The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (27 page)

In an acreage of lily pads, their territorial haunts are not always far apart. I have laid a fly on the water and seen three wakes converge upon it. Where Genio C. Scott, in
Fishing in American Waters
(1869), describes chain pickerel at such a moment, he says, "You will find cause for surprise that will force you to ejaculate." For my part, I'll admit, I damned near fell out of the canoe. An acreage of lily pads is not entirely like a woven mat. There are open spots, small clear basins, like blue gaps among clouds. By no means all the pickerel in The Patch are close to the edge as if looking out from beneath a marquee. They are also back among the gaps, and some are in acute shallows very close to shore, in case a mouse slips on something and falls into the water. To fly-cast among the gaps is much more difficult than along the edge of open water. Typically, you are trying to drop a long throw into six square feet of clear space, and if you miss you will be stuck fast to nymphaeaceous stems and cursing. Yanking on your line, you will bomb the territory and retrieve a pound of weed.

This family—
Esocidae
—is not popular with aesthetes, with people who torture trout. Put a pickerel in a pond full of trout, and before long all that's in there is a larger pickerel. There are people who hunt pickerel with shotguns. In Vermont, that is legal. Two other members of the family—pike and muskellunge—are quite similar in pattern, configuration, color, and appetite but are, of course, much and very much larger. Under each eye, chain pickerel have a black vertical bar, not unlike the black horizontal bars that are painted under the eyes of football players, and evidently for the same reason: to sharpen vision by cutting down glare. A pickerel's back is forest green, and its sides shade into a light gold that is overprinted with a black pattern of chain links as consistent and uniform as a fence. This artistic presentation is entirely in the scales, which are extremely thin and small. On a filleting board, a couple of passes with a scaler completely destroy the art, revealing plain silver skin.

On the filleting board, evidence is forthcoming that chain pickerel are as voracious as insurance companies, as greedy as banks. The stomachs, usually, are packed and distended. A well-fed pickerel will readily strike, the fact notwithstanding that it already has in its stomach a frog, say, and a crayfish and a young pickerel, each in a different stage of decomposition. I have almost never opened a pickerel and found an empty stomach. I have caught pickerel, slit their stomachs, and watched crayfish walk out undamaged. I put the crayfish back in the lake. Stomachs of pickerel have contained birds.

Pickerel have palatal teeth. They also have teeth on their tongues, not to mention those razor jaws. On their bodies, they sometimes bear scars from the teeth of other pickerel. Pickerel that have been found in the stomachs of pickerel have in turn contained pickerel in their stomachs. A minnow found in the stomach of a pickerel had a pickerel in its stomach that had in its stomach a minnow. Young pickerel start eating one another when they are scarcely two inches long. How did I know all this that was tumbling out? I was mining a preoccupation. I am the owner of not one but two copies of
An Annotated Bibliography of the Chain Pickerel,
E. J. Crossman and G. E. Lewis, the Royal Ontario Museum, 1973.

In uncounted millions, they live in the lakes, ponds, streams, and rivers of the Atlantic watershed from the Canadian Maritimes to the whole of Florida, and across to the Mississippi, and up it to the Current River in southern Missouri. They seem about as endangered as mosquitoes. In midwestern states and elsewhere, walleyes are often called pickerel and sometimes walleyed pike. A walleye is not a pickerel, nor is it a pike; it's a perch. A bluegill maneuvers better than most fish do. Blue sharks and tunas are ultimate cruisers. In the department of acceleration—the drag race of the deep—almost nothing comes near a pike, pickerel, or muskellunge. A pickerel's body is 60 percent muscle. Undulations move along the body in propulsive waves that culminate, like oar sculling, in straight-tine forward thrust. A particularly successful tuna will catch about 30 percent of the fish it goes after. A trout catches half the fish it strikes at. A chain pickerel, on a good day, nails 80 percent. The last time a frog escaped a pickerel must have been in Pliocene time.

 

The young doctor returned, 24 hours exactly after his earlier visit. He touched the patient with fingers and steel, and qualified for compensation. He said there had been no change and not to expect any; the patient's comprehension would not improve. He went on as he had the day before. My father, across the years, had always seemed incapable of speaking critically of another doctor, perhaps, in a paradoxical way, because he had been present in an operating room where the mistake of another doctor had ended his mother's life. Even-tempered as he generally appeared to be, my father could blow his top, and I wondered, with respect to his profession, to what extent this situation would be testing him if he were able to listen, comprehend, and speak. Silent myself now, in the attending physician's presence, I looked down at my father in his frozen state, 89, a three-season athlete who grew up in the central neighborhoods of Youngstown, Ohio, and played football at Oberlin in a game that was won by Ohio State 128–0, captained basketball, was trained at Western Reserve, went into sports medicine for five years at Iowa State and thirty-six at Princeton, and was the head physician of U.S. Olympic teams in Helsinki, Rome, Tokyo, Innsbruck, and elsewhere. The young doctor departed.

In a small open pool in the vegetation, about halfway down The Patch, there had been, this year and last, a chain pickerel that was either too smart or too inept to get itself around an assemblage of deer hair, rabbit fur, turkey quill, marabou silk, and sharp heavy wire. The swirls had been violent every time, the strike consistently missing or spurning the fly, and coming always from the same place on the same side of the same blue gap. In the repetitive geometries of The Patch, with its paisley patterns in six acres of closed and open space, how did I know it was the same gap? I just knew, that's all. It's like running a trapline. You don't forget where the traps are; or you don't run a trapline. This gap in the lily pads was 30 yards off the mainland shore between the second-tallest white pine and a granitic outcrop projecting from Ann's island. As I was getting back into the story, again speaking aloud in the renewed privacy of the hospital room, I mentioned that I had been fishing The Patch that last morning with my father's bamboo rod, and it felt a bit heavy in the hand, but since the day he had turned it over to me I had taken it with my other rods on fishing trips, and had used it, on occasion, to keep it active because it was his. Now—just a couple of days ago—time was more than close to running out. Yolanda was calling from the island: 'John, we must go! John, stop fishing! John!" It was time to load the canoe and paddle west around some islands to the car, time to depart for home, yes; but I meant to have one more drift through The Patch. From the northwest, a light breeze was coming down over the sedge fen. I called to Yolanda that I'd "be right there," then swept the bow around and headed for the fen. Since I had failed and failed again while anchored near that fish, I would let the light breeze carry me this time, freelance, free-form, moving down The Patch like the slow shadow of a cloud. Which is just what happened—a quiet slide, the light rustle on the hull, Yolanda calling twice more before she gave up. Two touches with the paddle were all that was needed to perfect the aim. Standing now, closing in, I waved the bamboo rod like a semaphore—backcasting once, twice—and then threw the line. Dropping a little short, the muddler landed on the near side of the gap. The pickerel scored the surface in crossing it, swirled, made a solid hit, and took the tight line down, wrapping it around the stems of the plants.

"I pulled him out of there plants and all," I said. "I caught him with your bamboo rod."

I looked closely at my father. His eyes had welled over. His face was damp. Six weeks later, he was dead.

FROM GARDEN AND GUN

I
HAVE THREE
badly behaved children and a damn good bird dog. My Brittany spaniel, Millie (age seven), is far more biddable and obedient than my daughters, Muffin (eleven) and Poppet (nine), and has a better nose than my son, Buster (five). Buster does smell, but in his case it's an intransitive verb.

My dog is perdition to the woodcock and ruffled grouse we hunt hereabouts and death itself to the pen-raised Huns, chukars, and quail she encounters at the local shooting club. Millie hunts close, quarters well, points beautifully, is staunch to wing and shot, and retrieves with verve. My children ... are doing okay in school, I guess. They look very sweet—when they're asleep.

As my family was growing, I got a lot of excellent advice about discipline, responsibility, respect, affection, and cultivation of the work ethic. Unfortunately this advice was from dog trainers and was directed to my dog. In the matter of child rearing there was also plenty of advice, all of it contradictory—from family and family-in-law, wife, wife's girlfriends, pediatricians, nursery school teachers, babysitters, neighbors and random old ladies on the street, plus Dr. Spock, Dr. Phil, and, for all I know, Dr. Pepper: Spank them/Don't spank them. Make them clean their plate/ Keep them from overeating. Potty train them at one/Send them to Potty Training Camp at fourteen. Hover over their every activity/ Get out of their faces. Don't drink or smoke during pregnancy/ Junior colleges need students too. And none of this advice works when you're trying to get the kids to quit playing video games and go to bed.

It took me years to realize that I should stop asking myself what I'm doing wrong as a parent and start asking myself what I'm doing right as a dog handler.

The first right thing I do is read and reread
Gun Dog
by the late Richard A. Wolters. This is the book that revolutionized dog training in 1961. (Of course, the dogs are now 49 years old and not much use, but the book is still great.)

"Start 'em young" is the message from Wolters. And that's why, if we have another child, he's going to learn to walk pushing on the handle of a Toro in the yard instead of teetering along the edge of the sofa cushions in the living room. Wolters, along with a number of other bird shooters, had realized that waiting until the traditional one-year mark before teaching a puppy to hunt was like carrying your kid in a Snugli until he was seven. Wolters was sure he was right about this, but he wasn't sure why. Then he came across the work of Dr. John Paul Scott, a founder of the Animal Behavior Society. Dr. Scott was involved in a project to help Guide Dogs for the Blind, Inc. Seeing Eye dog training was considered almost too difficult to be worthwhile. Using litters from even the best bloodlines, the success rate for guide-dog training was only 20 percent. Dr. Scott discovered that if training began at five weeks instead of a year, and continued uninterrupted, the success rate rose to 90 percent.

It goes without saying that the idea of Seeing Eye kids is wrong—probably against child labor laws and an awful thing to do to blind people. But I take Dr. Scott's point. And so did Richard Wolters, who devised a gun-dog training regime that had dogs field-ready at as early as six months. That's three and a half in kid years. My kids weren't doing anything at three and a half, other than at night in their Pull-Ups.

The Start-'Em-Young program turns out to be a surprise blessing for dads. Wolters writes in (
Gun Dog
of a puppy's first 28 days (equal to about six months for a kid), "Removal from Mother at this time is drastic." That's just what I told my wife about the care and feeding of our infants—
drastic
is the word for leaving it to me. According to Wolters, I'm really not supposed to get involved until the kid is one (equivalent to a 56-day-old pup). Then I can commence the nurturing (Happy Meals) and the "establishing rapport" (sitting with me on the couch watching football).

Next the training proper begins. "Repetition, more repetition, and still more repetition," enjoins Wolters. I've reached the age where I'm repeating myself all the time, so this is easy. "Commands should be short, brisk, single words: SIT, FETCH, WHOA, COME, NO, etc." In the case of my kids the "etc." will be GETAJOB or at least MARRYMONEY

"Keep lessons short," writes Wolters. And that must be good advice because notice how all the fancy private schools start later, end earlier, and get much more time off at Christmas and Easter than P.S. 1248. Wolters also points out that body language is important to the training process. "Your movements should be slow and deliberate, never quick and jerky." Martinis work for me.

"Don't clutter up his brain with useless nonsense," warns Wolters, who is opposed to tricks such as "roll over" or "play Dick Cheney's lawyer" for dogs that have a serious purpose in life. Therefore, no, Muffin, Poppet, and Buster, I am not paying your college tuition so you can take a course called "Post-Marxist Structuralism in Fantasy/Sci-Fi Film." And, meanwhile, no, you can't have a Wii either.

Wolters favors corporal punishment for deliberate disobedience. "Failure to discipline is crueler," he claims. I do not recall my own dad's failure to discipline as being crueler than his pants-seat handiwork, but that may be my failing memory. In any case, a whack on the hindquarters is a last resort. Wolters prefers to use psychology: "You can hurt a dog just as much by ignoring him. For example, if you're trying to teach him SIT and STAY, but he gets up and comes to you,
ignore him.
" When I was a kid, we called this dad working late every day of the week and playing golf all Sunday.

According to Wolters, the basic commands for a gun dog are SIT, STAY, COME, and WHOA. With no double-entendre intended concerning the GIT OVER HERE directive, those are exactly the four things my boy, Buster, will have to learn if he wants a happy marriage. My girls, Muffin and Poppet, on the other hand, seem to have arrived from the womb with a full understanding of these actions—and how to order everyone to do them.