“Trout Are Where You Find Them”

I’m going to say right up front that my friend Brian “Hodag” Heine died on October 8th, 1999, at age 34. I say this not to elicit sympathy, but to avoid the usual device where the reader is led on and on and then, at the end, clubbed over the head in a violent burst of melodrama. Which is not to say I have anything against this device, for without it legions of Hollywood filmmakers would be put out of work—but I don’t think my friend would appreciate it very much (about the only similarity he would see in the film “Brian’s Song” is a common first name.)     He might mind a little if I mention that he was an uncommonly good guy, but I think he would wholeheartedly approve when I mention the one thing which was omitted in his obituary:  he was an outstanding trout fisherman. He was democratic in that he chased channel cats and bass and even carp, and in the same way he was as happy chasing squirrels with his Winchester pump .22 as he was pursuing ducks in Theresa Marsh. But he was a trout fisherman above all. If you think I’m now going to tread on ground covered in “A River Runs Through It,” then you’re wrong, for the book (and the movie) are about fly-fishermen. Brian was a chub-tail purist, if there is such a thing, and there’s nothing romantic about that. After all, in the world of trout fishing cachet, chub-tail fishermen are the lowest of the low, pitied by worm-fishermen and looked up to only by those who fish with dynamite.
     He also probably wouldn’t mind if I note that the same genial nature and sense of humor which his family and friends enjoyed in him were qualities which attracted the opposite sex as well. Many women found him, well, as irresistible as a big brown finds a chub-tail waving seductively in the current. I’m thinking now of a few post-trip; pre-fiance stops for a cooling beer. His charm was such that he could spin his ever-present ABF cap in the air, bring it down perfectly on his blond head, and then grin confidently at some comely lass across the bar. Invariably—and I still can’t believe this—she’d come over to say hello. It galled me—a trash fish in the dating stream—no end; especially as in those days my most intimate knowledge of women came from the back of Little Cleo spoons.
     But the fishing was always first and foremost. When I think of Brian now, I see him as I’m plowing through streamside alders on the Little Wolf or the Bad Axe or any of the streams we fished together. Where I was always anxious to roam and usually covered a lot of water pretty quickly, he was content to sit on one small stretch all day long and was a master at recognizing all of the locations where trout might be found within it. I’d stop and we’d compare notes, and while I might have caught a few fish—even big ones—he had always caught more, and bigger.
     He’d squint into the horizon in the manner of a sea captain searching for spouting whales, maybe adjust his cap, and smile slightly.
     “Trout are where you find them,” he’d say.
     Of all the pseudo-philosophical statements he was so fond of dispensing, it was his favorite. I never knew how to respond, since it was so pithy, so concise, and so obviously worthless, and often as I went in search of other water I’d look back and see him releasing another fish.
     He almost never kept anything. In fact, looking back now on the twelve or so years we fished together, I can’t remember him ever having kept a single trout. He was the same way with deer hunting. He hunted mostly in the Chequamegon National Forest, and every year when I called for a post-hunt synopsis I’d hear of reasons why he didn’t shoot:  “Too far,” “Too close,” “Not big enough,” and had he lived long enough I’m sure eventually I’d have heard, “I saw a twelve-pointer about fifty yards out during the second weekend, but I didn’t shoot. He was too big.”
     Perhaps Brian’s kidney transplant caused him to be more appreciative of life, and all of its forms. I don’t know. But I will say that while many of us often use the words “It’s just great to be out there” as a way of masking our disappointment over getting skunked, he meant them, each and every time. His health problems required him to carry as much medical gear as tackle, and gout related to the transplant limited his mobility after awhile. But to his credit, he never gave these limitations more than a cursory nod. He was the kind of guy who mentioned almost dying during a trip for Lake Erie walleyes the way most of us would mention an oil change which was past due, but only by a hundred and fifty miles.
     There were dietary restrictions as well, which, afield at least, went largely ignored (I shudder now to think of dinner on one trip to the Tomorrow River:  Rock River walleye and catfish fillets fried in four inches of bacon fat. The three pounds of bacon it took to get that much grease had of course long ago gone by the board.) Brian’s blood-sugar levels were always a concern, and once I found him floundering listless and waist-deep in the sticky mud we called loon s**t. I half-dragged him back to his truck, where even his dazed powers of persuasion were such that I made a decision I still can’t believe.
     “I can drive,” he mumbled, and until I regained my senses we sped down the road at one half-mile per hour; barely rolling; and in the wrong lane.

     It was a shock when the end came. To be sure, my friend had talked about the possibility of his death and didn’t seem to fear it. I, however, since he was outwardly healthy, could only comprehend the possibility as I do my chances of becoming rich:  within the realm of possibility, but on the outer edges of that realm which are not visible to the naked eye.
     The year-and-a-half since Brian’s passing hasn’t given me any great insight into the meaning of his life and death, or any of ours, and I think it would gloss over his family’s pain for me to reach some sort of Disney-esque “circle of life” conclusion. Yet death occurs. We who spend a lot of time in the woods and on the water understand as much as anyone that while it is a beautiful world, it is also a hard one. Maybe someday, if we’re lucky enough to be old and gray, we’ll be able to look back and say, “So that’s what it’s all about.”
     And I can’t help but feel that it is about something. Here I have to mention that a week after my friend died I pressed his obituary between the pages of a Bible. But I felt—and feel—like a hypocrite. I couldn’t quote you a full mouthful of Scripture, but could name chapter and verse from any of the five hundred outdoor magazines stashed in the garage.
     And maybe that’s just as well, Brian might say. “Put it in a copy of  A Sand County Almanac. Press it between the pages of the inland trout regs.”
     But he probably wouldn’t even go that far. He was a practical man and not given to somberness, and if he was inclined to be poetic it would be more along the lines of “The Legend of Sam McGee.”
     No, he would say, “Just get outside, and don’t worry so much.”
     “And oh yeah,” he might add with his trademark cryptic grin. “Trout are where you find them.”