Night Games

The picture on our calendar this month is Ghidrah, a three-headed, winged dragon busy tromping a small Japanese village into bits and pieces. The calendar is there at the insistence of my preschool daughter. It frightens her over breakfast. She likes to be frightened. I envy the purity of her fright, mindful that adult monsters are weapons, institutions, neuroses, that lack the visceral beauty and immediacy of Ghidrah. The tonic reality of an actual Ghidrah entering Leelanau County trumpeting screams and celluloid groans and spewing fire is a bit too distant to be tasty, like a fantasy of catching and releasing a sperm whale on a streamer fly.

On the outside, though, I know what I will do for a little fright, what I have done to reach the nexus of feeling surrounding this emotion, what dubious adventures I've conceived that have sent me reeling around the world mostly in the name of consciousness to get that familiar jolt of awe and wonderment. But mostly I just use night. It's far easier and obviously cheaper than jumping from a plane. And up near my small farm in northern Michigan there's some interesting night fishing to do from May until October, not to speak of ghostly winter walks under a full moon.

Night fishing. In The Snow Walker Farley Mowat says the Eskimos have over a hundred compound words to describe variations in the condition of snow. The conditions of night own as many variations but there's never been a call for the thesaurus. Night is just night, not certainly for most a time to be walking around in the woods looking for a river that you were sure abutted the end of a particular path. Your ears strain for the sound of rushing water. Nothing. You turn around and the path doesn't look like a path anymore. Above the whine of mosquitoes you hear your heart beating. If you pause long enough the owls will begin again. You make another careful tack into the woods, steaming from the exertion in your waders. Your sweat mixed with mosquito repellent stings your eyes. Your fly rod catches in the tag alders and bends dangerously. But then you spot a landmark clump of yellow birch and stop long enough to hear the river just beyond.

There is a strange fragrance to a river at night that I've never been able to identify, some water-washed mixture of fern, rotting poplar, cedar, and the earthen odor of logjams. If you fish long enough at night alone and are a trifle unstable anyway the moon that guides your casts across the river smells vaguely metallic just as the sun that burns the first dew off after dawn smells copperish. This will sound farfetched only to those who haven't been there. I knew a young Ojibwa Indian once who demonstrated to me how he could find deer by their scent. Then he got drunk one day and went to Vietnam and hasn't been heard from since.

Night fishing is best, though, with friends, barring those times obvious to anyone when you want to be alone and clean out your head. I fish mostly with a friend I used to work for, Pat Paton, who is a carpenter and block layer. He is very good at starting fires and it's a solace to sit looking at a fire when the fishing is slow. If we're camping and the night is particularly dark and impenetrable we drink a lot of whiskey. If either of us is in a violently hasty retreat from what is popularly known as the “real” world we cook a steak in the middle of the night. This is an unabashedly primitive coolant to a troubled mind—to eat steak and drink too much whiskey out in the woods in the middle of the night. But it works in the same way as anyone's psychiatrist, I suspect. Maybe even better, assuming you stay out in the woods.

One night I caught a bat. The bat swallowed my fly and under the shaft of my penlight the bat was clearly suffering from the hook. The booze made it even more garish. I couldn't put a bat in the creel with my trout. I couldn't call Pat who as a hardened country boy is afraid of bats and snakes. Luckily another friend was with us that night. This friend is somewhat of a gun nut and he was packing a .357 sidearm for no real reason other than he enjoyed doing so. Everyone knows that a .357 will blow a hole through an engine block and that police use the weapon in some cities because it shoots for keeps. It is good for close-range whale and grizzly attacks and for cutting down trees if you've forgotten your axe.

“Put this miserable bat away. He's swallowed a number eight muddler minnow.”

“Hold the light and stand back,” my friend said.

There was a billowing blue flash and the kind of roar associated with a thunderstorm a foot away. We were covered with riverbank mud. The bat had vaporized. At least we couldn't find him.

“That's a handy piece you got there.”

“Sure is,” he said.

If you get enough trout it's best to cook them immediately. We usually take along a little fat and an iron skillet and salt. The only better way to cook a fresh trout is au bleu, poaching the fish with a little vinegar in the water and serving it with cucumber mayonnaise, watercress, French bread, and white wine.

Night fishing for lake trout on the shores of Lake Michigan is even more susceptible to hard-core buffoonery. It's best to have a driftwood fire because the water can be very cold. In this sort of fishing you get a definite release from the refinements of your sport, and that's one of the best things about night fishing. You can forget the long, delicate casts with a $200 bamboo rod, the minuscule fly drifting toward the water on a pound-test leader like the bug it's supposed to imitate. The sophisticated trappings disappear and you're young again with a spinning rod and plug, on some elemental but fun gathering mission. The legal limit is now three but a few years back it was five and the trout often average over ten pounds. We caught ten one night, over a hundred pounds of lake trout, then discovered that my old station wagon had lost its brake fluid a half-dozen miles from the nearest house. It was fine caroming off trees on the logging road on the way out. The main thing was to make the blows glancing rather than direct. You return to the yellow light of the tavern or home like a blinking creature wakened from a sleep in which he has been given back his health.

We forget our ears or only use them casually except while listening to music. My first memory of night fishing was as a boy in 1946 on a small lake we shared with a half-dozen other cabins. One of the cabins owned a small war-surplus diesel generator, while the rest were lit by kerosene. I would row my father around at night while he plug-casted for bass. After the doctor turned off his generator our ears would slowly attune to the plop of the bass plug hitting the water, the creak of oars, perhaps a loon's cry and the frogs and crickets along the shore. Denied one sense, another is enlivened until you can hear the fish strike and know when to strike back. Without sight the world becomes almost unbearably tactile. The clownishness that creeps in is a reaction to a near embarrassment over how deeply the experience is felt, an escape from muddiness into clear water.

I stood one night in the Bechler Meadows in the southwest section of Yellowstone Park. There were no people for miles and in the moonlight I heard thousands of migrating herons calling. I had a bad toothache, the best toothache I ever had. My friends were asleep and despite a mixture of codeine and whiskey sleep escaped me. I tried to fish on a branch of the Bechler River but my attention was overwhelmed by the sheen of thousands of acres of marsh grass in the moonlight, my throbbing jaw, the noise of the herons and imaginary grizzlies. I was a night creature as surely as I was a few years later in a boat with a broken-down motor out in Lake Okeechobee. There is a very particular “I don't care” abandonment mixed with a raising of the hairs on the neck that Matthew Arnold described as the test of good poetry. This contrasts with dipping smelt off creeks emptying into Lake Michigan with mobs of other mostly drunk men filling tubs with the small fish which we sometimes cook without cleaning. The coldness of the water makes you think of night fishing off Little Torch Key in Florida. You stand in the water which seems to approximate body temperature, feeling on your bare legs the subtle pull of tide. The fish cast phosphorescent wakes. You are a pure sense mechanism with the easy arc of your fly line repeated so often that it has entered the realm of the instinctive. You are so far “out of your mind” that you are rather surprised, and not necessarily pleasantly, when you return. But that's what sport is supposed to do, and night fishing is a sport with an umbilical connection called play that colors all your other movements. The boy catching bass at night to the man repeating the gesture three decades later is an inexhaustibly sensible step through time.

1976