You’ll come to trust the veracity of my columns more when I admit in this one that it was twenty years since I had caught a walleye in open water until just twenty hours ago.
No outdoors columnist or Minnesotan or fisherman worth his or her salt would admit to such a thing.
Twenty years ago I had a studio apartment near the corner of Franklin and 1st Avenue in South Minneapolis, but I had been committed to a halfway house near Lake and Lyndale – fourteen blocks away – for my own safety and well-being.
I worked that summer very strict hours at Rex Hardware on Lyndale and 26th.
In July, I was granted leave from the halfway house and the hardware store for a five-day walleye fishing trip with my grandfather, father and brother up on the English River system in Canada. We caught many golden-sided walleye on minnows and Li’l Joe’s spinners in classic red and white, or chart-reuse or fluorescent orange (which were new and unproven colors to my grandfather).
My grandfather smoked Camel straights, and I smoked Winstons and we fished together in a boat. My brother smoked in secret, like Margot Tenenbaum. But I knew he smoked Marlboros. My father had given up all vices except the oldest one of all. They did not smoke in their boat together.
That year and the next were a personal wilderness for me. Then I moved abroad and lived and worked and read and wrote as an expatriate for twelve years in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Then I came to Cook County and hunkered down at a cabin on Trout Lake for a couple years, fly-fishing for trout. Now for five years, I’ve lived in Hovland and fished steelhead, snake northerns, small-mouth bass, and now finally walleyed pike.
Twenty years gone and my one-room trapper’s shack has less floor space than that old studio apartment, unless you count the attic crawlspace – which is claimed by the mice – or the screened porch, which has gone to the dogs.
I again work at a hardware store – Buck’s, on the corner of Highway 61 and 1st Ave.
Now I fish the stunted and stocked walleye of the marginal water of the Arrowhead Trail, unsuccessfully, as I said, until twenty hours ago.
The two thirteen-inch walleye I caught yesterday (July 20) were beautiful and golden, fanged and spiny. One by trolling a deep-diving crankbait in golden shiner, the other on a worm harness with a fancy, very new and now proven spinner.
I keep thinking of my grandfather Jim.
When my grandfather was twenty years old and my great-uncle John was ten, my great-uncle rowed the boat and my grandfather fished.
When my grandfather was thirty and my father was ten, my father rowed the boat and my grandfather fished.
But when I was ten and twenty and thirty and my grandfather was fifty and sixty and seventy, he handled the boat so that I could fish.
In a long line of golden boys I was often treated like I was the goldenest. Or as if I were meant to be.
A generation beyond our last fishing together, I am not the golden boy of my childhood, youth or young adulthood. I am the golden boy in past potential only, and not now nor never again in anyone’s eyes, including my own.
But it pains me less and less as the years have gone by, and since my grandfather gave up his own golden ghost.
Leave a Reply