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After ten minutes
I realize I’ve lost my touch. There’s no
finesse in my cast, no wrist action. My fingers keep getting
caught in the bail, I’ve already got two knots in the line
that are restricting the distance I can throw. I turn around and
can see the ripples of my dad’s one-of-a-kind Rapala
top-water lure, one that probably belonged to his father, within
six inches of the lily pads. It’s something the bass should
be jumping at. I’ve got my trusted assortment of beetle
spins, all different colors and shapes of spinners, the flat
gloss of the reflection underwater which is supposed to mimic the
sheen of helpless minnows adrift in the current. A few years back
I used them to catch thirty crappies in a little over two hours
as we trolled back and forth over deep water. That was before the
great, mysterious kill of ’98, and the summer before I moved
back home.
I
try casting sideways, to slide in just in front of the pads. I
end up ten feet short, but if I throw too hard I’ll snag the
pads, and we’ll have to maneuver in, waste time, and commit
a felony—in Minnesota any aquatic life in public waters is
property of the state, and any removal or transplantation is
forbidden. If you get caught. I’d only seen marshals on the
lake a few times in ten years, but they’d stopped us once to
make sure we had life jackets out within reach, that we had an
extinguisher, fishing licenses.
We’ve
slid fifty feet in ten minutes, the slurping hum of the trolling
motor and the taps of my dad’s feet on the floor control
constant, calculated like digital rain on sound- soothing
machines. The trees become thinner, scattered between small
houses and manicured lawns that spill down to the shore.
Adirondack chairs and citronella lanterns are staked into the
ground in crescents, inner tubes and inflated loungers weighed
down by firewood near tied up boats. Willows rise and explode,
fade branches down to the water like fireworks, tease the surface
with leaves that draw “S” traces in the moving water.
Geese land across the cove without calling directions, falling
almost inaudibly like snow.
My
beetle spin pulls back through the water. I vary speed, let it
sink for a second after it lands, coast it out from the pads and
jerk through the weeds that separate my steady attack like the
Atlantic Wall, then slow it down again in case something has
followed it all the way to the white fiberglass hull, in case it
was thinking seriously about the bait, but waiting for the right
moment, the open door of pensive movement. I remain frozen,
looking into the dark chocolate water, willing the olive drab
shimmer of a bass’s topside, knowing that they don’t
follow, but hit the bait at the moment of impact, and thinking
today could be different, today averages could be outweighed by
telekinesis. That’s how long it’d been since I last
fished. Averages always hold.
Reprinted with permission
from "The Deep Middle"
Copyright © 2004
by Benjamin Vogt
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Bibliography
