amazed, euphoric even, because he said he wrote too. He said over and over that he wanted me to read some of his “shit.”

Shit. What a crude derision of one’s creative efforts, I thought. Why would I want to read shit? Back then, I was enamored of anything written in my own hand. Changing something seemed like an admission of defeat. Erasing was simply murder. I was a two-draft writer at most. What I wrote was not shit.

It was, I just didn’t know it. It took me far longer than six months to realize that. Real writers should not be afraid to write badly…and endlessly. Not to the point of developing bad habits, of course, but certainly in pursuit of the appropriate amount of humility. Just as musicians must practice their scales and just as aspiring Olympic athletes must hone their bodies, the aspiring writer must prepare himself for the seemingly endless and pointless tedium of learning his craft. He must prepare himself to throw away most of what he writes, or at least set it aside. He must prepare himself for tireless revision. He must prepare himself to write even when thoughts flee like leaves in the wind and words seem heavy as stone. He must prepare himself for few rewards. He must remember that the process of becoming a writer is not finished in six months or six years, it is the work of a lifetime.

As the colorful pyrotechnics exploded across the TV screen, thoughts were also going off in my head. When was the last time I had written a word when I didn’t feel like writing? When was the last time I had worked on a short story? Or strung words aimlessly across a page just for the sake of stringing words? When was the last time I had taken the trouble to edit something that had been waiting months or years for editing? When was the last time I had done much of anything I did not want to do? That to me was the embodiment of the Olympic Ideal, the self-sacrifice that it takes to be the best you can be at something, be it the 200-meter freestyle or writing or parenting or taking out the trash.

In the broader sense, the Olympics to me are a coming together to celebrate and share this ideal, which transcends race, religion, nationality and politics. The “Olympic truce” means far more than a guarantee of safe passage, it means the freedom of the world to come together in some small symbolic way to be just ordinary people, simple and unlabeled. I love George Will, but when he calls the Olympics a “charade of international comity” and scoffs at the IOC for holding them in a country governed by a “tyrannical” regime, he is missing the point. The Olympics and the Olympic Ideal are not about place. Did Pierre de Coubertin not say that “Olympism is a state of mind”? The Olympics are intended to transcend physical, political and ideological boundaries. Do they always? Probably not.

It’s easy to criticize the Olympics. The games are not perfect just as people are not perfect. People cheat. Judges sometimes judge unfairly. A small child lip-synchs a song. Politics stain behavior. The host country is governed by a totalitarian regime with a dismal human rights record. So do these games then serve no purpose? Only if one expects something organized on such an enormous and diverse scale to be perfect in an otherwise imperfect world. I would venture to say there are some 11,000 athletes in Beijing who believe the games serve a purpose. Do they all like each other? Do you like everyone you work with? Or everyone on your block? Out of 11,000 people there is bound to be some bad eggs. Even some who simply don’t deserve to be there.

But among 11,000 people, there will also be shining examples of courage and dedication, of sportsmanship transcending human differences. I will see people who are just plain better at being who they are than I am. That’s why I will watch and wonder and hope and be inspired. The Olympics are, perhaps, a microcosm of a world trying to get along. We’re doing it imperfectly, but most of us are trying. Like it or not, the world needs the Olympics, be they in Beijing or Chicago, because when we stop trying for and aspiring to something better, even in a small way, hope is lost.

As I continued to watch the ceremony and all its remarkable choreography (to George the subordination of individuality to the collective), it suddenly seemed so very right that part of my family was in Beijing for such a remarkable occasion. For so many months, how had I not seen that?

Reflections from Lake Three: The Writer As Fisherman

Boat, bait,poles, tackle boxes, gas, life jackets, fishing licenses, drain plug in place…what else could we possibly have needed? Just like with writing, fishing requires a lot of attention to detail. Sometimes we are so focused on the details we miss the obvious.

As we took off something was wrong, something dragging, thumping, something askew. I downshifted the twelve-year old Suburban, hoping it wasn’t, finally, the last of the transmission. Nothing changed. By then I had no choice but to circle the small campground and stop in front of our site. A left-rear flat. I was almost relieved…something we could handle. It was the third strike for this particular tire, but there wasn’t much I could do about it then. My son, John, had just changed it a couple of weeks earlier and bid me stand aside while he took ten minutes to change the damned thing again. He almost made it.

How had neither of us noticed that the tire was flat? We both had walked around the truck. It was not an inconspicuous thing. I am still amazed by it. I had been focused on the plane of lists, a list of items, a list of things to do…and I had done them. That too, the niggling details of fishing (and other things) were not my strength. And yet I’d not noticed a flat tire. That is, perhaps, the story of my writing life. Writer’s myopia. I focus on the green light, oblivious to the semi running the red.

After John had finished securing the spare and I had struggled to fasten the flat tire back into the truck, we stood outside taking stock. That damned tire had gotten us here, which was providential, but I also took it as an omen. We had planned to drive over to English Lake and fish for walleye, but now I had a bad feeling about challenging the back roads with no spare and no cell service. I believe there are signposts in life, but you have to look for them. After missing the flat, I was now looking.

“Do you want to fish here?” I asked John.

“I don’t care,” he said.

That finished it; we’d fish at Lake Three. Even if there were no walleye, there were wily largemouth bass. In all the years we’d fished Lake Three, I’d only caught one largemouth.

As I backed the boat into the crystalline green water of Lake Three, it still bothered me I’d not noticed that flat tire. When it came to detail, I had no writer’s eye, whatever that was. Wasn’t a writer supposed to notice color, texture, a bee pollinating yon distant flower? Life was lost on me, I thought, slipping through my fingers like water. The ink was running thin.

My trusty Evinrude started on the third pull again, even after a year of neglect in the garage. That was atypical of my relationship with mechanical things. In fifty-seven years, my only peephole into the world of the mechanical has been Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, and it had left me breathless. The work bench, an altar; the wrench, a holy wand. Or so it seemed.

We chugged into the little bay opposite the campground behind us, tucked invisibly back into the trees. I wasn’t thinking about literary things…War and Peace on the tip of a fishhook. Sometimes serious writers simply have to let it go. They need relief from “writer’s mind.” As they say, a watched pot never boils. I am not one of those. If anything, I need to troll the depths of my imagination more than I do, even out on the lake away from pen and keyboard. Ideas are everywhere, ready to take your bait and run. You simply have to pay attention.

We anchored and threw our bait out, suspended from bobbers. John was using leaf worms, and I put on a leech I’d really brought for the walleye at English Lake. Whether it would catch bass, I did not know. Our bobbers twitched and wiggled. Ah, I thought, the fish in this lake were interested in leeches. But just like with ideas, you have to pay attention, or they’ll leave with your bait before you can set the hook. If you allow too much slack in your line, you’ll hook nothing but water. I was not thinking about plots or blogs or even a journal entry, but what I was doing was not much different. John caught some small perch, while I was missing the hits that actually took my bobber under. Sometimes you miss, no matter how hard you’re paying attention. It happens. Life does not indulge us just because we’re taking the trouble to live it.

My bobber went under again, and when I set the hook this time, I did not miss. It was a good one for Lake Three. A swirl on the surface suggested something I dared not think aloud, that I had, at last…again, hooked a largemouth. And so it was, not a large bass but a bass just the same, caught at 11:30 in the shank of the day, in the sunlight, on a leech, on a hook dangling from an unappetizing silver snap swivel. “I’m really good,” I joked aloud to John, realizing how truly lucky I was, rather than skillful. Sometimes that’s what it takes, even with the wrong bait and the wrong tackle: you never know what you might catch. The fish was steely green, cold in my hand, beautiful black eyes, strong. The writer in me was finally coming out, capturing the entirety of the experience, even as I hastened to remove the hook as fast as I could to return the creature unharmed to the weedy depths. Only the second bass I’d ever caught in Lake Three.

Back in the tent I had a bound journal I kept solely for trips such as this. Some people take pictures. I write. Somehow I would try to capture all of this, to keep these precious moments from slipping away forever. The journal helps keep me focused, even when I'm not thinking about it.

We fished another two and a half hours without comparable success. An advantage of remaining at Lake Three was that we could beach our boat and easily take it out again that night after dinner. The bass might be biting again.

As we settled in for lunch, I was telling John about a white hornet that had visited our camp site every day at Lake Wabasso when he and his sister were small. I don’t even recall how this came up. The black and white striped hornet (most often called a bald-faced or white-faced hornet, actually a very large wasp) was a curious, docile creature, and on that trip we had come to regard it as our little flying friend, a tiny guardian angel. I still have it on videotape. Scarcely a minute after I’d told John of this, as I made my way from our screen house to our tent, I was confronted by one of these curious creatures, hovering so full in my face I might have inhaled it with a deep breath. Startled, I brushed it lightly away, knowing I would not be stung. It was the only white hornet we saw our three days there.

The eeriness of this improbable coincidence settled into me slowly. I’d no sooner spoken of a white hornet and was visited by one. Sometimes God writes in script too faint for us to clearly see, and yet it is there nevertheless and capable of deciphering with effort. My writer’s mind began to shudder and awaken. I had missed the tire, but I was beginning to see again in entirely different ways. Somewhere in solitude, with my journal perhaps, I would try to drill down to the meaning I knew was there. Even when words can't completely express what we see, they can help us understand.

The choice that night was to fish or build a fire. John chose to fish. We pushed off into the twilit bay and chugged quietly over to where we’d begun in the morning. I dangled a leech while John threaded a worm. The fish were hungry, but leeches were hard to steal, worms weren’t. Then my bobber went down, and I set the hook and felt the strong tug of a fish. I reeled my second largemouth to the boat, hoisted and released it as quickly as I could. John stuck with his worms.

Then my bobber swirled down once again, and once again I set the hook, this time feeling an even more substantial fish on the line. He broke the surface and taildanced briefly on the water, one of the most beautiful sights a fisherman can see. Game as he was, he was no match for my line, and in a minute I held him briefly in my hand, extracting the hook from the corner of his mouth, and he was free again to challenge another lucky fisherman.

I looked at John. He declined a leech again, although the perch were stealing more worms than not. He went to a surface popper and jerked life into it across the water. He had some nibbles, and caught a crappie. I wanted him to catch a bass more than anything, as if that would somehow solidify the bond between father and son. I ached for him to catch a bass. Why was he refusing to use the only bait that had caught one? I saved a couple of leeches for him and fed the fish some worms. Finally, I fed them our last two leeches as well. The mosquitoes were closing in, and only a vestige of daylight lit our way back to shore. We glided noiselessly onto the grassy bank.

We’d spent five hours on the water that day. I doubt we’d have had more fun on English Lake, where we’d caught nothing together the year before. John seemed pleased with our effort. I was pleased too, having caught two more bass than I’d caught on Lake Three in my entire life, but I would gladly have traded them for perch to see them at the end of John’s line. He would not tell me, even the next day, why he would not use a leech. I knew he wasn’t squeamish about such things, but I let it go. We all fish in our own way. John sometimes seemed like the flat tire I'd failed to see. Was I just not looking? Or was he like so many other people, evading my writer’s eye, like night creatures fleeing the light? The mystical appearance of a white hornet was easier to comprehend. How could I write of such things? How could I possibly….

For a different perspective on our fishing trip, see my post at The Silent Life.