We checked out a book from the library in the first grade, my little buddies and I. In the middle was a two-page spread with illustrations of a couple dozen breeds of dogs. My buddies Rob and Ron and I sat together and with #2 lead pencils on that good school art paper we practiced drawing copies of the dogs. Other kids stood around and watched and were very impressed. Rob and Ron dropped out and I continued drawing alone from that book, and others through the years. And for some years I believed that someday I would be an artist, and a good one really.
Then a few years later illustrations turned to words. There is a genre of books for boys, which deals in boys and dogs. My favorite author was Jim Kjelgaard (“Big Red” and others), and I liked Walt Morey (“Sled Dog of the North”), and an old book called “Trap-Lines North” which I loved the most.
By the time I read “Where the Red Fern Grows” I had known for a couple years that I wanted to be a writer, an author of books about boys and dogs that would inspire boys like me who were sentimental and lonely. Felt I knew what good writing was. It was only later that I wanted to be a great writer.
Then I turned eleven, and one dark summer night driving back from the cabin, our small family together, my father both speeding and swerving, I had an idea, and said:
“I think I’d like to work at Larry’s Live Bait.”
My parents in the front seats were silent and probably surprised. I’ve never been very entrepreneurial in the minds of my parents.
I just wanted to be a great fisherman. It never crossed my mind to be a great worker. That came later. The former never really came.
“Maybe I could sweep their floors. For a quarter or whatever. Or for free.”
Now they were encouraged, and thought it was a great idea. Something that would bring me to life, to tire me out.
“You could ask Larry about it,” one of them said.
Larry’s Live Bait was our neighborhood – or nearest – bait shop. I remember four employees there – one or more or all them might’ve been the owner or owners: The thin, tall old man who didn’t talk much, the stocky old man who also didn’t talk much, the deformed hunchback man who reminded me of a toad, and his hunchbacked wife – or sister. We never were clear which of these was Larry.
Aprils we went to Larry’s for our crappie minnows; Mays for our angleworms; Julys and Augusts for leeches, Januarys and Februarys for our walleye minnows, and Marches for our waxworms. My father took his outboard motor there for repair and fishing reels for maintenance. We bought our favorite lures at Larry’s: the Bass Buster Beetle Spin; the Rebel Crawdad; Rapalas of many sizes and colors, but at that time limited to Floating and Countdown, not yet Shad Rap.
jI never did follow up. Never swept or did any work at Larry’s. Didn’t do much work at all for many years, really.
My new big buddies at high school referred to Larry’s laughingly as “Larry’s Dead Bait.” We didn’t go there much because it wasn’t cool, and I was spending very little time with my father, who at that time wasn’t cool either.
It would be many years before I practiced any art, watercoloring at first – and many, many more years since then till I tried acrylics.
I made attempts at being a writer, then stopped, and repeated, in an ongoing cycle that lasts to this day. I have written no stories for the misunderstood or forgotten boy reading alone. When I have worked at being a writer I have felt satisfied, having succeeded at saying something well, if not successfully.
Now I work over the minnow and leech tanks and in the leech and worm refrigerator at our general store in town. I methodically scoop up dead minnows and provide the living with fresh water and aeration.
We have big suckers and small fathead chubs. I count out one dozen and three dozen leeches for the leech cups and stack those and the nightcrawler and angleworm boxes in the cooler so that everything is neat and in order.
And I arrange the long pegboard wall full of bobbers, hooks, sinkers, rigs, jigs and plastics. And so many lures! Rapalas, Mepps, Daredevils, buzzbaits and Ugly Bugs, and so many more newer ones.
Boys – and girls too – come in with their fathers, and sometimes their mothers.
And they look and look and look at the live bait and lures. They’re like children at an ice-cream truck. And I’m the smiling but sentimental, joking but solitary amateur artist and obscure writer who works the ice-cream truck. I have a hunch in my back now, too, the way adults sometimes do who carried too much in childhood.
“Sometimes I go about pitying myself, when all the while I am being borne across the sky on a great wind.” – Ojibwe
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