The Night Country

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.