Postscript on Century Lake

Not all my travel writing comes from personal observation.  I mix in research as long as it’s not too difficult.  I was anxious to find out more about Century Lake when I returned to the shack: its size, history, estimated fish population, whatever I could turn up.  Google makes it so easy to identify sources and shop facts these days.  My search however turned up nothing.  A search of Century Lake Ontario quickly devolved into various shipwrecks over several centuries found in Lake Ontario.  There is a Century Lodge on Eagle Lake Ontario.  But Century Lake, the one I came to know?  No footprint at all on the web.  Pretty amazing.

I found a lot of general information.  There are an estimated 3 Million lakes in Canada, 250,000 of them in Ontario, and 3,899 of those greater than 3 square kilometers.  Ontario Province lists but 155 lakes on its lake management webpage, which leads me to believe Century Lake and others like it are unmanaged.  The Canadian Wildlife Federation page had one of those (who cares?) discussions on the definition of a lake versus a body of water in a larger flowage system, which I stopped reading quickly.  Wikipedia only listed Ontario lakes greater than 150 square miles in surface area.  The on line maps didn’t help.  Many, no most, of the lakes in Canada are unnamed.  So far I have no objective proof that Century Lake exists save for the tiny laminated map we carried in our boats put together by our outfitter that shows only the east side of Century Lake but does contain the name.  That and the fact that my friends and I fished it.  Others surely know about it.  But there is nothing specific to go on.

At first I was frustrated at finding no information but then grew to like the fact that it is obscure, has escaped notice in this new world of so much data.  I hope I don’t contribute to its fame.  I don’t think this blog is much of a threat.  However in searching for something particular I learned a lot in general.  That happens a lot here in the shack.  Here’s what I know.

Century Lake is near these coordinates: 51.4603 N and -94.795189 W.  It’s in Ontario’s Woodland Caribou Provincial Park.  A guy in Red lake at the outfitters told me Job Lake, within miles of Century Lake, is about 52 miles north and west of Red Lake as the crow flies, although if I’m not wrong it is too far north for crows.  What look like crows up there are ravens.  And “as the crow flies” is the only practical way to travel.  There are no roads.  Birds and float planes have it the easiest.

 

My personal history with Century Lake is limited to eight hours, and my experience in the area only 21 days, three annual fishing trip of a full week over the past three years.  Century and its neighboring lakes have been there a lot longer.  Much longer as it turns out.  Way before rods and reels were invented that’s for sure.

As I fished I became obsessed with how long walleye as a specie has been living in Century Lake, but no one seemed to know how long fish have existed let alone walleye.  At some point I said who cares and moved on.  But my hunch was that walleye and Century Lake go together like bread and butter, and have for some time.  Time is, of course, extremely relative.  I devoted an unusual amount of it studying the genesis and development of the main elements of my trip:  the lake, the fish, and the men who catch them.  In doing so I learned a lot.

My curiosity was kicked off by a history teacher on the trip who said while talking in the car (it’s a long drive) that the Canadian Shield, a huge rock cap covering the earth in the area through which we were driving, was Pre Cambrian rock.

“What’s Pre Cambrian mean?”

He explained by describing an exercise he used while teaching to illustrate geology and time in the minds of his students.  He would put a timeline on a long banner of paper wrapped around the walls of the school gym with different colors representing the earth’s various geologic periods up to the current year.  The earth’s Pre Cambrian period was the timeline’s longest section, 7/8ths of the history of the earth.  Man’s time on the earth was but a narrow strip in contrast.

“What’s Pre Cambrian mean when you talk about rocks?”

“It means the rocks contain no fossils whatsoever.  From that they assume the rock existed when the earth was first formed but before life as we know it existed on earth.”

“No kidding.  So Pre Cambrian rock is how old?” 

“Anywhere from 4.5 Billion years old, when we think the earth was formed, to the beginning of the Cambrian period which started 540 million years ago.”  (A billion, for those of you who forget like I do, is a thousand million. 9 zeroes.)

“So what first showed up in rocks that changed Pre Cambrian to Cambrian?”  I wish I could have been a student in that gym to see for myself.

“Simple stuff that began in the sea.  The sea leached minerals out of the rock and it became something of a soup that grew bacteria.  Algae.  That was all there was for about a billion more years and then multi celled organisms began to evolve.  More complex life forms.”

“Wow.  And the lakes up here formed when?”

“Well, glaciers advanced and retreated several times over Ontario and the Great Lakes area.  After the last one subsided these lakes we fish would have been formed.  Hard to tell exactly when they first showed up as lakes really, but a very long time ago.  Five million years I’d say.” I checked.  He was right.

The Cubs’ World Series drought sounds a lot shorter when you think in these terms.  When you talk about geology and the beginning of life you’re talking about big, big stretches of time.  They’re hard to imagine.

“When did walleye show up in those lakes?”

“I have no idea.”

The story on fish is a whole other thing.

 

Fish started in the ocean when an organism like coral, commonly known as the sea squirt, changed into something else and remained something long and tube like for a hell of a long time.  If men existed then, which they didn’t, they would have had little fun catching those fish ancestors.  Catching the earliest form of fish fish would be like hooking a worm.  Ironic isn’t it?

I’ll spare you the details, but it took at least 121 million years million years, from 541 mya to 420 mya (mya is short for million years ago) for fish to develop jaws, which is a big deal to the folks that study the evolution of fish.  They’re pretty sure jawed fish were flourishing in freshwater 383 mya, but after that my sources went off detailing how fish grew feet, evolved to breathe air, became amphibians, walked on land, and then morphed into mammals.  That’s all fine and good but it’s a hell of a long story and I just want to know where and when walleye came about.  It turns out to be complicated.  Fish back then had a tendency towards going extinct, dying off and coming back differently, messing up everything linear.  We love stories that are linear. 

One of the oldest fish now alive, the fish with the longest evolutionary winning streak you could say, is the sturgeon, which lives and looks today just as it did 245 mya in the Triassic period when it was first identified by fossils.  Did walleye come from sturgeon?  I don’t know.  Let me put you directly on the walleye track.

The walleye we were catching on Century Lake are one of five species of the genus Sander, ours being Sander Vitreous.  Sander Vitreous has two sub species, make that had two subspecies as the blue pike was declared extinct in 1983, whereas the yellow pike subspecies (like #82 from the previous post) lives on.  Shit happens still, like the blue pike’s extinction from changing weather patterns and overfishing, in the world of fish.  Evolution goes on.

From fossils the experts have it figured that Sander diverged and became its own species 24.6 mya, and that the European and North American species diverged 15.4 mya, making the walleye in Century Lake a relative rookie to the fish game compared to the Sturgeon.  I digress, but I got this material from some biologist’s dissertation on the 4^th page of a Google search.  In it I also learned that the North American walleye have a higher level of genetic diversity suggesting “fewer Pleistocene glacial bottlenecks” in Europe.  You learn something every day. 

   

Ontario and the Great Lakes area being one of those glacial bottlenecks, when Century Lake emerged from the glacier that covered the part of North America now northern Ontario, walleye as we know them were ready and waiting to live in it.  Walleye had 10.4 million years, give or take a few I’m sure, to perfect themselves before taking up residence in Century Lake.

The final piece of this puzzle not explained is how and when fishermen arrived.  How did we get there, other than the obvious and smartass answer “by plane”? As it turns out man is by far the biggest newcomer.  Here’s that story in a nutshell.

Somewhere a sturgeon is laughing.  256 mya sturgeons were the same as sturgeons today.  At that  time the closest thing to man was a mammal like egg laying reptile.  It would take another 36 million years for an animal with a constant body temperature and milk glands to evolve up.  Finally at 85-65 mya (what’s 20 million years?) a flying lemur that lived high in the forest canopy and only came out at night showed up with digits that grasp and was hailed as the ancestor of primates.  65 mya ago and man’s ancestors are not yet down from the trees.  Skip forward.

 

·        25 mya                 Your old world monkeys and apes show up

·       10 mya                 Chimps and bonobos join the party

·          7 mya                  Something different with a larnyx appears-Hominina

·        3.6 mya                A hominid foot print found in Kenya means it walked upright

·        2.8 mya                Homo Habilus, with less body hair uses stone tools

·        1.5 mya                Homo Ergaster controls fire (1.3M years to figure out fire?) 
  500 ka                  (500,000 years ago) Neanderthal appears

·        160 ka                  Homo Sapiens evolve, and learn to FISH

·        40-25 ka              Neanderthal dies out

·        20-16 ka              other humans die out. Homo Sapiens=the only game  in town

Whew.  That was a quick trip through human evolution. But it still doesn’t get people to Century Lake.  That didn’t happen for a while.  If experts are right about this (and who am I to argue?) man began in Africa and made his way to Asia and Europe a relatively short time later.  North American human habitation?  Probably after that, 16,500-11,000 years ago.  The most popular theory is the land bridge deal. You know this one too.  It was damned cold. Water was sucked up into ice formations, the sea retreated, human beings could walk from Asia to North America across a 1,000 km. wide strip of land (roughly where the Aleutian islands now are) without the sea in their way, and they did.

You saw a drawing of them in your social studies book.  People wrapped in animal skins, snow blowing around them, walking into a new land.  That theory is pretty well nailed down these days.  In 2007 a DNA test concluded that virtually all North American indigenous people share the genetic code of Eastern Siberians. Tough boogers those early men and women, and adventurous besides.  They could have been looking for someplace warmer, but most likely it was a quest for better fishing.  That is the McClure theory by the way, with absolutely no evidence of any kind to back it up.

Those that made their way to Ontario 9,000-8,000 years ago were later known as the Cree, Algonquin, and Sioux people.  When you travel to Northern Ontario you are well aware of their presence.  Although they lost control of their country and their culture was forever altered as a people they maintain their native rights to fish and trap the lakes and rivers that are leased from the Canadian government by individuals and companies(primarily white people) to promote the tourism and sport fishing industry.  On Job Lake we put our boat on shore one day to stretch our legs and look at a campsite local native people established there and no doubt frequent when the season is over.

On previous trips to other lakes in North Ontario we have seen native trapper’s cabins jammed with steel leg traps and other gear.  In the wilderness of North Ontario I feel as if I am trespassing on native land.

South Ontario is much different.  The southern portion of the province has cities like Toronto and Ottawa.  The land is arable and farms dominate the countryside.  But both people and soil thin out dramatically as you head north towards Hudson Bay.  Our band of fisherman cross the border at International Falls and go  north stopping at Dryden on the Trans Canada highway to buy groceries.  In the 216 kilometer 2 1/2  hour drive from there to Red Lake we encounter no more towns and few farms.  90% of Canadians, it is said, live within 100 miles of their border with the U.S.  I’m not sure there would be a road North to Red Lake if it wasn’t for the gold.  Red Lake is one of the world’s most prolific gold mining districts.  In 2015 the area produced 375,700 ounces of high quality gold.

The town of Red Lake, now with a population of 4,700, boomed in 1926 with the discovery of gold.  In addition to gold mining and light logging Red Lake has become as an air hub for fishermen, canoeists and kayakers exploring the wilderness inside and out of Woodland Caribou Provincial Park.  The highway essentially ends at Red Lake, though a dead end spur goes west to more mining sites.

Here’s the good news.  The miners, and the French and British fur trappers and loggers that came 300 years before them, though changing forever the life and culture of native peoples, appear to have done little damage to the land and lakes of North Ontario.  Henry Hudson claimed the region in 1611 and in 1670 the British Government essentially honored that claim granting the Hudson Bay Company free rein to develop the area.  But they did little.  Historically it seems in North America an area’s best protection against the rape, pillage, and exploitation of white men occurred when white people couldn’t figure out a way to wring money from a locale.  They took out a lot of beaver and mink.  But the mining industry is interested only in what can be extracted from shafts deep below the beauty of the Red Lake district.  The wilderness with its Pre Cambrian rock shield, pine forests, remote lakes, the walleye, the moose, the bears, the ducks are relatively safe I think.  Unless I’m wrong no more roads are slated for construction.  The fishermen are growing old from what I observe.  If a huge boom in flights to fly in fishing camps occurs in the future among young people I would be very surprised.  There’s no Wi Fi up there, or cell phone service of any kind.  Besides, the camps are equipped with outhouses.  They manage to get lake water running to a faucet in the cabin but flush toilets and septics are safely out of reach.  They’re not going to build a Hilton up there.  Thank God.

And the white people flying into the lakes, an industry that began in earnest after World War II with the development of safe nimble airplanes, barely scratch the surface of history.  60 some years of fishing from May to September?  I think it has altered the area little.  Our group, American immigrants of Scotch Irish, German, Norwegian, Mexican, and assorted lineages were mere visitors to the wilderness for seven days.  Hardly a blink in the enormity of time.  In that gym illustration of the history of the earth we would be a barely visible.  A slender streak of color drawn by a Sharpie. I don’t think we matter much in the grand scheme of Century Lake.  I hope not.

 

I think of Century Lake now when I’m home.  The ducks (Buffleheads? Mergansers? We’ll never know now) will be flying south soon along with the loons.  The Whiskey Jack, cousins of the Blue Jay, whom we fed peanuts in the shell on the deck railing, will stop hanging around the cabin and go back to the woods where they’ll hunker down for the winter.

The ground hog that lived under the cabin, the squirrels, the wolves we heard howling at the Northern Lights, will prepare for the coming cold.  Bears will hibernate.  The walleye will slow down and spread out in the lake but live comfortably under the ice and snow that will cover the surface of the lake, as they have in that lake for how long?  5 million years?  In the spring when the ice goes out they will school up, be ravenous, spawn, and get fat s the days get long.  Occasionally during a few months of summer out of shape fishermen will pull old boats off the sand, catch walleye but let them go, and leave laughing.  It’s life.  I hope it goes on forever.

Fishing Century Lake 2

I loaded my backpack with gear and swung it onto my shoulders. In one hand I held only the light portage poles in their cases, the other hand free.  My companions, younger than I, carried more.  They carried the coolers and a two gallon can of gas for the portage boats if needed.   We started by going up and over a boulder by the river, and then the path plunged straight into the woods.  Saying it was a path may be an overstatement.

There is more rock than soil beneath the boreal forest of Northern Ontario.  Sheets of rock cap and individual rocks of all sizes dominate the forest floor.  A ribbon of worn dirt as we imagine paths is seldom seen.  On top of and between the rocks moss, lichens, and pine needles form a spongy carpet underfoot.  Trailblazers had tied bright purple plastic on brush and branches showing the line to walk, taking us around obstacles like large tree and boulders.  Fallen trees and limbs lying across that line had to be negotiated, stepped over or scuttled under.  Mature jack pine, white and black spruce, and an occasional birch or balsam blocked the sky while seedlings and saplings crowded beneath them.  The trail rose and fell.  In the low places we discovered the worst hazard, bogs of standing water.  Do they have a bottom these bogs?  Surely they do, but how deep?  Trees had been chain sawed leaving stumps, other trees dead and broken from wind storms left sharp spears pointing up.  And ever present were tree roots.  It was a path obviously seldom taken.  Getting injured in a fall was a real possibility.  If I manage to hurt myself in here, I thought, and can no longer walk my friends will have a hell of a time getting me back to camp.  We made our way slowly.

After making our way down a drop in the path we turned a corner on a surreal sight.  Over a watery bog strewn with small logs was a wooden sidewalk of new weather treated lumber, three feet wide, twenty five feet long, flat as a pancake, on stringers set on concrete pads.  How they got the materials there and constructed  so perfectly is still a mystery to us.  Back at the cabin after the trip we entertained the notion someone had dropped it into place from above with a helicopter. Given the canopy of trees that’s crazy, but it’s equally unbelievable that they carried in the deck lumber by hand, the concrete mix, the long stringers of doubled up 2x8’s.  What a task that must have been. 

On the crude map they gave us every portage was a straight line of indeterminate distance.  We had no idea how long that walk actually was.  But it wasn’t any hour that’s for sure.  After the new footbridge there was another older bridge, with split logs as treads, some missing.  After that it was just logs across the muck.  My balance isn’t what it used to be.  When I stepped on logs and felt I was about to tip I simply stepped in the muck.  Yeah it went over my shoes, up to my pant legs, mid calf once.  I almost had a shoe sucked off so I stopped and tied them as tightly as possible.  I pressed on, keeping up by and large with the rest, and I didn’t fall.

One of us men strung out along the trail remembered that 25 years ago they carried outboard motors and cases of beer over trails like this.  When my son was in 7^th and 8^th grade, twenty years ago, I crossed long portages in the boundary waters with a canoe on my shoulders for Christ’s sake.  Sometimes we made two trips.  What’s wrong with me that I worried so about a relatively short walk to Century Lake?

I think I’m old that’s what’s wrong.  I think I’m old and I worry.  If I’m not careful I’ll worry myself right into limiting my activities and get even older. I’m 65.  No more and no less, and my physical abilities are what they are.  I have a friend who is 80, very active, and thinks I’m young.  I came to the realization on that portage, as I stepped over a log, that I was relatively OK, stronger than I thought, and with work and discipline I may be able to get stronger.  I vowed to let that walk to Century Lake be a lesson to me.

What’s the lesson?  One day I may no longer make the portage to Century Lake.  There may also come a time when I decide I can no longer make the trip to Ontario to fish.  It happens to every person that endures.  If we live long enough we give up things: golf, long trips, driving, living independently.  Unless we die before our time, old age can, and does slowly narrow and limit the world for each of us.  Age can rob us of all that once made us feel free and alive.  I want that time to come not one day too soon.  I do not want to give up my freedom until I absolutely must.  And I certainly won’t abide talking myself out of it.  Life as I know it now is very good.  I’m staying with it as long as I can.

*****

You can tell you’re getting to the end of a portage because the sky brightens beyond the trees as the next open lake shore nears.  We walked parallel to the shore for a while, wondering why, and then turned down to the lake.  There were the two boats we were looking for, pulled up on a sand bar and tied to trees.  We put our stuff down, congratulated ourselves, and had a rest.  Then we loaded our gear and pushed off into new territory for all of us.  We had made it to Century Lake.

The lake didn’t look special.  It was small.  You could see every shore from the middle. There were a few islands, some rock points extending out into the water from the islands, and a rock wall on one shore.  We had no depth finders so we had to fish the old fashioned way, guessing where there might be structure holding fish under the water  and drifting over that area hoping to get bites.  My partner and I started at a rock point off one end of an island.  The other boat went to the opposite shore.  It was a warm sunny day with a decent breeze.  I rolled up my pant legs to dry off my legs.  We put our poles together, tied on jigs, baited them and got them in the water.  Our day of fishing had begun.

“Let’s count what we catch,” my partner said.

“Good idea.  I can’t imagine we’ll beat a hundred.”

“That had to be a fish story.” 

“No kidding.  Why do people do that?”

I caught fish one and fish two within five minutes.  While fish two was on my line fish three announced his or her appearance by bending my partner’s pole.  Five minutes, three fish.  I don’t do a lot of math in my head, and when I do its not complicated.  But there are 12 five minutes segments in an hour.  If you caught three fish in each of those five minute segments that would be 36 fish an hour.

 

“What time is it?” I asked my partner.

“About ten.”

“So if leave at say 4:30 we’ll be on the lake six and a half hours.”

“Yeah.”

“You know a hundred fish may not be so crazy after all.”

We kept a running total and did not stay at that pace.  Somewhere around noon, we were at 41 and getting hungry.  I’d made two ham and cheese sandwiches and packed apples.

 

“You ready for lunch?”

“Sure.”

While I rummaged in the cooler for two beers and sandwiches I kept my line in the water.  We fish for walleye with a worm on a quarter ounce or heavier lead head jig trailed by a colored rubber twisty tail.  We debate the best color.  Anything bright seems good.  Because walleye feed near the bottom I let my jig go down till the line is slack, reel it up and few turns, and jig it occasionally.  Jigging is twitching the line, raising and lowering the pole.  My pole was lying across my knees while I cut the first sandwich in two on an oar.  I thought I saw the end of my pole twitch.  I picked up a sandwich half and laid it on the knee of my partner, who was likewise intently studying his line.  Picking up my pole I felt another tug, gave it a solid jerk setting the hook, and reeled up fish number 42.  He fought like hell and danced on the surface of the water with his tail.

After getting the fish in the boat I measured it and found it to be 19 inches of healthy, beautiful, fat game fish.  The walleye on Century seemed lighter in color than the fish we were catching on Job Lake, with whiter bellies and more golden sides.  I silently thanked that nice fish for selecting my bait and released it so it could return back down there near the bottom with the others.  I imagined a sea of walleye roaming the lake bed searching for food.

About the time I released my fish my partner, chewing the last of his half sandwich, was reeling in number 43, which could have been my fish’s  twin.

It kept up like that, steadily, so much so that we didn’t eat the second sandwich till almost two, and we didn’t eat the apples till we were off the lake and heading back to the cabin.

We were slowed at times.  Because we were fishing for walleye the northern pike caused us trouble.  They are bigger and more aggressive. When we fish for northern we use stronger line with steel leaders so the fish can’t cut the line with their teeth.  Horsing the bigger northerns into the boat is harder without a net, so we lost a lot of jigs, the northerns cutting our line, which  added more time time retying jigs.  Sometimes we felt the slightest tug and our lines would wave up out of the water, a northern simply gliding by and cutting our line.  When you fish for walleye you hate northerns. They keep you from your intended fish.

 

The wind came up, the sun was hot, and the fishing slowed a bit.  We repositioned the boat, traveled across the lake and back, and tried new spots.  Slowed is a relative term.  We were always catching fish, just less frantically at some times than other.  By 3:30 our count had reached 59.  A hundred fish seemed clearly out of reach.  We pulled up and traveled to our companion’s boat, which had been in the same area for a while.

They had lost count of how many fish they had hooked, but were giddy with their success.  You could feel and hear the fun coming from their boat.

“This just doesn’t quit,” our friend running the boat said.  “Move upwind about thirty yards and drift across this rock point.  We get five or six fish every pass.  It’s unbelievable.  And beautiful fish, nothing more than 20 inches, but nothing less than 16.  Get in there.  There’s plenty for everybody.”

We got in line.  As they passed the point and began to turn around we were halfway down the drift.  It was true.  We were constantly catching fish.  We consulted and agreed we should pull out about 4:30.  At 4:15 our count stood at 72 fish.

 

“We’re going to hit eighty.  Can you believe it?”

“We’ll do better than eighty,” my boat mate said.

It’s so hard to stop fishing when you’re catching fish at that rate.  At 4:40 we caught number eighty.

“Can we hit 90?” I said laughing.  ”It’s just ten more.”

“Hell, we could make 90 on one pass.”

We repositioned the boat, put on fresh worms, and let the wind carry us down for our last drift.  My partner caught 81 and I caught 82 at the same time.  A double.  The sun was getting low in the sky and sparkled on the water.  I began to fully realize what a day it had been.  As I grabbed the jig in the walleye's mouth and hauled it over the gunwale I looked 82 in one of its big eyes and spoke directly to it, in an attempt of sorts to commune with a walleye.  He seemed to be looking back at me. 

“Hello 82.  It’s an honor.  Thank you for being here.  I hope I didn’t hurt you.”  I had hooked him through the top of his upper lip, all gristle, no blood.  He would be fine, as would the other fish we caught that day.

Fish aren’t dogs.  They make iffy pets, and this was after all a wild fish.  82 looked frantic, but at the same time confident I would do the right thing.  Unlike some of his friends that had cut me with their gill plates and poked me with their fins, this fish stayed still while I worked the jig out of his lip.   I lowered him back into the water and let him swim away.

“It’s an amazing lake Gary.  And an amazing day.”

“Yes it is.”

We caught eight more fish on the remainder of that pass to bring our total to 90 for the day.  90 fish, two men, one boat.  I didn’t think it was possible. We had our boats back at the portage by 5:00, made the trek back, which was of course just as arduous but somehow easier knowing what lay ahead.  As we pulled into camp back on Job Lake our friends came down to the dock to help us with the boats.  We were tired. They had the steaks ready for dinner.

After dinner, those who braved the portage were the first to bed.  It was a beautiful day on Century Lake.  I hope to be back.

Fishing Century Lake 1

A brace of ducks skittered off the water as we rounded the first bend in the Musclow River.  We had eased slowly into the river from the west side of Job Lake.  The ducks flew low with the pines as background and then rose, clearing the tree line into a blue sky where we could see them more clearly before they flew out of sight.  Buffleheads we thought, maybe Mergansers.  Four of us in two boats were on our way to fish Century Lake.  We were worried about the portage.  At least I was.

I was one man in a group of seven on the fourth day of a week long fishing trip in Northern Ontario.  On the dock in Red Lake while we were loading the plane for the flight out, we asked the pilot about that portage to Century Lake.

 

“We finally got rain a while ago so the water should be up, rocks not a problem.  But it will be soggy on that portage.  Party I flew out a few weeks ago said it was a slow go.  An hour or more.  You gotta be in shape I‘d say.  Be careful.  The fishing should be good though on Job and Robert.  Century is catch and release. Can’t keep ‘em you know.”

We knew that.  It wasn’t the keeping but the catching that appealed to us.  We’d heard great things about Century Lake.  We all wanted to fish it.  But that report discouraged us.

Our flight out of Red Lake in an old De Havilland plane with a new turbo engine was delayed by low clouds.  Fine with us.  We prefer our pilot not take chances.  But because of the wait we didn’t get unloaded, sorted out into our bunks in the cabin, and into the boats with our gear set up and jigs in the water till almost two.  Despite the slow start we fried fourteen walleye that night for dinner along with salad and beer.  The eating was nearly as good as the fishing.

We follow the rules up there in Canada. We all bought eight day conservation licenses which allowed us to possess each day various numbers of fish by specie.  We were fishing for walleye and the daily limit was two.  Between ourselves we decided to release anything under 15 or over 18 inches long.  No young fish with a future and no old fish that are most important for breeding.  We harvested only the mid range fish, and they were abundant.  We take no fish across the border going home. The walleye were hitting hard that first day.  It was good to feel them on the line again, nearly a year since I’d felt that much anticipated tug.

We each kept our best two fish on stringers only on days were needed them for dinner.  We released them immediately on the off days.  We ate walleye fried, baked and served with a butter caper sauce, and in fish tacos with a choice of homemade Mexican red and green sauces.  We ate well up there, and decided to mix up the menu more than in previous years.  We brought steaks as always but also chicken breasts marinated and frozen in Jamaican jerk sauce, and penne pasta with a good homemade meat sauce.

Breakfast featured bacon nearly every day.  We order bacon from the outfitter in Red Lake that is cured and cut by a local butcher. I don’t know why it’s so much better than our bacon at home but it is.  We had bacon with pancakes and eggs, bacon with omelets, biscuits and gravy (skipped the bacon that morning and suffered a few complaints) along with BLT’s for lunch.  Some summers the tomatoes don’t last in our local gardens till Labor Day but this year we had plenty, along with home grown garlic and freshly picked Illinois peppers.  I almost added bacon to the homemade chili for Wednesday’s lunch but decided against it, believing that would be extravagant.  I can’t imagine groups in other cabins eating better than us.

The cabin was equipped with four boats.  Three boats switched off partners each day and one of us fished solo in the remaining boat.  Everyone fished with everyone.  On the day I fished with Bob, the only one of us with prior experience on Job Lake, we went down to the river leading into Robert Lake to fish the shallows and also to travel the river and see how the first portage into Robert Lake looked.  Bob had heard rumors of moose sightings in the river, so he put the motor up a notch and ran shallow and slow, carefully keeping the motor at the same speed so the noise from it became a steady drone rather than a rise and fall more noticeable to a moose.  Better to sneak up on them grazing the river. 

Moose who stand on those long legs in the shallows, often with their head in the water, are eating plants like wild rice.  There were big beds of wild rice in the Musclow, but as quiet and stealthy as we were we encountered nary a moose.

We did encounter two fishermen, the only other humans within miles we believe, staying in a cabin on Robert Lake, who had made the portage from there and were heading up the river to fish Job Lake for the day.  As their boat neared we began to talk.

“Have you seen any moose?” Bob said.

“Not a one.  Thought we saw some tracks on the portage though.”

“How are the fish treating you?”

“Good, especially on lower Robert.  How is the fishing on Job?”

“We can’t complain.”

“Have you been to Century?” I said.

“Went yesterday.  It was unbelievable.”

“How was the portage?” I said.

“Not as bad as we were told.  They built a new bridge platform over the worst stretch.  It only took us about half an hour.  You have to go slow and watch your step, but it is more than worth it.”

That was a different story than we’d been told.  Maybe the pilot was trying to discourage us?

“The two of us caught a hundred fish between us in one boat.”

“You’re shittin me,” I said.

I’d never heard such a thing or imagined the possibility.  A hundred fish.

“Swear to God.”

Fisherman and the truth are easily separated, even among the most religious of anglers.  But if it the fishing was anything close to that good, even accounting for the brag, I knew I had to go.  Our boats were passing out of earshot.

“Good luck fishing Job,” Bob yelled.

They hollered back, their response faint.

“Go to Century Lake.”

That night over Bushmills Irish whiskey and Molson Ale we planned the trip.  Four of us would go first and advise the other three as to the rigor of the portage and the advisability of going.  The youngest and those in the best shape would go first.  I fit neither category.  I was the oldest and of those four and definitely the most gimpy. 

“I’m going to have to go slow,” I told them.  “I got this right knee and left ankle thing.  I’m telling you, I could hold you up.”

They wouldn’t let me talk my way out of it.  The plan was to free our hands, mostly mine, carrying as little as possible so we could grab onto trees and stumps and break our fall if we stumbled on the trail.  We wouldn’t take full tackle boxes, stringers, depth finders, or nets and we would use backpacks to carry bait, boat gas, jigs and only a little tackle, lunch, and small coolers.  We had two portage poles, which broke down into four pieces and fit into short cases so they wouldn’t catch on trees and brush.  We would go in early morning, fish all day, and make the trip back while there was plenty of light.  We had only to hope for good weather.

 

Most days started still and cloudy, cleared up midday as the wind picked up, only to have the clouds return by evening.  We’d been hoping for clear nights.  You never see more stars than when you are way up in the north woods.  That night the sun set and the sky remained clear.  Our necks got stiff from looking up.  It was a waning crescent moon, just a sliver.  As it got darker more stars came out.  Before we turned in for the night the Milky Way was a bright carpet across the eastern sky.  The big dipper was huge, the front two stars of the pail pointing to the North Star.  Cassiopeia was there, like a big W, and I thought I saw the seven sisters.  I wish I knew more.  I wished I was a kid back home on the farm.  We would turn off the pole light and I lie on a blanket in the front yard next to Mom.  She knew them all.  We’d follow her finger, squinting with one eye, and pretend we saw them too.

We had a standing agreement that if anyone got up in the middle of the night and saw the Northern Lights they would wake the others.  That night, I don’t know when, I heard the call.  It was a cold night and not everyone chose to come out, some stayed in the warmth of their sleeping bags.  As I stepped onto the deck and looked north a dancing finger of pale green light, eerie and otherworldly, made its way through the middle of the big dipper.  No one among the small group standing in the cold spoke. The silence was intense. As we looked at the sky wolves howled far off. 

   

The sky was still clear the next morning.  After bacon and eggs with pancakes, four of us in two boats headed to the west side of Job Lake where we entered the Musclow River and scared up the Buffleheads (maybe Mergansers).  The trip down the river was short.  By the time we reached the falls the sun was still hidden behind the pine, spruce, and birch forest that surrounded them.  Job Lake is some twenty-five feet higher than Robert.  The river falls and tumbles nicely over large rocks before it opens up into Robert Lake.

We nosed our boats into the bank at the top of the falls and tied them next to portage boats placed there for fishermen camped on Robert heading the other way, like the ones we met the previous day.  We didn’t take extra care in packing up for the walk around the falls.  It was less than a hundred yards.  At the foot of the falls two boats awaited us.  We took them a short distance straight across the upper portion of Robert Lake and entered the river again, winding our way into Moose Lake, hooking around the first point to the left and finding the portage to Century.  It was obviously much less traveled.  There were weeds around the tie in.  The bank rose steeply.

It was getting warm as we began to organize for the long walk.  I took off my jacket and flannel shirt.  As I did I told myself that my right knee, although it may send shooters of pain up or down my leg from time to time, doesn’t really give out.  When it feels as if it does that’s just my brain automatically trying to take weight off the joint to avoid the pain.  It will hold steady even though it hurts.  And my left ankle, despite not allowing my foot to fall flat when I step nor bend as much as the right, won’t turn or throw me off if I am deliberate and careful.  I would not hurry and hope for the best.

Carpe Diem

Golf has been going well.  If you have golfed much at all you know that as a game golf presents great challenges.  You can play really well Tuesday, hitting the ball a long way, more or less where you intended, connecting solidly on nearly all your swings, chaining together three or four good shots in a row, putts included, to score well.  Try as you might, knowing it’s not true but unable to stop yourself, you begin to secretly believe that golf, at least for you, after all these years, has at long last become a fairly easy game.  There’s a bounce to your step.  You feel skilled and accomplished.  If life was an ocean you would be skimming over it like a surfer, ahead of the wave, triumphant.

And so you seek out more opportunities to play.  In fact, you can hardly wait to get out there again.  The next time you venture onto the links you get off to a bad start, hooking your drive on the first hole, hitting your approach shot fat, misreading the green and putting the ball wide of the hole.  Uncharacteristic of me, you think to yourself.  The internal dialogue goes like this: I just need to settle down, concentrate on making better swings, and play within myself, like Tuesday.  Play the course and don’t let the course play me.  It will get better. 

By the eighth hole you want to sneak off to the parking lot and go home.  You haven’t hit a good shot all day.  Clubs that used to be reliable fail you.  You can’t hit your driver, your utility clubs are wildly off the mark, your iron shots dribble down the fairway or worse disappear out of bounds or into the hazard.  Close to the green you muff chip shots.  You haven’t made a putt all day.  You’ve missed every opportunity, no matter how slim, at par.  You’ve blown up on several holes though you can’t bring yourself to mark double digits on your score card.  You hate golf.  You may never play golf again. You find yourself thinking “I could probably get good money for these clubs on e bay.  There are better things I could be doing. Lots better.”

Golf is like that.  It can be hugely rewarding, and then without notice it can make you feel like a bottom feeding fish, a big fat carp with sucker lips that can do nothing but scour the river bottom for the flotsam and jetsam nature leaves behind, available to you only after it sinks to the river’s mud floor and begins to smell.  You feel wretched but you keep slogging, swimming against the current, the pressure of the entire river on top of you, desperate for any glimpse of hope the game may grudgingly allow you.   Golf can do that to you, defeat you wholly and without mercy.  It can gut you.

Fortunately Tuesday, August 23, 2016 at Tanna Farms in Geneva was one of those wonderful golf days I first described.  Like many days this summer the weather was iffy and hard to predict but at tee time, 9:48, the sun was shining.  The sky was bright blue save for those high wispy white clouds.  Lower and in front of the wisps hung giant soft cotton ball clouds. There was a nice breeze.  My group teed off, the weather held, the course (aside from the bunkers) was in good shape, and we played well.  We had 15 par equivalents.  A number of birdies contributed to that total.  It was three guys, each playing 18 holes for a group total 54 holes, notching 15 pars.  For us the day was almost other worldly.  That combination of numbers, pars scored divided by holes played, is 27.8%.

If our group was organized enough to keep records, Tuesday’s score could our group’s all time best.  Screw record keeping.  I’m declaring it our best.  On top of it all we ended our day in the restaurant/bar enjoying lively conversation over cold beer and great Reuben sandwiches.  We had a convivial two beer lunch and headed back home.  Lovely day.  As our local LaSalle County Democratic Party chairman Rocky Raikes is wont to say “It don’t get no better than this.”  I haven’t golfed since.  Why screw up a good thing?

I’m getting out of here on that high golf note, leaving the country, heading to Canada.  I’ll drive with six other guys to Red Lake Ontario and take a seaplane from there which will land on a remote lake with one cabin and a dock.  We will unload our stuff and the plane will take off.  Once he is out of sight we will be the only human beings there.  They take us in on Sunday and pick us up the next Saturday. We will have no connection to the rest of the world except for a satellite phone used only for emergency.  Up there in the woods and water there are no cell phone towers.  Solar panels will provide a little electricity in the cabin, but outside that structure there will be no artificial light, no roads, nothing else man made.  An occasional plane flying overhead will be the only reminder of the modern world.  The quiet is breath taking.  The only artificial noise we will hear is the sound of the small gas motors on our four fishing boats.  I’m very anxious to get there.

I obviously won’t be posting my blog from there, but I’ll be thinking of one to write when I get back.  Chances are both you and I will get to the wilderness less and less in our future.  It’s an experience that should be shared, I think, when possible.  I like to fish, and I like the experience of being away, but most of all I appreciate the beauty of the natural world.  Up there you get to soak in it, roll around in it as it were, every day and night.  It becomes part of your daily rhythm.  You notice every part of nature more; the sun, the clouds, the water, the trees.  We could do that at home each day but the world we know so well takes over.  Familiar streets, leading to often traveled roads invite us to speed past the beauty around us.  We look at screens now to experience each other and the world: TV screens, computer screens, phone screens.  We hear other sounds, react to other voices, think of other things.  Up there it’s different, and the difference is wonderful.

It’s my third year of taking this trip over Labor Day weekend.  I know from experience I’ll miss out on things that happen back home; Cub games for one.  Last year when I got back to Wi Fi and reconnected to the world of information I learned Jake Arrietta had pitched a no hitter.  On the other hand I will also miss a full week of presidential campaign news, which will subtract seven full days of media bullshit from my life which I will never again experience.  I might make it till election day after all.  My fear though is that it will be like watching a soap opera.  One day of viewing will probably catch me up on everything I missed.

   

And so I’m off, lead head jigs, spoons, and steel leaders packed along with a rain suit, a wool sweater, homemade chocolate chip cookies, and carefully packaged garden tomatoes.  I take a survival kit of sorts with me in my tackle box in case I get lost out there on the lake.  It consists of wooden strike anywhere matches in a waterproof container, four tins of sardines, a compass, a compact emergency silver tinfoil shelter that’s supposed to keep in your body heat (never used), and a flask of whiskey.  I don’t expect to use any of it, except for the flask.  We will live rustically for a week but we’ll eat well.

In addition to the walleye we eat most every night we buy this wonderful Canadian Rye bread across the border.  Toast it and layer some lettuce and that thick Canadian bacon (more like ham) with mayo and salted home grown Illinois tomatoes between the slices, wash it down with a LaBatt’s Blue, and you will have enjoyed right there a simple internationally sourced lunch that is nearly impossible to top.

Don’t worry about me.  I’ll be fine up there.  Take care of things while I’m gone and I’ll make a full report upon my return.  Golf if you get the chance.  Try not to be a carp.

Paper Route

My son Dean, out of nowhere, told us long ago at the dinner table he wanted a paper route.  He was maybe 11.  My kids amaze me.  Just when I think I know them, they change.

“It’s a hard job Dean.  Why do you want to do it?”

“I want the money.  And I think it will be fun.”

He envisioned himself riding his bike briskly down the middle of the pavement, tossing papers skillfully, landing them perfectly on doorways on either side of the street.  It wasn’t that easy.  He found out it was easier to walk his route, primarily made up of three dead end streets just north of our house, toting a canvas bag stuffed with papers slung over his shoulder.  Only rarely, in extreme temperature or stormy weather, did his mother or I help him.  Aside from one hot afternoon when I observed him losing his cool at a stack of heavy papers and angrily throwing the ad inserts in our garbage can, Dean was a really good paper boy.  He was dependable and made friends with customers on his route, especially the old ladies. One woman gave him a can of pop every day.  He cleaned up at Christmas with bonus money.

Dean was frugal with the money he earned.  When he neared high school and quit his route Dean bought a desktop computer better than the one we had at the time.  I was proud of him.  I still am.  He’s the staff accountant at a Chicago not for profit on the West Side that provides housing for the homeless.  I think that paper route served him well in many ways.

This past week I helped another person with his paper route, a guy at church whose 99 Taurus blew a head gasket.  It was a high mileage car and he didn’t pay much for it, however it may have lasted longer had it not been pressed into service on a rural motor route for our local paper.  It’s a tough business, being a driver for a motor route.  Tough mainly on vehicles.   I was able to see that firsthand when I drove for him Monday.  He was in the process of putting that problem, and that car, behind him.  To do so he needed a little help.  He asked I pick him up so we could be at the local paper at 7:30 a.m..

 

“I need to get to my parking spot.  If the papers aren’t there we may sit in the park for a while.”

Being early is neither my strength nor my preference.  Actually, I hate being early.  This smacked of a deliberate and planned early arrival.  I have yet to find that either desirable or useful.  But I bit my tongue, arrived in plenty of time, and as we got to the big delivery door in a downtown alley behind the newspaper building he instructed me to back in, rear bumper by the building, not too far but not too close to the van parked next to it.  I backed in.

“That’s a little too close,” he said.  I pulled out and backed in again.

“Just right.”

We sat there.  He asked if I wanted to go to the park but I declined, preferring to stay and watch what developed.  There was nothing to do.  Earliness was setting in. I worked on the Monday Tribune crossword puzzle with a yellow pencil.  I had a cup of coffee from my thermos.  We chatted.  More cars came and parked beside us.  A van parked directly in front of us, perpendicular to my headlights, hemming us in.

“How will we get out?”

“You’ll see after we’re loaded.”

“Does the truck from Kankakee with the papers come on time?”

“Not always.”

The drivers of the vehicles were milling around us, talking. Then a big honking truck with an equally large bearded driver arrived.  Pallets of papers were transferred to the building, and the process that brings a paper to your door began.

 

Bundles of papers bound with a yellow plastic band and covered with a “top sheet” were tossed into piles near the doorway and the drivers began to take them back to the cars.  I saw then why being early was an advantage.  Closer to the door means you carry your papers less distance.  A stack of newspapers can be heavy.

“Open the rear door on your side,” he said, after opening the rear door on the driver’s side.

“Will we need the trunk?” I’d removed my golf trunks in case.

“I don’t think so.  If it was Wednesday we would.  But the paper is pretty skinny on Monday.” 

He quietly shuttled back and forth from the loading door to the car, looking carefully at the top sheets, arranging bundles of newspapers on the hood, roof, and trunk of the Buick.  Then the flow of bundles seemed to stop.

“Any more bundles for truck seven?” he said to the guy in charge.

“I don’t see any.”

“Should we count them?” I said.  I was standing by the trunk.

“We’ll count them after we get them in the car.  OK, get on the other side I’ll begin handing you bundles.”

Glancing at the top sheets, he handed me bound stacks of papers.

 

“This one goes on the floor behind your seat.” Next. “On the seat by the door.” Next.  “On the seat in the middle.”  He was similarly placing papers on his side of the Buick.  “Between us in the front.”

 

When the car was fully loaded we counted the bundles in each stack, how many on the driver’s side floor, back seat left, back seat middle, and so on.  Satisfied we had what we needed in the right places, he announced we were ready to go.

"What's with that 'truck seven' deal?"

"I have no idea where that terminology comes from.  Maybe they once had their own truck doing this route."

“How many papers do we have in here?”

“Well, there's always stops and starts.  But I'd say right around 800.”

“Wow.”

I looked up through the windshield and like clockwork the car parked in front of us pulled away, which allowed us to turn south down the alley.  We were underway.  Almost immediately we stopped.  Our first stop was the machine in front of the newspaper building itself. 

“Now I could use the trunk.  I’ll throw the returns in there.”  I popped it open remotely.

With a long plastic knife like key he opened the machine, transferred Saturday’s papers to the trunk, put in a bundle of Monday papers, and we were quickly on our way.  We repeated that same operation at various machines around town.  Some of them got surprisingly few newspapers.  We delivered bundles to housing units, dropped off bundles on various corners for foot routes, and in doing so met some of the delivery people.  Some twenty years later they seemed unlike my son Dean.  Most were adults.  It was a bright sunny day so we didn’t bother to put the bundles in plastic.  Soon we were making our way across the river and west on Route 71 out of town.

Once underway, we spent about an hour in town, filling paper machines, dropping papers off to carriers, talking to them.  The talk ranged from Trump to the Cubs.  They too were waiting for our arrival, well most of them.  Some bundles we drove away from, alone and forlorn on the street.  In concept the paper we were distributing is an evening paper, or was.  The fact that it arrives in Ottawa at 8:30 after it is printed in Kankakee blurs that distinction quite a lot.  Let’s just say you get it later in the day.  In truth, the freshness of its news is the same as the morning Chicago Tribune, which I also get.  What I don’t get in the Tribune of course is local news.  I’m a two paper, actual newsprint kind of guy with another on line.  I hope I can stay that way.

 

We dropped papers at various homes: in tubes, at the ends of driveways, and close to doorsteps.  I was surprised at how few houses received a paper.  When I did help Dean with his route a house that didn’t get a paper was an exception.  Now it’s the rule.  Many of the homes that did receive a paper were modest.  I tried to figure what that might mean.  No internet?  No computer?  Seniors not into technology?  It’s almost impossible to generalize.  You’d need real data.  Who knows?  I don’t know how print editions sales now compare with on line sales but my guess is that they’re down considerably.  As we headed out of town most of the papers were gone.

“What’s with all the tubes we don’t put papers in?” 

Most every mailbox or group of mailboxes had plastic tubes for receiving papers but we were putting papers into only a fraction of them.  As we went farther west some tubes of the neighboring rival paper began to appear.

“You have to request a tube from the paper.  But when you stop subscribing no one takes them down.” 

It was a sad sight, those faded plastic tubes, once with a purpose, now empty and useless.

“They make great birdhouses you know.  I have two or three tubes I put papers in with nests in the back that hatched out baby birds.  I imagine the unused ones have even more nests.”

A subtle reminder for me that everything has a purpose if you look hard enough.

If you are going to have a motor route delivering newspapers few would be more beautiful.  We followed 71 west as it paralleled the Illinois River past the entrance to Starved Rock State Park, past Point shelter, up the hill and into the woods.  We wound through the curves and canyons, delivering papers occasionally to the homes that border the park.  Are there prettier views in the Midwest?  Maybe.  I don’t know where.  At some point we turned around and headed back.  Near Catlin Park we headed south out of the river valley and into the beauty of Deer Park Township.

 

You don’t have to be a farm kid to appreciate Deer Park but it may help.  To a city person it might look empty.  To me it is chocked full.  Above us was uninterrupted blue sky dotted with clouds.  The road wound between fenced pastures, bean fields, corn taller than I’ve ever seen, farm ponds.  You’ll still find working farms, barns, and shed mixed in with those no longer in use, even an occasional corn crib.  There are beautiful farmsteads in Deer Park, with unimagined views.  It’s a rural paradise and we were in it, winding our way over blacktop and gravel roads, turning this way and that, dropping off papers but mostly soaking up the quiet stillness of the day.

Rangy red and white Hereford cattle and compact black Angus switched flies with their tails in the shade.  Hawks stood watch on utility poles.  Ground squirrels scurried across the road.  When we stopped to push papers into plastic tubes on flimsy posts dragonflies hovered near the windshield.  Farm families and wannabe farm folks plant day lilies and holly hocks by their mailboxes.  Bees buzzed near the blooms.  My friend pointed out one of his favorite places, a mud puddle where, when it rains, a cloud of yellow butterflies congregate, stirring and filling the air when he pulls in the drive.  He takes it slow there, trying to be gentle on his struts he says.  I bounced the Buick through roughly.

“I try to be good to my car out here.  The more gentle I can be the longer it will last.”

How long your vehicle lasts on the rural delivery route is the wild card of the independent business person who delivers your newspaper in the country.  Supplying the vehicle, replacing brakes and tires, making the repairs are, along with the price of gas, the wild cards hard to factor in to what your delivery person makes in the way of profit.  They pay their own social security and tax withholding, receive no benefits, and share little risk with the newspaper.  Once the paper puts the bundles out to be picked up, their job ends and the carrier’s task begins.

 

“How many miles do you drive a day again?” I said.

“About 90.”

“Well then heck, I bet eighty of those miles are driven out here in the country.”

“Yeah, that’s about right.”

“And you said out of 800 papers we delivered 720 of them in town.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So that makes a print edition of the paper delivered way out here damn expensive.  That’s one paper every mile.”

“Well, only if you want to look at it that way.  That sounds bleak.”

“I don’t know how else to look at it.”

 

A for profit business maintains buildings, pays a staff of journalists and support staff, buys newsprint and ink, maintains a printing press, a fleet of trucks and then pays drivers to drive anywhere a subscriber lives to deliver an actual product to their home every day but Sunday.  Every day.  That same content, like the content you are reading right now, can be sent in a digital file to your computer, tablet, or smart phone virtually free.  Do you pay to receive Dave in the Shack?  Does Dave in the Shack cost me anything to distribute?  That’s a definite NO to both.  By that standard a printed newspaper delivered to your home is wildly expensive.  How much longer can and will that expense be maintained?  How many fewer subscribers, wanting and willing to pay for the cost of a paper version of the newspaper, will it take before rural home delivery ends?

 

My friend loves his job.  He’s done a lot of different things in his life, but being a rural mail carrier is just right for now.  He’s come home to this area after being away for a long time.  He’s starting over.  Being independent to a large degree, spending time by himself, having time to think and put his life in order is perfect for him.  I saw firsthand how nice it might be, until I imagined my car breaking down, until the snowstorms hit, until the price of gas goes up and the pay doesn’t.  But that’s all in the future.  For now my friend is out there, every day, taking in the summer solitude like a Zen master in an old Pontiac Bonneville (with the good V-6 engine) enjoying work every day.  Working, for you perhaps, and happy to serve you.

 

Enjoy the feel of your newspaper in your hands.  Have a tomato and a slice of muskmelon.  Like summer everything comes to an end, but we don’t have to ponder that unless we choose.  Worry only if you want, but the smart move is to give your newspaper delivery person a nice tip.

August Shack Report

August is the best month of summer. Things most anticipated come to fruition; tomatoes, BLT’s,  peppers, melons, vacations.  August is an ending of sorts but a good ending.  August is when summers are reflected upon as promise realized. This one, the summer of 2016, was particularly good.   I’m turning 65 Saturday, entering the safe harbor of socialized medicine called Medicare, and finally reaching the age in which I’m old enough to be officially retired.  I quit working three years ago which some consider early.  It’s been almost perfect, except that at 65 I am still an unpublished writer.  I shouldn’t complain.  The world has been kind to me.

In my three years since retiring I’ve learned a lot about writing and what it takes to be a writer.  I think I’ve improved.  I can see mistakes and edit faster.  I express myself with fewer words.  I’ve learned to rewrite effectively.  But I’ve discovered weaknesses.  I discovered I’m weak in areas of writing I didn’t know were there.

 

Here in the shack I quickly found a significant aspect of writing that exists in addition to creating stories.  There is the actual writing I am doing right now, putting characters together to form words, words to form sentences, sentences to paragraphs and so on.  And then there is working on writing, which I am loath to do.  Working on writing is what you need to do to go to the next level, find a wider audience, get published. I can barely stand thinking about it.  I think I have a block.  It’s not writer’s block.  I’m writing all the time.  It’s something else.  It’s packaging and promoting.  It’s figuring out how to break into that big vault of new readers.  Really, to be successful as a writer, to publish and gain a wider audience, need I both write and work on writing at the same time?  I think so, but so far I haven’t been able to do the latter.   

You read my blog, which I’m very grateful for, and you give me great feedback.  Without readers I’m not sure I could or would be doing this still.  Thank you.  By today’s count I had 646 reads, or at least opens, on my mid July blog post “Out of Selfishness.”  That’s the most I’ve ever had.  Though I can’t determine who clicks on the link via e mail and who accesses the blog through social media I’m pretty sure the growth is attributable to Face Book.  I had a lot of shares on that particular post.  The e mail list only gets smaller.  As my peers in social work retire or worse their agency e mail addresses turn up undeliverable.  Meanwhile on Face Book people I don’t know are reading my posts.   

Twitter is a bust so far.  To be honest I don’t know how to use it.  The only people who seem to respond to my twitter feed are Russian women seeking boyfriends or other equally weird messages.  Consider this message I got last week.

***شرکت نوين گيت***
با سالها سابقه در طراحي ،اجرا و خدمات سيستمهاي درب اتوماتيک و راهبند فروش،نصب و راه اندازي و خدمات انواع درب اتوماتيک (درب سکشنال - کرکره اتوماتيک - کرکره پنجره - درب ريلي اتوماتيک - جک پارکينگي - کرکره شفاف - رول گيتر - انواع راهبند و درب اتوماتيک شيشه اي... ) خدمات 24 ساعته و شبانه روزي حتي در تعطيلات رسمي مشاوره رايگان در تمامي مراحل

I was excited.  A foreign reader?  I immediately replied “I wish I knew what you were saying, but sorry I don’t read Arabic.”  No response.  Then I remembered the Google translate feature.  Here’s what my so called foreign reader was telling me.

The New Company Gate

With years of experience in the design, implementation and service of automatic door systems and barrier sales, installation and service of automatic doors (sectional doors - Automatic shutters - Shutters - Doors rail automatic - Jack parking - transparent shutters -  all kinds of barriers and doors made of glass. Service 24 hours a day, even on holidays.  Free advice at all stages.

I need a Twitter lesson.  It’s not working out.  I don’t understand hash tags.  There’s a lot of work I can do there but I don’t know if it’s worth it.  Twitter is nearly as foreign as that right to left Arabic alphabet. 

I’ve tried other avenues on the working on writing journey with little success.  I bought books about writing, friends have lent me and sent me books about writing, and though I’ve read some of them I can’t honestly tell you what they said.  I have subscribed to writer advice e mails.  There are a lot of them, but most want you to purchase training packages, or pay to listen to mass digital seminars organized by supposedly famous authors who mainly boast of their platforms, followers, and sales.  I couldn’t seem to find anything they actually wrote except for the briefest stuff.  I concluded they were famous for their sales not their sentences.  I asked to be taken off their lists.  I feel like I’m drowning in information about writing.  Writing about writing is also writing, but it’s not what I’m after.

I did remain subscribed at The Write Practice and Narrative.  The Write Practice is a brief and direct communication offering various bits of advice from a number of writers, all short and to the point.  I don’t read them all, but often they answer questions to which I don’t know the answer.  Narrative was recommended to me by a friend.  It’s an online not for profit publication founded in 2003 that is dedicated to advancing literary arts in the digital age by supporting the finest writing talent and encouraging readership across generations, in schools, and around the globe.  Quite a mission.  It also sponsors writing contests.  I just missed a July 31 deadline for their last one. 

That’s a core problem.  Although I’ve been writing off and on all my life I’ve never submitted anything for publication.  Nada.  Zip.  I’m beginning to think that’s a problem.  At the suggestion of a writer I met at Lit Fest in Chicago I subscribed to DuoTrope, a web site that lists and gives weekly updates on every known magazine, ezine, journal, publishing house, you name it that accepts writers’ material.  It’s gigantic, the number of publishing opportunities, paid and non paid.  Absolutely enormous.  The lists seem endless.  I’m put off by its enormity.  DuoTrope provides a program for tracking submissions, makes on line submissions possible, does everything it seems but scan your hard drive, find something suitable for one of the thousand of content displayers, and sends it in for you.  Sadly I have yet to pull that trigger.

I have a hard drive full of blog posts, short stories, and the beginnings of books.  On paper I have journals from trips, college papers, stories never digitized, potential material in my head coming out my ears.   Let me give you an example. 

I found a paper I wrote in an American Lit class at ISU, the one that covers Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman.  In response to a simple and specific assignment to write about images used by Thoreau in his book of  Walden essays I turned in a rambling 4,000 word autobiographical narrative about myself on the farm.  It was a very personal lonely boy sort of confessional tale.  I don’t know what I was thinking when I turned it in.  It was perhaps the first time I had ever shared such personal thoughts on paper with anyone. Don’t ask me why I did it because I still don’t know.  The professor was Elsa Greene whom I now can’t find. 

She gave me an A.  She said this in her comments. 

What to say?  This is a piece of writing rather than a paper for a course-and it’s good.  There are problems with it but I don’t feel like going through them one, two, three, four, five.   If you want to talk about it come in.

I didn’t go in to see her.  She caught me in the hall weeks later after class and insisted I make an appointment.  Would not take no for an answer.  When I went into her office she had made a copy of the paper and had red lined it with additional comments. She said something to this effect.

“You have strings, or very small themes, that run through this piece which pull the reader along and then you tie them together.  That’s hard to do.  I didn’t know where you were going but I was intrigued and then you made it clear.  You have something here.  You know, there are student publications, maybe periodicals, that would print something like this.  It needs work, and I could help you, or someone else could if you prefer.  But I think you should pursue this.  What you show that you are able to do in this paper is not easily accomplished.”

I didn’t know what to say.  The thought of others reading what I was thinking, finding out who I really was and what I had revealed in that paper was daunting.  I didn’t think I was ready for that.  I said nothing in return. After a period of silence she spoke again.

“I’m not going to embarrass you further but why don’t you think it over?  It would not have to be this piece.  You could work up something else.  But I encourage you to keep working at this.  I think something could come of it.”

Again I said nothing. Finally I mumbled a thank you and got out of there

I never told anyone but my wife and a friend about that conversation till now.  I had forgotten about the paper.  And then I found it in a buried folder of old stuff and re read it.  It was clumsy and sloppy.  I rewrote it.  I remember exactly what I was trying to say 45 years ago because it was my life.  It was me speaking.  It was that internal dialogue I’ve lived with for all these years put on paper.  It’s that thing I try to get across to you but cannot express in a sustained book like way.

I have plans for a book of farm stories.  Is it a book of stories or is it a single story?  At one point I cast about trying to find an answer to this question.  Is each chapter of a book its own story?  Or is the whole book one story?  I think it is one story.  That concerns me.  What if I don’t think that big?  My stuff is short, it begins and ends.  How do I chain it together?  Exactly how do I write these books anyway?

I made a vow never to lock myself into a memoir but everything I want to say can be found somewhere in my life and the lives of those around me.  What if family or friends are offended?  The farm stories may read well for men and women now old who never lost the feeling of being on the farm and want to go back, for those who secretly know a part of them never moved to town.  But everything I learn tells me books of short stories are notoriously hard to publish, except for accomplished novelists.  I have to think farm book, but in my mind it's farm stories.

There’s the book about marriage and parenting.  There’s the tale of a college kid trying to sell stories in a grocery store.  There’s the book about building the shack and why it had to be built.  There are travel stories, the cryptic book about the man from the mountains who comes to live by the sea.  If my books were ships on that sea they would be unmoving and still, becalmed, no wind in their sails.  My books are just not what I want them to be.  It feels like they go nowhere.  For a more Midwest closer to home metaphor if my stories were railroad cars they would be that long line of sand cars sidetracked near Grand Ridge waiting for the price of oil to go up, fracking to resume, and Illinois Valley sand to once again in demand, along with the now idle freight cars that carry it. 

Thank God for the blog and the feedback you provide.  I’ve gotten used to exposing my thoughts and feelings there.  Why can’t I let you in on the books?  Imagine how much worse it would be if I had no readers?  I started the blog at work you know and quit work because the blog became the only thing I wanted to do.  And so I stick with it, and you as readers, even though I sometimes think I should plow all my effort into a novel.  Try as I might I cannot make the blogs posts into a book.  A book is a different animal, and I haven’t captured that animal yet.  But the blog gives me much.  I hope it gives you something as well.

So here in August 2016, three years into retirement at age 65, I am not discouraged.  Retirement and my writing in the shack continue to change and grow.  After three years of not officially working I find myself relaxing more, confronting my shortcomings, and rising to new challenges.  I have not produced a book, but I’ve not given up.  I’m optimistic.  I’ll let you know next August what the new year brings.

 I’m open to suggestions.  Thanks for reading all the way to the end.