The Snowfly (5 page)

I felt a knot in my stomach. “That's good.” She had moved to New Orleans early in the month and she was already getting married? It hit me that she had had a boyfriend there all the time and this bothered me, though I knew I had no right to such feelings.

“I hope so,” she said. “I truly hope so.”

What more was there to say?

“Have you tried the new pole?”

“Yes,” I lied. I didn't know why, but I had put the new rod in a closet and left it there. It's never been used.

“I'm so glad,” she said. “Listen, there's something I forgot to tell you in my note. There's a professor in the entomology department. His name's Nash. I hear that if there's anything to know about trout, he'd be the one to know it.”

Another silent interval followed.

“Well,” she said, finally breaking the silence, “I guess that's it. Bowie, there's a force inside you. You can use it or it can use you. Remember, we all get to choose.”

 

•••

 

After I entered college, I never went home to live, but I did visit every few months. After talking to Luanne for the last time, I headed home to spend several days with my folks. On Independence Day the old man and I fished the creek below the cabin and Queen Anna sat on a cedar log on the bank, shucking corn, telling us how hungry she was for fresh trout.

Dad used worms and I used the old bamboo rod with an Adams on a long leader and caught nice-sized browns more often than I deserved and Queen Anna complained bitterly that releasing the fish was “stealing from her stomach.” My old man laughed out loud at her and told her to watch me and she'd see that I had become an “artiste” with my rod and artistes didn't concern themselves with their bellies. He added that he had eight browns in his creel and she wasn't going to starve.

“I don't recall anything in the Good Book about letting God's fishes go,” Queen Anna proclaimed in her own defense.

“That Good Book of yours don't say anything about V-8 engines, airplanes, or apple pies with sharp cheddar cheese neither,” came his rejoinder.

She was quiet after that and I was amazed to witness him challenge her and prevail.

Roger and Lilly came over late that afternoon with their year-old son, Roger Junior. Roger brought beer and when we opened a couple of bottles, Queen Anna scrinched up her face and declared for all to hear that “college is leading my son astray.”

Roger said, “I never went to college.”

My mother looked over at him and rolled her eyes. “You were always a lost cause.”

Roger laughed and held a bottle up to her in salute. Queen Anna stomped into the house.

During dinner, Lilly asked what I had planned after college and I told her I'd probably look for a job with a newspaper.

“Gossip chasers,” my mother announced. “You can't believe anything you read unless it's in a book. Newspaper people drink and have loose morals.”

I held up a beer bottle. “I guess I'm halfway there.”

My mother grimaced, my father laughed out loud, Lilly looked shocked, and Roger Ranger slapped my back in good fellowship.

I expected verbal retaliation, but instead my mother came over to me and kissed the top of my head and patted my hair and said, “You were born good to the core and that will never change.”

“What about me?” Lilly asked in mock indignation.

“We'll deal with you later,” my mother said in a jocular tone. I never remembered her kidding around before and it made me happy.

Lilly and I did dishes after dinner. She and Roger lived only a few miles away from the folks and I knew she would be up on local goings-on.

“Anybody hear where Raina is these days?”

Lilly frowned. “You still carrying a torch for
that
one?”

“No, I'm curious.”

Lilly let the denial pass. “She left when you left and nobody's seen or heard from her since. Gus says she's off ‘chasing the dream,' whatever that means.”

“The” dream, not “her” dream? Odd language, but that was Gus for you. “Well, I hope she catches it.”

“All that one's likely to catch are nightmares,” Lilly said. “More likely, she'll be the cause of them for others.”

“That's pretty harsh,” I said.

My sister turned to face me. “I know you thought she was your friend, but her kind doesn't have friends. She kept you close to make sure you ­didn't beat her out of anything. You never thought with your brain when it came to her.”

“That's not true,” I insisted on Raina's behalf. And mine.

Lilly shook her head.

I felt the levity of the evening leave me.

Queen Anna came into my room as I prepared to go to bed. “I don't want you traipsing around the world,” she said. “God gave me only one son.”

“I have to go where the work takes me,” I told her. “But I'll be careful.”

“Like hell!” she said. It was the only time in my life I heard her use such language.

3

After classes began in September, I called on Professor Lloyd Nash, a Lilliputian man in his early sixties with long snowy hair, a flushed face, and a soft voice. His office was in the fifty-year-old Natural Sciences Building on the old campus.

“You're the student Luanne mentioned.”

I shouldn't have been surprised that she had talked to him, but I was.

“She said you'd want to fish with me.”

“No, sir. The fishing I can take care of myself. What I want is to learn.”

“Bugs, eh. You tie your own flies?”

“Not yet. I don't know enough.”

“Boring stuff, bugs. But if you want to learn about nature and trout, I can teach you.”

I had gotten the scholarship Luanne recommended me for and had a fairly substantial courseload that fall term, but in fact I spent a great deal of my study time learning about insects and fantasizing about trout fishing.

I wanted to learn, and Doc Nash was patient with me. The first thing we addressed was life cycle: how some species went from egg to nymph to adult and others from egg to larva to nymph to adult. Over the weeks we talked about size and color, shape and behavior and habitat. I had always thought that weather played a big role in fishing and Nash said it did, but mainly because meteorological conditions affected water temperature and clarity. In time I came to understand where certain insects would appear and when and how to look for them.

Nash's offices and labs were in the basement of the Nat Sci Building, just down the dingy hall from a huge, poorly lit room with a collection of entomological specimens that looked even older than the building. The Collection Room's clutter was beyond description. Display cases had been knocked over, spilling their contents. Wooden storage boxes were coated with dust and huge cobwebs that looked like muslin. The air was stale and dry. Nash called the room “the purest of chaos.” We went down to the room from time to time so that he could show me something to bring home a point he had been lecturing on. He told me that the collection had been neglected for years and that time, disorder, and inattention had rendered it pretty much useless to the academicians. It would cost more to clean it up than to leave it, so there it sat. I volunteered to organize the room and Nash offered me twice the minimum wage to inventory the specimen collection. I agreed. I would have done it for nothing.

I also had a new job that term with a chain store called Discount City, a huge expanse of can't-live-withouts spread over several acres under one roof. My job was to be visible in my off-the-rack cop suit, but it was also made clear that I was not to
do
anything, my first experience with the principle of deterrence. I had no idea if my presence dissuaded shoplifters, but I tried my best to look fierce when people acted suspiciously. The pay was steady, I could pretty much name my own hours, and when I was on the job and things were slow I could hide out and study. It was one of those places where nobody talked about careers. What we had were jobs, a means of making the money we needed for what was important in our lives right then.

Over time, I gravitated to working nights at Discount City. I had classes in the mornings, and studying and bugs and working in the Collection Room in the afternoons until it was time to go to work.

It was Lloyd Nash who told me about the salmon “fiasco” (his word). The Department of Natural Resources had planted cohos in a couple of Upper Peninsula streams and they had taken hold, which apparently came as a surprise. There had never been salmon in the Great Lakes. The state's fish biologists had been rearing salmon fry in a hatchery on the Upper Peninsula to plant elsewhere to relieve the alewife problem. Back in the 1940s and 1950s alewives—small, prolific Atlantic Coast fish—had moved up the Erie and Welland Canals to propagate in the Great Lakes. This wasn't a problem at first because there were huge populations of lake trout to keep the alewives and smelt in balance. Smelt had been introduced accidentally into the Great Lakes from a private rearing pond in upper Michigan and also taken hold. Then, following the same route alewives took from the Atlantic, lamprey eels moved up and began to kill off the lake trout. As the lake trout died, alewives overpopulated and began massive spring and summer die-offs, washing up onto beaches by the tens of thousands to rot and stink, driving off tourists and disgusting locals. The cohos were intended to take care of the alewife and smelt populations for another state but some got out of the hatchery, swam out into Lake Michigan, and began to come back after that. The brood stock was from Washington State, where the fish were born in rivers, moved into the ocean to grow, and came back up the freshwater rivers when it was time to spawn. Here they were in fresh water all their lives and the fish biologists were astounded when the salmon thrived.

“When man begins to tinker with nature, the results are not predictable,” Nash declared. “And they are invariably disastrous.”

“Do the salmon take flies?” I asked Nash.

“You should see for yourself,” Nash declared with a harrumph and told me where to find the fish. That was the end of that conversation.

I knew a couple of guys majoring in forestry, Mike McGinn from Vermont and Eddie Moody from Georgia. It's funny how people with similar interests gravitate to each other. I had met several guys during my years at MSU who were trouters and I had fished with some of them. Mostly I fished alone, but occasionally I went with McGinn and Moody, who were inseparable pals, good fishermen, and pretty good company. I mentioned salmon to them and both of them had heard about the fish but didn't know much about them. I suggested we head north to take a look, so we loaded McGinn's Volkswagen bus and drove to the U.P. It was mid-October.

According to Nash, the fish were spawning in Thompson Creek, a two-hour drive west of St. Ignace and the Straits of Mackinac. There was a village where the creek dumped into Lake Michigan; upstream the DNR had a hatchery where the fish had been raised. We were miles away when we began to see campers parked along U.S. 2. There were lights and fires on the beaches and the running lights of boats off shore. The village of Thompson had a population of maybe a hundred people, but it looked like a Saturday-night crowd at Olympia Stadium when we pulled in around midnight. The boat launch was backed up for miles to the west. State troopers and county cops tried to direct traffic but were obviously overwhelmed by the crowds. Shadows crossed the road in front of us. We saw people running, shouting, and laughing boisterously. It was a grand and ugly carnival.

At daylight we made our way down to the big lake. We had to hike over an expanse of dunes and when we got closer to the water we heard a low buzz, like a huge bee, and when we stepped over the last sand barrier I stopped and sank to my knees. There were hundreds of fishermen in the surf, all of them shoulder to shoulder, with long stiff rods. You could hear their lines buzzing as they threw heavily weighted lures. The air sounded like there was an electric current whipping around. Now and then someone would scream, “Fish on!” and the snagged salmon would cut across dozens of lines, tangling them all. Despite the mess, fish were being landed and tossed on the beach, where they flopped around, flashes of dying silver in the morning light, sand clinging to them like bread crumbs.

There were two pickup trucks on the beach with aluminum beer kegs in their beds; beer went for a buck for a small paper cup. Guys in rubber hip boots stumbled around, screaming like animals. I saw two behemoths in red plaid hunting jackets suddenly grab each other and fists flew and so many other people were so close that they started punching out of self-preservation. I backed away and stood there with my mouth agape. A cop car wallowed through the dunes with its siren wailing, only to get stuck. The deputies scrambled out and threw themselves into the brawl with their billies and I saw somebody grab a fish by the tail and smack one of the cops in the side of the head, spinning his hat away like a Frisbee. McGinn shouted, “Un-fucking-believable. This is
great!
”

I did not fish. The surf fishermen were slinging treble hooks the size of walnuts; the hooks had been soldered to pyramid-shaped one- and two-ounce lead weights that cast like bullets and hit the water like depth charges. Several men had bloody arms, having been snagged on sloppy backcasts, and there was one man—somebody said he was a doctor—who stitched several wounds while the victims sat on blue-and-white ice chests filled with fish, their tails sticking out, shouting, “Hurry up, for Chrissakes, the fish are out there!” His fee was one dollar a stitch and he had a huge jar filled with dollar bills and dark bloodstains on the sand by his cooler.

This was not fishing and these were not human beings.

Not long after the sun came up, the wind began to blow at near-gale force. There were hundreds of boats off the beach, some barely beyond the reach of surfcasters. At the mouth of Thompson Creek there were so many boats that the surface of Lake Michigan nearly disappeared. There were thirty-foot cabin cruisers and varnished wooden Chris Crafts and aluminum boats and prams and two red-and-white dinghies that bobbed like corks and wooden rowboats and dented canoes, craft of every description mixed together in a giant flotilla. The bulging, rolling surf banged them together and metal thumped and scraped and grated and a pall of blue-gray exhaust raced over them as the wind intensified. Ragged whitecaps rose up and began to break against the beach. Boats began to roll and pitch as the swells grew to more than six feet and canoes flopped toward the beach like abandoned surfboards. The surfmen kept casting and reeling. A small cabin cruiser began to smoke and more cop cars and even a fire engine tried to come through the dunes, but sank to their axles. Uniformed men stumbled out of the vehicles and through the dunes, their service revolvers drawn, shielding their eyes against blowing sand.

I had no idea where McGinn and Moody were and didn't much care. When I got up to the road, there was a faded red bus with a hand-painted sign on the side that said
pussy:
$20 and a woman grabbed my arm as I passed the bus and said, “You want some?” As I pulled away she said, “You're beautiful, honey, I'll blow you for nothing.” I kept going until I found the VW and got in as the sky darkened. Ambulances and fire engines began arriving from the east. I lay in the van and I knew I had seen something that I did not care to ever see again.

This was not sport. It reminded me of accounts I had read of buffalo hunting. I had witnessed something I'd previously only heard and read about: mob mentality, where some sort of group psychology overrides individual conscience. Intellectually I thought I could comprehend the mind-set of a lynch mob, or similar group, pursuing a killer, but a bunch of men chasing fish? It was frightening and I wanted no part of any of it.

Most of the fish were being taken with snagging rigs. In the years that followed, snagging would be outlawed and the blood-crazed insanity of Thompson Creek would become a thing of the past.

My companions eventually came back, dragging four huge salmon. There had been no room for them on the beach, but they had bought a few of the lethal weighted hooks, called spiders, off some of the butchers on the beach and, not wanting to risk eyes and ears, had gone upstream and made their luck there. The salmon were black and where the spider hooks had caught hold, there were gaping pink-and-white tears, chunks gone. They claimed to have tried flies to no avail and quickly abandoned them for spiders, reasoning that a twenty-pound salmon was a good reason to choose effectiveness over sport. When we returned to East Lansing I would never fish with them again. I thought I was immune to big-fish fever and didn't want to be contaminated by those who lacked the willpower to resist. I was a self-righteous fool.

Back at school when I next saw my bug mentor, Nash asked what I thought about what I had seen. There was so much inside me that I stood mute while he looked me over. He gave me his sternest look and said, “Therein lies the road to trophy fish. When the state gives the people what they want, this is how it turns out. Salmon don't belong here. When we start to mess with the natural order, it always turns bad. Trust in nature, son. She provides all the miracles we can handle. If you want to chase big fish, you're on your own.”

The period before Christmas at Discount City was shoplifter season. A state trooper briefed the security team on surveillance procedures and once again we were told that despite our elevated knowledge, we should continue to refrain from any in-store confrontations. If we saw a theft, we were to call the Ingham County Sheriff's Department and they would take care of it. Like many plans I've confronted in life, this one was solid on paper and that's as far as it went. Ingham County was financially strapped. Cop patrols were reduced. Bodily harm might get a response in ten minutes, but shoplifting? Not a chance.

There was a small employee break room in the rear of the building. It had picnic tables and several vending machines. As a rule, most employees were not friendly. We were paid barely more than the minimum wage, and turnover was high. Over the months I saw a few faces that seemed to endure, and we who endured naturally gravitated to each other. As with trout chasers.

Security worked in pairs. My partner, Rick Fistrip, was a senior from Flint enrolled in the criminal justice program at State. I usually saw him when we punched in and again when we punched out. He was always in a hurry and worried about scuffing his gleaming black Corfams.

From time to time I saw customers acting suspiciously; eventually I decided they were mostly just normal people made nervous around uniforms and badges. I'd relate what I saw to Fistrip at punch-out and he'd say, “Yeah, yeah, I saw.”

The first time we met he asked if I was a student. I confirmed I was in journalism, which elicted a look of the sort reserved for a dog rocket on a Grosse Pointe sidewalk.

“Why would you want to be one of those assholes? Reporters obstruct justice or get in the way.”