In mathematics, a discrete line fixed in space, bounded on the ends by two defined points, though of a finite length, is comprised of an infinite number of points along that length. Think of a yardstick: three feet in length, 35 inch marks, 71 half inch marks…on down to quarter and eighth inches, &c, &c.
So too is a semi-annual old-time trip in June down to the deer camp in Wisconsin’s St. Croix Sand Barrens with my old man.
Nearly four days and three full nights, 70 hours totaled. Comprised of moments and experiences and grating conflict and crying, soda-pop-out-your-nose laughter. Enough fish to remember; too many to recall.
Down Dry Landing Road over the St. Croix Valley, Foxy jumps out the truck window at 40 miles-per-hour after a fleeing doe. My old man is dumbstruck. I had rolled the windows down in the sandy heat. “No broken bones, no foul,” I shake my head.
The next day when I forget to roll the windows up Daphne jumps out the window at 30 miles-per-hour after we’d swum in our underwear on Bear Trap Lake. “Some of you, though probably not all, will learn your lesson,” my old man says straight-faced. That actually makes me smile.
He has no great love for my pups usually. Only for the first five minutes, or when they are exhausted. Daphne is a child (cute but worthless); Peppy is a golden retriever (just worthless).
And Foxy – apparently having not swallowed her hormone pill prior to the trip – is incontinent. (And it must be said, not the only incontinent on this little get-together). In the night she has accidents, peeing in her sleep on my old man’s old couch (twice) and on his rug (that really tied the room together). “’Such is life in an outhouse,’” I joke, quoting Leopold Bloom in the jakes in “Ulysses.”
I’m ambivalent about his yellow lab, too: Lacy II, a 90-pound horse that is certainly not our Lacy I. This one is a great retriever of big wounded geese, hidden wing-clipped ducks, and dry-mouth grouse. Great when she’s not having epileptic fits.
In the evenings we fish the Upper St. Croix in the heavy flat-bottomed wooden boat my old man built just for the purpose. We’d found that the aluminum of our usual boats – his 12-foot Alumacraft rowboat and my 17-foot Grumman canoe – “bit,” or grabbed onto rocks too easily.
We use the trolling motor to go upstream from Dry Landing to Schoen’s Landing or from Schoen’s to Prophet’s Hole, then drift down while fishing small-mouth bass.
On the first evening, he forgot to bring along the black box with my bass bugs in it. I specifically told him at the landing to grab it from the truck bed for me. He didn’t. So I can’t use the 9-foot, 9-weight Temple Fork rod with expensive floating rocket line. He feels bad.
I start the drift at Prophet’s Hole instead with my new spinning reel, and the new line comes off in a spiraled mess. I have to strip it all off and the monofilament is at my feet in the boat and the reel is empty. I go to my casting rod and Hula Popper and get a bird’s nest of backlash on the first cast. While I’m trying to unravel the backlash, thirty feet back my Hula Popper is pulling downstream with us, and a bass takes it and I have to crank it in hard over the backlash. It’s a 16-incher, and worth it, but the reel is now screwed beyond return. Up a creek without a rod. Three rods, none usable.
A couple years ago my old man had finally discovered AC/DC (“TNT” and “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”) and Journey.
So I’d asked him to bring along some more music he was discovering. And you know what he brought? Lionel Richie.
We have trouble communicating. Lionel Richie is not what I had meant at all. That is not at all what I had meant. He couldn’t believe I didn’t like it.
In the evenings while cooking dinner we discuss the merits and demerits of Creedence, but cannot agree. For him, “Grapevine” and “Suzie Q;” for me “Born on the Bayou” and “Up Around the Bend.”
I’m a Beatles man. My old man is a Dylan and Stones man. And I don’t mean folk Dylan.
“I tuned out in 1965,” I say. “Later Dylan isn’t poetry; it’s erudite babytalk.” He liked that line. And felt it was accurate.
At night he introduces me to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (“I liked it better,” I said, “when it was called ‘Seinfeld.’”), and to “30 Rock” (“This is tough for me to watch. Liz Lemon is too much woman for me.” She’s like Farrah was in “Charlie’s Angels.)
He schools me on Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal (“’That’s not writing; it’s typing’”), and I remind him of James Joyce. I go into a lecture on how the great characteristic that Bloom shared with Odysseus (Ulysses) was resourcefulness.
My old man packs out before me, and I’m left beyond the fixed end of the mathematical line. With an old Daiwa Silvercast close-faced spincaster on a short (5-foot) rod, and with my pups tied up ambivalently, I work down into the nearby spring creek moving along the sandy Barrens bottoms. I cannot find any worms in the dry leaves and sand when I dig with my hands, but I’m resourceful and here is a black June bug, big like a Rhinoceros beetle. I stab it in the thorax with a #10 Aberdeen hook; drop it into the shallow creek under a downed log. And a 7-inch brook trout steals it off the hook with a fury.
This is not material for an Outdoors column. It’s an odyssey.
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