And in my mind I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.
Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
from the song “Helpless” by Neil Young, 1969
After a quick trip across the lake, a 9.9 horsepower motor pushing our 14’ fishing boat as fast as possible, we neared a vertical rock face and slowed down. Our wake raced past us and broke on the rocks on shore, bouncing back at our boat. We bobbed on the water.
“What’s our depth?” I asked.
He read the screen of the gizmo by the motor that indicated how deep the water and displayed digital Lego like figures purported to be fish from time to time.
“22 feet.” We’d been catching fish in water 26 to 32 feet deep all week. “We’ll drift to deeper water. When we get to thirty three feet or so we’ll go back and make another pass. There’s a trough down there that runs along the cliff. Let’s fish.”
He shut off the motor. I opened the bail on my reel and dropped my line into the water. A quarter ounce neon green lead head jig was tied directly to the end of wispy, nearly invisible six pound test line. On the jig's hook half a worm was threaded, just to cover the tip. I’d pinched the worm in two, and put the remaining half between my yellow cotton gloves on the bench beside me. Both halves, the one on my hook and the one in the boat, wriggled. We’d brought the worms all the way from Illinois. Still they wriggled. You have to hand it to worms, they are very resilient.
How that puny looking line could hold such heavy fish without breaking was a mystery to me. Line spooled off the reel and then stopped. I knew my jig was on the bottom. I reeled it up two turns. It hung with no slack, straight down, not moving. I curled the forefinger of my right hand under the line and held it lightly, staring at the end of my pole.
I looked up from the water. Cotton ball clouds hung in a brilliant blue sky. Across the lake I watched a patch of shade, chased by the sun, sweep across spiky pines on the far shore. A crow cawed three times. Then there was silence.
It gets quiet in the shack. There is the click of the keyboard as I type, birds, crickets at times, locusts in the trees at night. But constantly in the background is the persistent noise of civilization. A siren, the hum of truck tires on Route 80, the sound of a train on the tracks down the hill, a car passing across the ravine on Fields Place or on Caton Road at the other side of the house.
But on that far northern lake? Nothing, broken only by the smallest of sounds. The quiet lap of a single wave against the boat. Wind. A metal stringer scraping the gunwale of the boat. Small sounds were amplified. For long stretches of time nothing was heard at all. The silence was magnificent, and deeply peaceful.
No roads lead to Lake Roderick in Northern Ontario. I suppose with a canoe or kayak and a series of long and tortured portages you could reach it by land, but for all practical purposes it is accessible only by sea plane. To get there eight men in two vehicles, one towing a trailer, started in Ottawa, drove to International Falls, crossed the border into Canada, drove to Red Lake, Ontario, and managed to get ourselves and all our gear; groceries, bait, tackle, equipment, and bags, into two planes. They flew us north and west over lakes and forest, landed on the waters of Lake Roderick, and taxied to a dock. In front of us was a rustic cabin, which became our home for seven nights. With our stuff unloaded and on the dock, the plane taxied off. Its two long silver pontoons left the surface of the lake, grew smaller, then disappeared over the ridge. We traveled over a thousand miles to put ourselves in this place.
The rock face where we fished that day was forty feet tall. Where the rock was exposed, not covered by small pines clinging impossibly to the granite, their roots yards wide and a few inches deep, a collapse was evident. The front of the rock face had sheared off. Chunks of granite, lying near the lake’s edge, showed sharp angles. On the cliff above were gaping holes where the rocks once were, deep fissures in the rock wall mirroring the shape of the rock below. You could see how the rock could be fit back together, rejoined after all these years, like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle. It looked like a Picasso cubist painting. A big nest of sticks was built on a flat ledge, home to birds we never saw. As we fished the giant rocks loomed above us, next to us, the water twenty five feet deep within yards of shore. I imagined more slabs and chunks of rock on the lake floor below our boat, with fish seeking shelter between them. I jigged my line, pulling it up and letting it fall. The end of the rod bent slightly. I felt a slight tug on my line.
“Please come back,” I said softly to the fish, deep below me, as if it could hear.
I felt another tug. I let my rod tip go close to the water before jerking the line up hard. Nothing.
“You missed him,” my fishing partner said. “They hit light. You might have pulled it out of his mouth.”
I reeled my line up, pulling the jig out of the water. I could see the shiny curve of the hook, the barb showing.
“He took my worm.”
“I’ll go up and make another pass.” My partner started the motor and slowly took the boat back to the start of the rock face, turned the boat sideways to the wind, then killed the engine, letting us drift, pushed by the wind, through the same water again. I put the worm’s other half on my jig. We cast our lines on the wind side, positioning our bait near the bottom, and continued to jig.
Near the spot where I had the bite previously, my rod tip again bent and I felt again the familiar tug. ‘Let him take it a little more’ I said to myself. When the tug became stronger I pulled up hard. This time the weight stayed on the line.
“Fish on.”
I kept the tip of my rod up and high and reeled in line. As I did the weight became heavier and my drag, the control on the reel that gives when tension on the line hits a predetermined level, sang. The fish was running straight down, taking my jig and the line it was attached to with him. I could feel the fish move through my rod, watch him move as the line pulled right, then left, through the water.
The fight with Walleyed pike is mostly vertical. They flee downward and we work to bring them up to the boat. They rarely run away from the boat. Northern pike, especially when they see the boat, run hard in all directions, sometimes jumping out of the water in an attempt to spit the hook. When they do they sometimes use their teeth to cut a set up with no wire leader such as the one I was fishing. This was a Walleye.
“Do you need the net?”
“I don’t think so.”
He fought nicely but was beginning to come up. I didn’t think he was big. As he neared the surface I could see him, green sides flecked with yellow, big translucent eyes, his brownish top fin spread open and spiny on his back, the hook firmly in his mouth. I drew him up to the boat, grasped the head of the jig between my thumb and finger, and pulled him up and in. He flopped on the bottom of the boat.
We ate the fish we caught and when we had our limit released the rest. Eight guys can keep sixteen Walleye. That’s 32 fillets max, more than enough for a meal. Those were my favorite days, when we had plenty of fish for supper cleaned and ready in the fridge at camp and could fish just for the pleasure of catching them. We released the small ones, and many of the bigger ones, preferring to clean and eat the medium size Walleye. I quickly laid the fish I had caught on the seat of the boat in front of me, on a ruler decal, and saw that he was eighteen inches. That would be a perfect eating size, but we had no need for him. I carefully took the hook from his mouth, held him in the water and let him slide out of my hand.
“Go back and grow. See you next year.” He swam away, down to the bottom, unharmed.
The camp supplied us with a cast iron cook pot over a propane burner on a frame outside the cabin. One of our group was the fry master. He did a wonderful job. He used a light batter and cooked the fish golden brown. Some nights we made rice to go with the fish, spiked with onions and peppers. Other nights we sliced raw potatoes into slivers and fried them in the fish oil after the fillets were cooked. Until we ran out of lettuce we made a big salad to go with. Someone was smart enough to bring a bucket of Illinois garden tomatoes. A little hot sauce sprinkled on the plate. All washed down with cold beer. Is there anything better than eating fish caught that day from clean cold water served hot with freshly prepared sides? Of course there is. But as I bit into those Walleye fillets around the cabin table with my friends I couldn’t think of anything.
We stayed in a summer cabin set on stones, the log floor beams suspended a foot from the ground, rubber hoses running under the cabin for plumbing. When you looked at the construction inside the cabin, all exposed peeled log rafters and beams with flat wooden panel siding, you could almost see the trees from which it was made. Recently the camp owner converted to a solar panel system for electricity, which worked well. Despite their summer only use there was a steel wood stove in the kitchen which, when compared to the Sardine stove in the shack, was gigantic. It was like building a campfire in a steamer trunk. But it took the chill off. We made a fire every morning, and often at night. Visiting Canada at the 51st parallel in early September is like travelling through time. Through the green pine boughs we saw the yellows and reds of the deciduous trees turning. We were the last fishing party on the lake. After we left they were shutting it down for the season. A giant V of geese flew over us heading south on one of our last days on the lake. Fall is coming. We saw it up there.
Not every day was idyllic. We brought rain suits for a reason. The weather turned quickly. I learned that the hard way. After lunch and an afternoon nap we headed out in the boats to fish again. As sometimes happened a few of our group decided to stay in camp. I was without a partner. The oldest among us, a man near eighty who kept up amazingly well, saw I needed a boat mate.
“I’ll go with you Dave.”
He quickly got his gear together and we set out, some five minutes after the others, and went our own way.
“How about we go to shallow coves and throw spoons at Northerns?” I asked. Although we all brought tackle for the bigger, harder fighting Northern Pike we had exclusively fished for Walleye.
“Sounds good to me. Lead the way.” I took off in a new direction to a part of the lake that appeared to contain shallower water, looking for reed beds and cabbage grass, a type of water weed believed to hold Northerns.
It was windy in the middle of the lake and overcast, so we went from cove to cove, going carefully around points of land that often indicated shallow rocks below the surface. We’d fished for perhaps an hour with little luck. It grew overcast and the wind increased. I paid little attention to the sky nor did my partner. It began to sprinkle rain.
“I’m not interested in fishing in the rain are you? Let’s head back.”
As I said that and started the motor, the sky opened up and hard cold rain pelted us. We were shocked it could rain that hard, that fast. I had been wearing my rain jacket as a hedge against the wind but not my rain pants. I watched as my jeans were spotted with rain, then completely soaked. I felt a chill. The wind increased.
“Put your rain coat on!” I said to my partner. He struggled to find the arms. In the end he wrapped it around him and held it close to him.
“And your life vest!” I felt the burden of getting him back safely.
As we left that cove and entered the larger lake the water was choppy and covered in whitecaps. I’d been on large lakes like this before, with my son, in the boundary waters. We traveled by canoe. I would never have attempted to cross a lake that size in such weather in a canoe. I would have opted to get on shore and wait it out. But we were camping on those trips. We had a tent, a tarp, a propane stove. Here we had none of that. I figured we didn’t have a match between us. Instead were in a good aluminum boat, a deep V bottom Lund, with a dependable Yamaha motor and plenty of gas. My goal immediately was to get us back to camp as soon as possible.
The wind was mostly behind us, and the boat handled reasonably well. My partner was alarmed however, at the boat rocking through the waves.
“Slow down, we’ll tip!”
“No we won’t. I’m going to get us back to camp.”
As soon as pulled out of the cove I was disoriented. I couldn’t see well enough to tell island from shore. The sky gave me no clue as to where the sun was and thus what direction we were heading. We yelled to be heard above the noise of the wind and rain.
“Do you know where we are?”
I paused. “No!”
He paused. “Neither do I!”
“I have a compass!”
I had a cheap compass in my tackle bag. I got it out, opened the case, and let the needle spin. I have better compasses that this I thought. Why didn’t I bring one of them? Rain spotted the compass face. I wiped it off with my thumb. I turned the boat around.
“I’m heading North!”
“A compass doesn’t do you any good when you don’t know where you are to start with!” He had no faith.
“Our camp is on the North end of the lake. I’m going North. You going with me?”
”I guess I am.”
I held the hood of my rain jacket out over my face, shielding my eyes from the hard slanting rain, and held tight to the tiller. I couldn’t see the far shore. My biggest fear was rocks. If we hit a rock which damaged the motor or the boat, or worse yet threw one or both of us into the water, we’d be in real trouble. I looked at my old partner. He’d managed to get the hood up on his rain jacket. He had his life jacket on upside down. He was depending on me to keep him safe. I was still lost.
Sometimes we have little to go on but hope and faith.
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