Fishing in April

If the men in my family don’t catch many fish, my guess would be that it’s because they don’t stay in one place long enough to catch anything. I never knew that there was so much commuting involved in fishing. Each and every time that we change spots, we have to load everything back in and out of the vehicles, although mostly we use my cousin Joey’s truck, because it is the most convenient and already smells like dead minnows.

The reasoning behind moving is that there is always something wrong with where we are, and there is always someplace better to be fishing. The other problem is that when we switch locations, everyone scatters briefly from the caravan of vehicles, to swing home, or to Kwik Trip to pick up whatever they’ve forgotten. Inevitably someone reaches the next location faster than the others. They set up not knowing what the others who haven’t arrived yet are going to find wrong with the spot. Common protests are that it’s too windy, it’s too dark, and it’s too crowded. Being the first day that actually feels like spring after a snowy cold winter doesn’t help either. Everyone and their cousins are out fishing.

My cousins all start fishing in Fox Lake, seven miles down the road from Beaver Dam. I don’t know Fox Lake very well, or the park they mentioned, so I circle around the town a few times, which takes exactly 76 seconds and leads exactly to the park eventually. Joey’s big green truck and Al and Chrissy’s silver car are waiting there.

My cousin David is fishing from the pier, a baseball cap over his long hair, a beard growing again on his face. He has a round sweet face and the style of his facial hair make me think “Amish” without meaning to. David is nearly twenty one, and one of the sweetest people I know. He takes care of my pets and my garden when I leave town, fixes my computer regularly, and moves furniture for me. The summer he was born, I came up to help my cousin Chrissy and her husband Al with the shock of babyhood. I slept in David’s room, a small sleeping porch with a roll away cot beside his crib. I fed him bottles in the middle of the night and walked the floor with him when he cried. I turned fourteen that summer and didn’t know that I could love anyone as much as I loved him. Whatever bond we made that summer, we still have. I feel proud and happy and safe with David. When I arrive, he shuffles toward me with his arms spread wide, waiting for a hug.

The wind is coming in gusts, so as soon as I arrive it’s my job to sit in the collapsible lawn chairs whenever anyone gets up to pee by the side of the truck, or check their fishing line. Two chairs have blown into the lake already and have been rendered temporarily unusable.

Al burps loudly from his fishing spot on the shore, a low guttural sound that always surprises me, despite hearing it thousands of times by now.

“Jesus, Al. Did you just burp up a baby?” Al is quieter than most of the members in our family, and only turns to smile at my comment. It starts a conversation about how Al does have unusual burps, but Joey feels the best part is the long sigh that inevitably follows.

“Al has the most satisfying burps in our family,” Joey proclaims knowingly as he casts his line out into the wind. “They even make me feel better.”

Small swallows darted around the waters surface as dusk creeps in, making me realize there must be mosquitoes or some other bugs out for them to frenzy over. Unless the birds were just practicing, which seems unlikely, but so do mosquitoes when I have yet to put my winter coat away for the season.

We pack up all the gear as it grows dark and drive to Frankie’s Point, though that’s not the parks official name. We call it this because Joey’s brother, and my cousin, Frank, used to like to fish there before he died suddenly a few years ago. I’ve never been to Frankie’s Point before, and I stand facing the lake, thinking about the past. I wonder if everyone in my family wishes Frankie were still here when they come to this place. It’s dark now, and the lights from the houses glitter across the lake. I can see why Frankie liked it here. I want to stay, but the consensus is that it’s too busy. I don’t fish, so I don’t get to vote. We don’t even set up. Joey heads out to give on of his kids a ride home, and the rest of us caravan through town looking for a new spot to fish.

When we stop at Waterworks Park, I call Joey to tell him that we’ve left Water Street because the spot was taken, and he asks me about the wind.

“I don’t know. It’s not bad here. Let’s just fish here.” I tell him. Mostly, I just want them to settle in. We’ve been to a bunch of parks, and they all seem fine to me.

“Is it more of less windy than the first place we were at?” he asks me.

“The place in Fox Lake? Less, I think. But I think that it was windier in general then. I think that the wind has died down some now,” I tell him.

“Hmm...” he says, not sounding like he believes me. He isn’t going to want to stay here. He’s going to make us move again, I realize.

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after" according to Thoreau. I think of this as I wait for Joey and watch everyone else set up, except for Al. He says he’s not setting up again until we’re staying somewhere for sure. I’m starting to wonder if that actually happens. And I wonder what it is that my cousins are after, because there is a lot less communing-with-nature-time when you break it up with all this driving around.

When Joey arrives, he unpacks his fishing gear as if we’re staying. He struggles with the poles and the flashlight, so I come to help him. “Hold this,” he tells me as he hands me the flashlight. I take it from him and shine it in his direction, then realize that it’s all wet. I can’t figure out why it would be wet, and then I know.

“Ugh. Joey, seriously, was this in your mouth?” I pull it closer to my face and see that the tip of the flashlight is wet. So is my hand.

He laughs, “You’re the one who took it.” He tells me nonchalantly.

We stay long enough for everyone to get set up, for Rob to get his line tangled with the guys on the next pier, and for Joey to catch a bullhead. Joey tells me that bullheads don’t count as catching fish. I watch him struggle with the fish and the hook, and I think that it probably matters to the bullhead, but I don’t say it out loud. I get enough crap just for asking them not to throw cigarette butts in the river and explaining how dangerously low the planet is on clean groundwater. When the fish is free of the hook, Joey throws him in the water behind him without looking back.

I don’t actually fish anymore, though I was raised with the sport as the highlight of most of my family activities. By my teens, I would mostly just lie in the boat and read my book. I have nothing against fishing, although I do try to follow the policy of “do no harm,” as a general life principle. Still, in all fairness, people do need to eat. If it was necessary, I think that I could hunt and fish to provide for my children. But for now, I have a Piggly Wiggly less than half a mile from my house that sells everything that I need.

Joey decides that this time we should go out to try Sunset Park, but plans change mid-route and we end up at the dam. There are no open spots by the parking lot, so we carry all of things over the bridge and dam itself into Cotton Mill Park. I realize that we could’ve parked on Haskell Street, where my cousin Frankie lived before he died, and that we wouldn’t have had so far to walk. I don’t voice this to them, because it makes me worry that they’ll pack everything back up just to park closer, and I just want to sit down and relax.

I watch the men in my family once again unpack their gear and get set up to fish. The rushing water of the dam is soothing, and downtown Beaver Dam can be seen down river. Al puts a small stick in the ground to prop up his fishing pole, and settles into his chair to smoke a cigarette. This is classic Al, he goes with the flow.

Joey has brought his son, Willy, for the second half of the fishing expeditions. Willy is the child that Joey’s father cursed on him years before. “If you ever have a son, I hope that you have one exactly like you…” he warned, and it came true. By two years old, Willy had learned to run full speed into the baby gate to the kitchen like a line backer, slamming the gate and himself into the ground to break into the kitchen. He did this dozens of times a day. He’s rambunctious and funny and loveable, like Joey. He and my daughter Georgia are in the same class at the middle school. They played pee wee tackle football together for years, and share band concerts and friends. Their names list one after the other on the high honor roll in the local newspaper every semester, and both Joey and I swell with pride. I grew up with Joey, and I think of it as an everyday miracle to watch our children do the same thing.

Willy gets his line stuck on his first three casts into the dark water. Joey gets less amused each time, despite my laughing. He talks to Willy with the flashlight in his mouth again, asking him how he can get snagged on each of his first three casts. The words come out in jumbled bursts, the flashlight getting wetter as he talks. Somehow, we can all understand every word, and I think that it actually seems like a talent. Willy brings his pole over for another hook and minnow, and sets his chair right on top Joeys fishing poles. When Willy reaches down to save the poles, he trips Rob who nearly gets his own hook in his back. Joey is done dealing with Willy, and sends him upstream to fish.

“I knew that I should’ve pulled out,” Joey mutters through his flashlight once Willy is out of ear shot. I laugh so hard my stomach hurts, and Al tells me that I’m scaring the fish. Once I catch my breath, I look at the happy faces of the men in my family, and think that this is why we’re here. That it doesn’t matter which park we go to, or how many.

We all settle into our seats and Joey says “Now don’t laugh, but I was thinking that the Waste Water Treatment Plant would be an awesome place to fish…”