Common Places

     As places go, it isn’t much:  a dam smack behind a mill, where the hum of high wires floats above the dirty-foam roar of the water. It is supremely ugly. But the fish are there, and because of them, the fishermen. Another place is a goose blind near a farmhouse which is fast becoming just a reminder of the area’s rural past. Buildings sprout up everywhere—“progress” not only has a foot in the door, but is about to barge right in. Spots like these—the ones we actually visit most often—are the less-fashionable stepsisters of the sporting world. They aren’t very prosaic; and even less poetic, because they are the road most traveled by.
     In our mind’s eye, we see ourselves following the religion:  in Scotland, uncasing a fine double gun somewhere on the grouse butts, or bonefishing in one or another cay with salt smell heavy in the air and the water the color of turquoise. Or we see ourselves on the Madison or the Firehole or in the Black Forest of Germany, or chasing any of the other Holy Grails of the sporting world. And then at the end of the day we relax; sun-and-windburned and pleasantly tired, while someone brings us a drink straight out of Hemingway. These are good fantasies, whether or not we ever get to indulge them, but when they are over we head to the stockpond, the woodlot, or the murky city creek.
     We started out there, of course, as kids with freckles and bobbers and rusty .22’s. And now we take our own kids. Game animals are largely squirrels and rabbits, and fish run the gamut from bullheads to rock bass to the ubiquitous carp ( ironic, isn’t it, that an immigrant from imperial old Europe should be the most democratic of America’s fishes.)
     And in between, we stray… to locales made famous by Ruark and Traver and Karamojo Bell. Call it hunting and fishing’s equivalent to the seven-year-itch. Still, the common places welcome us back like a faithful spouse, and offer the same blessings they always have. My goose-hunting spot is far from wild, and the birds are of suspect lineage. But even the tamest of bread-fed golf-course geese take on a certain majesty when the wind is cold and you have a shotgun in your hands.
     Sure, the old reliables aren’t the locales of catalogs and literature with a capital L. Places so steadfast can hardly be expected to serve up a dose of romanticism as well. And sport as religion? Well, epiphanies are common in stories, but rare in life. But sometimes the pedestrian places are like the plain girl in Chem Lab who everyone ignored, until one day she turned and spoke and you noticed something you hadn’t before.

Only in Wisconsin!

Take a Kid Fishing, Unless Your Name is Kurt

     My boat isn't fancy. It's a 15-foot, plain-Jane aluminum fishing boat. There are no pedestal seats, there's no casting deck, and there's no livewell, either, unless I leave the drain plug open for a few minutes. The newest thing on the craft is a '94 Evinrude outboard, which my wife and I bought used a few years back after our vintage Johnson motor ground to a halt in spectacular fashion on the Castle Rock Flowage. I'm not bemoaning the boat's vanilla qualities, though. It does what Lori and I need it to do without a lot of fuss. Which is not to say that I don't occasionally look longingly at new boats with all of the refinements that a high monthly payment can provide. Recently I was looking at a boat displayed in the catalog of a famous tackle distributor. The boat has every bell and whistle, but I'm pretty certain that the photograph is posed.

     Why do I think that? It's because the angler in the photo is in the stern, facing away from the two bikini-clad lovelies who are sunning like lizards on a hot rock on his casting deck. Yeah, I know. It happens all the time to me, too, and it's a damned nuisance. Man can't hardly go out and catch a basket of bluegills these days without vixens draping themselves all over his boat, fouling up the ropes and making it difficult to cast. Actually, it's never happened to me. My wife might sit in the bow, but she'd never lie down, partly because it'd be uncomfortable as heck and partly because of a stinkbait spill which I haven't gotten around to cleaning yet. Anyway, the boat in the catalog is very nice. I bet its drain plug even fits. That it does is significant in a way which I hope will become clear soon.

     I've written before about the houseboat my father built in our backyard in the early 1970's. We had a grand time, mostly, whether we were on Lake Winnebago or Lake Michigan or the Mississippi River. I say "mostly" because, well, we did have some incidents, such as the electrical storm on Lake Poygan where we kids stood on the top deck, pointing at each other and laughing hysterically as our hair stood on end. When you spend as much time on the water as we did, some of this stuff is bound to happen, but to this day when I hear the word "vacation" I immediately picture my mother, sitting in the galley and praying the Rosary. I'm kind of glad we never went to Disney World. I imagine how alarmed other kids would have been, sitting in the spinning teacups while in the background my mother intoned "...now and at the hour of our death, amen."

     My younger brother, Craig, is planning a performance about our boating experiences, entitled "28 Ways to Die." I think he's exaggerating. I only count 27. Craig thinks that the reason we got into some of those scrapes is because my dad had a kind of devil-may-care attitude stemming from his service as a fighter pilot in the Wisconsin Air National Guard. So why do I run into so many scrapes on my own boat? I haven't been a fighter pilot, and my attitude is not devil-may-care but instead one of willful ignorance. Which brings us to the drain plug.

     One day about twelve years ago I hitched the boat I then had to my truck and headed north to Menasha, where I grew up. My friend Steve and I planned to take his nephew Adam after walleyes on Lake Winnebago. If I remember correctly, it was to be Adam's first real "big boy" fishing trip. I'm good that way; always willing to share my knowledge with others, and at the launch I imagined how it must feel to be in the presence of such a giant as myself.

     "Alright, Adam," I said as I pushed us out into the Fox River, squinting into the distance like Captain Ahab searching for spouting whales. "Let's go catch some fish."

     It didn't take long for us to realize that I had left the drain plug out, as green water poured into the boat. The plug had never really fit very well. Time and sunlight and possibly gasoline had made it expand to twice its original size, so it was a real bugger to get in, even under the best of circumstances. The best of circumstances did not include rapidly rising water, a friend making unhelpful suggestions, and a child seeing the myth of adult competency vanish before his very eyes.

     "It's alright," I said as I fumbled underwater, trying to pound the plug in with a wrench. "I'll just start the motor and we'll run the water out."

     That was an excellent idea, in theory, except that the starter cord had a way of coming off of the flywheel if I pulled on it too hard during times of stress. Which I definitely did, as our half-full boat drifted toward one of the more prominent Fox River landmarks.

     "Hey," Adam said. "There's a sign up ahead. It says DANGER DAM."

     "Aw, don't worry about it," I said, trying to reassure him. "It's just a place name, like Beaver Dam."

     "Or Hoover Dam, " Steve said. "They say there are still workmen from when it was built going around and around and around in the undertow."

     "Well, yeah," I agreed. "Or Hoover Dam."

     With one hand I was frantically trying to replace the drain plug and with the other I was using a screwdriver on the motor, trying to locate the spring arrangement on the flywheel which would coil the starter cord back up. At first my efforts with the screwdriver had been, if I say so myself, almost surgical, but as we got closer to the dam they became more generalized.

     "Mommy," a child in a riverfront home might have asked as we slid by. "Why is that man stabbing his motor?"

     Since I'm writing this column, it's obvious that we didn't pitch over the dam. I was able to finally get the drain plug in and Steve and I took turns rowing against the current back towards the landing. We didn't get Adam out on the big lake after all, since I never did get the motor fixed, but we fished nonetheless, right next to the launch, in water up to our knees. I'm sure Adam remembers his trip well, and creating memories, really, is what fishing is all about. So take a child out on the water this summer. After all, children are the future of our sport.

     Me? I've already done my part.

Bank Sitting

    Bank sitting, or shore fishing, or bottom fishing or whatever you choose to call it, is a type of angling which doesn’t get a whole lot of ink. But I think a lot of fishermen—even those of us who own boats—will admit to doing as much of it as anything else. Sometimes you’re just not in the mood to deal with jet skis and cigarette boats, or, in the worst-case scenario, to endure long waits at the launch only to watch the person in front of you spend a half-hour at the ramp doing the things he should have taken care of at home.
    I’m no stranger to technology—even though I’m one of a dwindling minority of fishermen who own a boat not equipped with a fish finder. (I was strangely proud of that for a while, but now I’m going to buy one. The lake near my home has a big suspended panfish bite in the late summer months, and I’d rather catch fish than feel superior.) I own more tackle than is probably necessary, and every winter I page through the Bass Pro Shops Master Catalog lusting over specialty rods and reels to augment the specialty rods and reels I already own. But one of the charms of bank sitting is that most any combo you have will do. And as far as technique goes, there’s no buzzin’, no burnin’, no crankin’… and no scented, flavored baits which could double as snacks (unless you count the dip bait I use for catfish, which is thoughtfully labeled, “Not for Human Consumption.”) None of this is an attack on anyone’s favorite technique, though—I have my own, too. I probably have a jig tied to the end of my line at least 50 percent of the time, for just about every species except largemouth bass. (For bass, I like twitching minnow imitations on top, even during periods when I should be doing something else. I like it so much that I even use the tactic in winter. I cast to my favorite emergent structure until eventually the owner emerges, alright, enraged, and I have to move on to the next ice shanty.)
 
   My own favorite shore-fishing spot is along a small southern Wisconsin stream. The stream is studded with logjams, which make for good fishing, is home to mink and muskrats and ducks, and is pretty enough, though it will never be featured on any angling calendar. In spring, floods cause all sorts of trash—soda bottles, Styrofoam cups, and the like—to accumulate at the logjams and in the current eddies. My wife and I pick up all the trash we can, but what’s left doesn’t bother us too much. The creek doesn’t aspire to be anything more than what it is, and a resort will never be built upon its banks.

    When I’m out in my boat or wade fishing, I usually concentrate on a specific species. But the target of bank sitting—and I doubt I’m alone in this—is usually of the “whatever bites” variety. Sure, I tell myself that I’m fishing for channel cats, or walleyes and saugers, but the reality is that I catch as many carp as anything else—which is okay, as a tug on the line is a tug on the line as far as I’m concerned, and no fish fights harder than the carp. I catch freshwater drum (“sheepshead,” we call them in Wisconsin) too, and here I’m reminded of the old adage that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I once tried a recipe which touted drum fillets as “the best fried fish you’ve ever tasted”—a tall order in a state where a double order of “lake perch” is gastronomic heaven, or at least was until Lake Michigan’s yellow perch population collapsed. (Now their appearance on supper club menus is often followed by two of the ugliest words in the English language:  “Market Price.”) But those drum fillets were, if not outstanding, pretty darned good, and I’ve tried a few times since to duplicate the results. My wife and I recently tried a different recipe for drum, which advertised the result as being absolutely delectable. I suppose it was, if not delectable, at least edible, in the sense that our bodies must have absorbed some nutriments, and in the sense that we didn’t die. There we go again:  One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
 
   While bank sitting on a little stream or gravel pit can yield fillets for the pan, it can also yield experiences not to be found by roaring around in a boat on more storied waters. A friend and I were at my favorite shore site a few summers ago, soaking dip bait worms for channel catfish. A solid bite on one of our rods resulted in a large snapping turtle, which we promptly released.
    
    And released.
    And released again.

    At this point, with the snapper trailing three dip bait worms from its jaws, we decided to move the turtle—with the aid of a landing net—to a point well upstream. I’m sure that, like a homing pigeon, the turtle was headed for another taste of Sonny’s Super Sticky Channel Cat Bait when we finally packed up our gear and left.
   
  On another occasion the same friend and I were again fishing for channel cats, at a different location along the same creek. As night was falling, I caught a nice cat, put it on my stringer, and turned to light my lantern. When I turned back, one of my rods was in the creek and heading rapidly northward, with just the tip visible bobbing above the black water. I jumped in after the rod, with my friend registering amusement from the opposite bank. I slogged through mud and water and weeds, until finally I caught up with it and pulled a 25-inch cat to hand from the log jam where it had hidden. I waded back to shore and strung the fish next to its cousin.
 
   At the end of the night that particular fish was gone. It had wrecked a link on the chain-type stringer.
 
   I didn’t begrudge that cat its fillets, however. After all of the trauma that fish had been through, I figured its escape was just poetic justice.

    Most of my bank sitting outings are not that eventful, of course. Sometimes I don’t catch much—or anything—and sit quietly contemplating in front of a set of unmoving rod tips. The opportunity to sit and think, in fact, is something which bank sitting offers in abundance, and which I take advantage of a lot. Which is not to say that I’m an angling Zen-master, though, perched upon some sort of piscatorial mountaintop dispensing cryptic words of wisdom to seekers from below. Becoming one with my environment is sometimes trickier than I’d like to admit.
  
  One day this spring I headed to a network of lagoons by a large lake just a couple of blocks from my home. I was harried after a busy day at work, and what I was contemplating was not fishing but the lengthy “to-do” list which sat upon my desk. When I arrived at the spot, I found that its only other occupant was an elderly woman, who wore a large straw hat and perched like a kingfisher on the edge of a lawn chair.
 
   I was worried about my list, and when I got a bite I was too antsy and missed the fish. As for the woman, I don’t know if she was thinking about much of anything, but every once in a while she’d reach down, pluck a pole up off of the grass, and hoist a bullhead or crappie flopping up onto the bank. In the space of an hour she outfished me—me!—about ten to zero. Disgusted, I packed up and headed home. Once there, I discovered that what I had to do wasn’t really all that important anyway, and I wished I was back at the lagoon. But that’s the way of things.
 
   I’ll get it down, though. At least a couple of days this summer will find me forsaking the boat and the waders and sitting on a bank somewhere, lulled into calm by sun and current and the smell of lush vegetation. I’ll heave baits out into the water, reel the lines taut, and sit and wait. If I’m lucky, a rod tip will lunge and I’ll hook a fish, and then there’ll be a job for the net. And that’s what it’s all about, no matter which method of fishing you choose.     

Wing Shooting, Sort Of

    My friend John and I were tired from a day of fighting briars and stomping brush piles, but the tangle of discarded Christmas trees we discovered at a trailhead near dusk looked alluring enough and put thoughts of aching muscles out of our minds.
    “Get ready,” I yelled to John as he took position. I kicked the boughs and a brown form squirted out.
    O.K., technically we weren’t wing shooting, but rabbit hunting, but chasing bunnies is as close as I got to bird hunting last season. I used to do more wing shooting, but now the time constraints of adulthood (read: “job”) reduce my time afield. Plus I love hunting deer, and then there are family obligations during the holidays. Which brings us to January. Which means rabbit hunting.
    I used to visit pheasant-hunting preserves occasionally in wintertime, back when I had more disposable income (actually, I had less income then, I was just more inclined to dispose of it.) Sure, preserves aren’t the same as the real thing, but then neither is hunting pen-raised birds on public land. But I always enjoyed the hunting and the happy moil of dogs and hunters in the clubhouse after a day afield. And if you’re willing to pay enough to hunt a certain kind of game farm, you can sit by a roaring fire with a glass of claret, perhaps puffing on a pipe between appreciative sips, and contemplate the grandeur of the sporting life in the afterglow of a glorious day. You can probably even hire a dog to curl at your feet and nap, intermittently waking to gaze loving brown-eyed glances up at you. All of this of course occurs while you ignore your own actual dog, which consumed three-quarters of a long-dead opossum and is consequently suffering acutely from what pharmaceutically-minded folks would delicately call “occasional stomach upset.”
    The previous paragraph was written with tongue planted firmly in cheek, but dogs are an integral part of the feel of wing shooting. I’ll probably offend some folks, but I myself am a cat man. I have four, and one retrieves. Or did, until his ballooning weight deep-sixed a promising field-trialing career. Now he’s on low-fat kibbles, which he’s not wild about. He’s not keen on the Pilates routines and the 4 a.m. treadmill workouts either. So while I do not now own a dog, I have had the pleasure of chasing partridge and pheasants behind those of friends. Some of those dogs made us want to honor their artistry by trading our shotguns toward expensive models with gold-filigreed side plates. Others made us want to purchase rusted old single-barrels for ten bucks at an estate sale. Here I’m thinking of “Blue,” my friend Gregg’s springer spaniel. She was a wonderful dog, but like most springers, she was, well, just a bit excitable. And omnivorous, too.
    Gregg, Blue, and I were in Gregg’s backyard one day, drinking beer and pitching horseshoes, when we discovered that Blue had swallowed a considerable mass of fishing line. A tag end of it protruded from her posterior. Gregg tugged lightly at the end and Blue yelped and shot off like a rocket with the line still in Gregg’s hands. We looked at each other, horrified, but didn’t move—at least immediately—to stop Blue. After all, we were fishermen and used to trolling, and wanted to wait until Blue had cleared the last stretch of productive bushes (I can only relate that story because Blue turned out to be absolutely fine.)
    I began my wing shooting career (such as it is) in east-central Wisconsin, when I was in high school. My father fished, but didn’t hunt, and my grandfather’s hunting days were over, but that wasn’t enough to prevent me from becoming obsessed with ducks. I read waterfowling books and DU magazines during study hall, pored over my dog-eared copy of the Migratory Bird Regulations at lunch, and saw widgeons and teal and wood ducks in my dreams.
    The ducks were not impressed.
    You see, I assumed practicing (i.e., “shooting clay birds”) was for effete dilettantes. For me, I thought, shooting skill was natural, carried in my veins like a love for the Green Bay Packers. I reckoned I was a latter-day Daniel Boone. For some of my friends, that rang true. But not for me. So I missed, and missed, and missed some more. Often, I’d run out of shells and have to drive to town to collect money for more from my paper-route customers. It was a recurring theme:
    “Why, good afternoon, young man.”
    “Hello, Mrs. Johnson. I’m here to collect for The Appleton Post-Crescent.”
    “But didn’t I just pay for this month?” (I hit her up frequently.)
    “No, Mrs. Johnson, that was for last month.”
    So, with Mrs. Johnson paid up through the end of time, I’d zoom off to buy more shells, hoping to be back in the blind before the evening flight.
    I’m not proud of that, but it kind of sums up my start in bird hunting. That, and the greenhead which launched itself off of a mat of duckweed and then just hung in the air like a weather balloon, where I proceeded to miss with each of the three shells in my gun. The mallard was then potted with one shot by a kid whose mother had probably just sewn his hunter-safety patch on his jacket . Now, I’d be happy for that kid and shout my congratulations across the marsh, but back then my failure was a bitter pill to swallow.
    I have gotten better since, though, through experience and practice on trap fields and sporting clays courses. So it comes that field shots now are a decidedly less-dicey proposition. Connecting is just not as satisfying as it would have been in high school, when I’d have sprinted back to my dad’s truck and driven to Forest Junction to call my friends from a pay phone. This is not to say that I don’t fall into slumps which bring me back to my youth, like a .350 leadoff man who falls into a month-long .200 swoon.
    Which brings us back to the rabbit hunt I mentioned at the beginning of this column. I shouldered my side-by-side .410 as the cottontail made a straight-line dash toward another brush pile. It was an easy shot, and I anticipated the heft the bunny would bring to my empty game vest.
    I missed.
    First with one barrel, and then with the other.
    My friend John rolled the bunny with an excellent shot and collected the final cottontail of his limit.
    Rabbit hunting?
    Sure sounds like wing shooting to me.

Storm, heading west on I-94 from Miller Park, August 19, 2012

Ixonia.

Aztalan. Funnel cloud precursors were forming and dissipating.

Lake Mills-ish.

Coming into Madison.

Miller Park, August 19th, 2012

Braunie, reigning MVP, and deserving again. Yeah, I know. Shut up.

Sudden shower, roof closing

Hanna and Mia made this. They're really pretty bad-ass.

Chorizo ended up winning. Guess the Miller Park Sausage Races are no longer inherently racist.