Technical Difficulties

       "Guys on Ice," by Fred Alley and James Kaplan, is billed as "The Ice-Fishing Musical," and is set in my home state of Wisconsin. I haven't seen it, since I have a long-standing aversion to theatrical productions not involving showgirls. But I understand dancing is involved.

     I think I speak for ice-fishermen from the Finger Lakes of New York State to the Sandhills of Nebraska when I say that anyone performing a dance in an ice shanty should be shoved outside, and then pelted with dead smelt.

     Well, wait. I suppose a little impromptu jig if you've caught more fish than me is entirely appropriate. But any sort of choreographed number is completely unacceptable.

     As an aside related to dance, I will say that after I graduated from college I obtained work as a forester in Michigan. While in Michigan I maintained a dalliance with a gorgeous young woman whose name escapes me now. And by "dalliance" I mean that I pursued her ardently, and she was dimly aware that I existed.

     Anyway, she was heavily involved in flag team competitions, where groups of girls performed dance moves to music while waving brightly-colored pieces of cloth. To impress my intended, I attended one of her competitions in some Detroit suburb. I took my seat in the gymnasium bleachers, and the first number began to pulsating beats. After it ended, I admitted to myself that it was really good, in much the same way that the moment when you stop hitting yourself in the head with a hammer is really good.

     After a couple more such exhibitions, I surmised the entertainment was pretty close to an end. I thought the same thing after the next number, and the next, and the next. On it went, for six hours, until finally the whole god-awful mess came to a halt. I scrambled out of the gym, knocking over contestants and coaches and proud grandparents, and sprinted to my truck.

     Back to Guys on Ice. My general impression after reading press releases and critical reviews is that the musical portrays we of the hard-water clan as good-natured, if a little dim, and maybe a bit behind the times.

     Good-natured but dim perfectly describes my fishing buddy, John. But behind the times? Many ice-fishermen, John included, use technically-advanced equipment which would have left our jigstick-wielding forebearers slackjawed. Locators. Lightweight, mobile shelters. Global positioning system units. And underwater cameras. We're practically ready for a trip to Mars.

     Of course, I do not own an underwater camera-- out of concern for the fish. Just as I don't want a recorder in my living room, catching me sitting in my boxer shorts eating hot dogs from the package while watching professional wrestling, so I want to spare a bluegill the embarrassment of me catching it doing the piscine equivalent of picking its nose.

     The truth is, you could say I have a somewhat adversarial relationship with technology. A month or so ago, I called my wife, Lori, out to the driveway for our annual trailer-light inspection ritual. The results are always the same, no matter how well the lights worked the previous year. This year was no different as I looked in my truck's rearview mirror while Lori stood behind the trailer:

     "Brake lights?"

     "Good."

     "Right turn signal?"

     "Good."

     "Left turn signal?...Left turn signal?...(Expletive!)"

     It has now gotten to the point where the collective wads of electrical tape attached to the trailer's wiring weigh more than the trailer itself, and I have a more extensive collection of wire nuts than most hardware stores.

     John has no such adversarial relationship with technology. In fact, he never met a piece of technology he didn't like (or buy), especially when it pertains to ice-fishing.

     He not only has an underwater camera and a locator, he also has two ice shelters and a bucket full of graphite jigging rods, along with a dozen state-of-the-art tip-ups and a backpack to carry them all in. Of course, a lot of this has to do with the fact that John has obsessive-compulsive disorder and is compelled to buy every new piece of gear he finds.

     I guess that's better than, say, having to turn a light switch on and off 20 times before he enters a room. But if John ever misses a credit card payment all of us will be on street corners selling apples from carts...which John will happily buy.

     On our ice-fishing forays, I trudge behind John and his team of Sherpas, bearing a five-gallon bucket which contains my meager assortment of gear: one jigging rod, a tip-up, and a prescription bottle containing a few ice jigs.

     I usually get cold pretty early in our trips, because while John sports the most advanced apparel, mine hasn't advanced significantly since the days of my grandmother's hand-knitted yarn mittens-- which had the insulating qualities of, well, wet yarn.

     I wore a pair of those mittens one day long ago, during a fisharee on Wisconsin's Little Lake Butte des Morts.

     "Butte des Morts" is French for "Hill of the Dead," and in retrospect I should have considered that an omen.

     It was a very cold day, and to combat the cold I did what any kid would do, which was drink massive quantities of hot chocolate. Now, the human body requires a certain amount of liquid for its own needs, but the excess has to go somewhere. Unfortunately, my hands-- encased in a mixture of frozen snot and yarn-- were so cold that I was unable to unbutton my fly.

     Well, I fidgeted and danced and jiggled for an agonizing hour or so until I realized that I had to make a choice: Give in and let nature take its course, or have one of my warmer buddies unbutton my fly for me.

     You're right. Not much of a choice.

     Later, my friend's mother came to pick us up, and as she drove to drop me off at home the scent of urine filled the car.

     These days, I'm a little jealous of John's mastery of technology. Because of his gear and ability to use it to adapt to changing conditions on the ice, he regularly outfishes me. And because he pays attention to dressing for the cold, his truck doesn't smell like urine. Well, no more so than usual.

     Yet, I'm a sunny soul, and take solace in the fact that, after our trips, while he's no more than halfway through with putting away his stuff and has yet to clean his fish, I'm having a hot toddy in front of my fireplace.

   

My Glittering Ascent in the World of High Fashion

     I've been through many job interviews in my life, and in them I learned excellent lessons, some of which I'd like to pass on to you. Specifically, the store manager who called your business suit "a timeless classic" when you first bought it in 1974 was not using the word "timeless" in any generally accepted sense of the word. Also, when an interviewer asks, "What would you do differently if you had your life to live over?" DO NOT say, "I wish I had been born a woman." Unless you actually were. But Paul Wait, the editor of Wisconsin Outdoor Journal, really threw me a curveball a year ago when we first discussed the possibility of me writing the magazine's closing column.

     "Kurt," he said. "You're just about perfect for the position. You hunt; you fish; you do both of them badly. But-- and this is really what we're looking for-- do you know anything about the world of high fashion?"

     Do I know anything about high fashion? Let me repeat that, for dramatic emphasis. Do I know anything about high fashion?

     Well, no.

     But I assured Paul that I'd do my best to catch up before this, the highly-awaited Spring Fashion Issue. My "catching up" consisted of watching a Victoria's Secret special on television. Now, this was a fine, fine program, of such redeeming social value that it's a wonder it wasn't picked up by PBS. First the models all walked out together, and their body types were such that the stage looked as if a fleet of dirigibles had crash-landed at a Popsicle-stick factory. Then the models walked the runway individually; each in turn, looking mightily peeved to be so beautiful and so wealthy at the same time. None of them ever smiled, as if they'd been dining exclusively on lemons for weeks. That, or they'd just been told that their half of the tax refund no longer exists, because you let the salesman talk you out of the used rifle you secretly knew you weren't going to buy anyway and into the Remington Model 700 in .270 Winchester that you've always wanted. Not that I've ever done that.

     Well, I got to thinking. Why not put on an outdoors-themed fashion show? Wisconsin Outdoor Journal could use it to sell subscriptions, or as a benefit, maybe for Trout Unlimited or The Ruffed Grouse Society or another of the organizations that make our tired old world a tolerable place to live in. I can picture it now:

     The lights come up onstage. A man, who looks suspiciously like yours truly, shambles out. The crowd gasps in unison; retinas scorched. "It's the glare from his forehead!" someone yells from offstage. "Makeup! Makeup!" A girl runs out, buffs the model's head, and disappears. "Sorry," the announcer intones. "On with our show." The model walks to the center of the stage and stops while the lights illuminate his footwear. The announcer continues:  "These knee-length rubber boots are the centerpiece of our Spring Footwear Collection. They are perfect for turkey hunting. They are scent-free, for bowhunters, and in a pinch can also be put to use on the trout stream..."

     I guess it's not coincidence that I was thinking about footwear yesterday. Specifically, I was thinking, "How many pairs of shoes does my wife own?" (12, as it turns out.) Even more to the point, I was thinking, "How many of them will she not miss?" You see, I like to throw stuff out. It gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling deep inside, particularly when it's not MY stuff I'm throwing out.

     "No way," Lori said when she got home from work. "You're not throwing any of my stuff out."

     "But you have 12 pairs!" (This is just good information to know. At some point in the future when she yells, "You haven't entered any cash withdrawals in the checkbook for six months!" I can respond with, "Yeah, but you have twelve pairs of shoes!")

     "Bet you do, too," she said.

     "Do not."

     "Do too."

     Well, I got to looking. I have barn boots, for turkey hunting. And two pairs of leather boots. And ice-fishing boots. And old canvas tennis shoes for wade fishing when it's a billion degrees outside. Oh, and chest waders.

     Pleased to make your acquaintance. I'm the Imelda Marcos of the sporting fraternity.

     On with our show. And now our model is sporting a light rain jacket which can be kept rolled up under a boat seat until that moment when a sudden squall pops up...

     One of the benefits of living down here in the Madison area is the sheer abundance of cultural events. On any given weekend since we first moved here four years ago, there have been literally dozens of events available-- not one of which I actually attended. In fact, the last time I had a little culture whipped on me was years ago, at a dance program in Whitewater. I went because my then-girlfriend had an interest in the arts, and I had an interest in feigning interest in the arts. The centerpiece of the show consisted of a woman shouting while performing a series of awful contortions. A great many bridesmaids can attest that I've done the exact same dance at reception halls across the land, and I never got any grant money for it, either.

     I bring all of this up to mention that I very nearly attended a cultural event recently: a showing of the play "Muskie Love." I'm sure it's excellent, but what caused me not to attend was the poster. In it a man-- supposedly a muskie fisherman-- is wearing a floppy hat and a fly-fishing vest, and holding a spincast outfit which even a sub-legal muskie would destroy in about ten seconds. The muskie fishermen I know all look like Paul Bunyan-- or his Blue Ox-- and would tell this usurper to try his luck at the trout pond next to the petting zoo.

     "Now our model is wearing a thick flannel shirt. Wait, is he exposing a little chest hair? I think he's trying to impress that pretty woman in the front row..."

     When I was a kid, goodness personified lived about four doors away, in the form of Kristy McCook. You know the type: a scent of rose petals always seemed to be in the air, and her hair blew gently in the breeze, even during the doldrums of August when there was no breeze. Well, I was smitten, with a capital "S." One day I was pedaling the new bike my dad had bought me home from youth football practice, and from a block away I could see that Kristy was on her front porch.

     "Excellent," I thought to myself as I built up speed. "She'll be impressed; me being a football player and all." Heck, there was even a little blood on my jersey. Can't get much manlier than that.

     As I neared her house I switched to riding "no hands," and in front of her house I looked over, in a more or less smoldering way, and piled right into her dad's new Volkswagen.

     "And for the finale...Wait, he's fallen off of the stage. I believe he's hurt himself..."

     Some things never change.

   

   

Lake Mendota, Madison, Wisconsin, September 15, 2012.

Maple Bluff and Governor's Island from the stern.

Maple Bluff. How the other half-percent lives.
 It's O.K., they're liberal,
and consequently feel very, very guilty about it. 

White bass, destined as fillets for chowder this winter.
Hard not to catch them on Mendota  these days.

                                               “Come live with me, and be my love,
                                                 And we will all the pleasures prove
                                                 That valleys, groves, hills and fields,
                                                 Woods, or steepy mountain yields.”

                                                 --Christopher Marlowe.


                                                 “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

                                                   --P.T. Barnum.


     I went grocery shopping the other day. After a quick turn through the dairy products section, I ambled past “Meats,” warmed by messages from the National Pork Council, and finally ended up at the magazine rack. The magazine rack is an interesting sidelight to any grocery shopping trip, laced as it is with publications covering every conceivable topic from horror films to quilting. But what really caught my eye were the women’s magazines; each purporting to offer today’s woman what she really needs to know from “Put Menopause to Work for You” to “Sex, and How to Avoid It.” And underneath these shameless paens to human insecurity, there they were:  the bridal magazines.

     Bridal Monthly. Bridal Illustrated. Bucket o’ Brides. Bride-o-Rama. Row upon row of them, each with radiant models gazing beatifically at the viewer, reminding me of nothing so much as my First Communion copy of The Picture Book of Saints, with its wonderfully ironic images of martyrs reposing in transcendent bliss as they are stoned to death or torn apart by jackals.

     But I digress.

     You see, I have recently developed an interest in bridal magazines, spurred on by an inkling to take that most important of steps:  marriage. I have fallen in love. After a romantic career marked by passionate ambivalence on the part of my intendeds, my term as a throwaway scratch-off ticket in the lottery of love has come to an end.

     And so it was that with lilac-scented thoughts in mind, I recently found myself in a mall with thoughts of purchasing an engagement ring. I am normally loathe to engage in shopping, but am even less inclined to do so when the object of purchase is something as foreign to my experience as a ring. I wandered with trepidation down the aisles of the mall, past the Gap, past the Gap Kids and the Buddy Squirrel, and past a gaggle of mallwalkers stepping sprightly in athletic apparel. I walked into a jewelry store whose motto, believe it or not, is “When It’s Forever”—leaving me to wonder where all the short-sighted folks go for their jewelry needs. I was met instantly by “Madge,” a saleswoman who immediately recognized my preference for Field and Stream over Conde Nast and led me to the engagement rings.

     “Sir,” she said, “I usually explain The Four C’s to our first-time customers.”

     The “Four C’s,” as any engaged or married man knows, by heart and against his will, are Cut, Clarity, Color, and Confidence. The fourth C is not, as I suggested to Madge, “Cost,” although she was pleased because this gave her a chance to go into “the two months’ salary guideline.” This guideline, in short, is the process whereby jewelers seize men’s finest sentiments and then sell them back to us.

     I decided to play ball, and informed Madge that my income is limited only by the number of  bottles I can return for deposit during any given period. Madge was more than a little taken aback. “But surely, sir,” she said, “isn’t your love for… um… Lori?… worth the most you can possibly afford?”

     She had a point there. It’s just that she and I reckon cost differently. To be sure, Madge was just doing her job. Yet somehow I could not help but feel that the tenets of capitalism have no place tampering with something as sacred as love:  the boat of my best intentions had run aground in a sea of consumer culture. I had walked into the store with intentions of symbolizing my affection for my beloved. Instead I stood at the counter feeling as if I had just bought a used car and was about to drive off in a cloud of smoke, with the salesman laughing in my wake. And so I left ringless, but not before Madge gave me her card and a copy of The Wedding Planner—compliments of the wedding industry.

     The word “industry” is no exaggeration. The Wedding Planner lists no fewer than 27 categories wherein retailers prey on lovers’ natural desire to be married. Categories range from “Invitations” and (of course) “Diamonds” to “The Reception” and “Beauty.” Upon reading “Beauty,” I discovered that my whining about shopping for engagement rings had been just that—whining. Women have the real hard part of the bargain.

     The Wedding Planner’s section on “Beauty” begins:  “Every bride wants to look her best, and with foresight and planning, she can be beautiful in everyone’s eyes”—implying, of course, that without the judicious use of spackling compound and considerable structural work, the wedding guests will flee from the church in horror. The section suggests that the bride-to-be meet with a consultant to discuss such topics as “cosmetic background,” “headpiece selection,” and—I’m not kidding—“hair history.” Apparently this is where the bride reveals that her hair was with Napoleon at Waterloo and was instrumental in passing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.

     By the time I finished “Beauty” and launched into “Receptions,” I was feeling a bit dizzy, and eloping was starting to look like a really good idea—maybe Las Vegas? I imagined a ceremony with an Elvis impersonator reading us our vows:

     “Do you, uh, Kurt here, take Lori tuh be yer, uh, lawful wedded wife?”

     “I do.”

     “Don’t be cruel. Thank you. Thank you very much.”
   
     After the ceremony, I imagined, Lori and I would retire to a small reception, there to dine on peanut butter-and-banana sandwiches, gorge ourselves on barbituates, and take our place on a row of crepe-bedecked toilets—wedding party in front—to die, like the King, on the throne. Given what I have seen of conventional wedding planning, this scenario not only seems more enjoyable, but also a good deal less ludicrous.

     But I’m being selfish here. As The Wedding Planner states, the wedding is not so much for the happy couple as it is for friends and relatives.

     Perhaps this has all been idle complaining.

    Maybe the important thing is that someday my beloved will walk, resplendent in white, down an aisle lined with smiling well-wishers. Lori and I will gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes, delirious with joy, and repeat those magical words:  “I do.”

     But I don’t have to be happy about it.  

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.