Back Seat with Fish

As my father drove, I looked longingly at water—ponds and creeks, Lake Michigan, and the Mississippi. Even the muddy stock ponds stippled with coot and the low brown James River aroused my interest as we crossed eastern South Dakota, just outside our destination. But overall, the Great Plains looked flat and parched, and a hot wind—as if cranked from a truck heater—blew across our faces as we walked up to the crumbling athletic building, the door held open by a homemade barbell of pipe and two cement-filled coffee cans. I didn’t know anyone at Dakota Wesleyan University, but the football coaches and players were welcoming. My father stayed with me a few days, helped me open a checking account, get phone service, and find the local sporting goods store. “There’s a lake here,” the man said, pulling out a map and showing us Lake Mitchell. We drove the reddish roads out to the sandy shore. The sun was high, grasshoppers snapped around our legs, and the water bubbled like green pudding. I dug out my spinning rod, made a few casts, dragged in weeds, snagged, and had to break off.

A freshman in the fall of 1983, I started at offensive guard for our football team. The season opened on a warm and bright September afternoon, but every week the prairies grew colder and darker. There were long bus rides to other small colleges in Nebraska, Iowa, and North Dakota, where, by the end of the season in November, sometimes only a handful of people bundled up in the gray stadiums. I got my ass kicked play after play. We won only one game that year—against the University of South Dakota at Springfield, soon closed and converted into a prison. I thought of our undefeated high school season, the marching band, the sunny stadiums packed with hundreds of fans, the plush grass, and short-skirted cheerleaders singing our names. On one bitterly cold, snowy day in Jamestown, North Dakota, we took the field against a team that outclassed us in every way. Our wool-zipped cheerleaders stayed on the bus—and I can’t blame them—and when we got trampled by seven touchdowns, when their defensive end threw me to the frozen turf for the tenth time and then offered a polite hand to help me up, I let go of football.

But I held on to college like an exciting new friend. Even religion seemed interesting—a deep pool I had somehow missed on my first drift downriver. Dakota Wesleyan was a church-related liberal arts university, not a bible college; and though shadowed in some prairie parochialism, it was shepherded by a progressive campus minister, Duane Wilterdink, who exemplified an open-minded Christian light I could admire. In a public discussion on gay and lesbian rights in 1984, Reverend Wilterdink talked about friends who had loving, long-term relationships with their same-sex partners. “That love is as genuine and deep and long-lasting as my love for my wife, Mary,” he said to an unsettled and aroused audience. One night over a beer, I talked with the reverend about the death of my mother and how our pastor and other Christians explained it as “God’s plan,” assuring me she was in a better place. Reverend Wilterdink told me that when Jesus lost his friend, Lazarus, he wept and brought the dead companion back to life. “I guess Jesus wasn’t too happy with God’s plan,” the reverend said, and I smiled. “God didn’t want your mother to die.”

I asked Reverend Wilterdink what it meant to be a Christian. He told me that God’s love, forgiveness, and mercy had come to him through Jesus of Nazareth. “Christ is my savior,” he said. But I could see that he truly embraced people of other faiths and walks—the Native American students observing a sacred sweat, the Muslim students fasting for Ramadan, and wayfarers, like me, steering by the promises and deceits of Whitman’s American Transcendentalism and the scripture of Melville’s Moby-Dick. No other book had ever spoken to me like Moby-Dick—fishing, friendship, fanaticism, and all the big questions I’d been asking about God, man, and the universe rolled before me in words that felt warm and deep. I told Reverend Wilterdink that I must be an agnostic, and he reminded me that Thomas Henry Huxley, the popularizer of the term, declared that even he was “too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.” That jibed with my journey, and I told the good reverend that I worshipped fish and sex. He closed his eyes and slapped a hand to his forehead, but I felt he really respected and liked me even though I was not a Christian.

Reverend Wilterdink taught a philosophy class called “Drugs, Alcohol and Altered States of Consciousness” that explored getting high through various cultural, literary, religious, and philosophical contexts. Were acid, mushrooms, marijuana, and alcohol possible means toward spiritual enlightenment? “Yes, of course,” I answered, and the other students smiled—some in approval, some in condescension. Several of us argued that acid and mushrooms were in a different corral than marijuana and alcohol. “Weed and wine are easier to ride,” one cowboy put it perfectly. In the end, the reverend helped me to see that drugs were at best a shortcut to what must properly be a long journey of meditation, prayer, practice, and study toward higher consciousness. “You can’t just fish with dynamite,” I concluded. “You’ll ruin everything.”

But the reverend and I also agreed that alcohol was a wonderful social lubricant and that peaceful sociability was at the heart of a happier universe. To assist in my pursuit of a happier universe, my old New York friend, Eugene, had set me up with fake ID, and I had no trouble buying beer and liquor and getting into South Dakota bars. There was also plenty of chowder available. “Iowa’s fourth leading cash crop,” a student-farmer told me, handing me a little bag outside the grain co-op where he worked.

With the harvest came South Dakota’s hunting season. My father let me bring my 12-gauge shotgun from home. I kept it in my dorm room closet behind my only sport jacket. The campus was bristling with rifles and shotguns, but I knew of only one incident—discharged in the ceramic studio, where a shelf of wonky, unfired final exams were blasted to pieces, and the shaken teacher gave everyone an A.

“I had nothing to do with that,” Birch Hilton chuckled, wiping down his old Winchester and putting it back in his closet. “Hey, you wanna do a little pheasant huntin’ on Saturday?” he asked.

Birch was tall, muscular, and handsome with jet black hair, dark Persian eyes, and the five o’clock shadow of a rugged movie star. A linebacker and psychology major from White Lake, South Dakota, a very small town west of Mitchell, Birch carried the humble and generous plainsmen’s spirit. After another Saturday home game trouncing, we eased our bruised bodies into his little Opel, a taped flashlight replacing one of the headlights where he’d hit a cow, and drove the 35 miles on Highway 90 to his house, a tired wooden three-story in need of a paint job. His sweet mother prepared a big dinner of roast chicken, peas, and mashed potatoes. There was fresh milk and government cheese, small provisions for rural communities devastated by the farm crisis. Birch’s father, Clark, was also tall with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and a finely chiseled face. Clark once owned a lumberyard but now worked part-time as a feed salesman. He dished out potatoes and asked me questions about my family and New York, while Birch’s brothers and sister listened and giggled over my accent. There was no wine or beer on the table. We said grace and dug in. After dinner, his sister played piano.

In the morning we drove the family pickup out to a rundown farm where Clark had arranged for us to jump some ducks. A man in torn, stained coveralls came out and muttered about a tractor he “couldn’t sell for shit.”

“Bert’s losing the place,” Clark confided as we walked up to the first berm.

“All right,” Birch coached. “We’re gonna get low and come over that rise. If you see ducks, blast ’em.”

Birch and I crouched and crept to the crest, peeking over at a half dozen puddle ducks and a couple coot swimming nervously away. We stood up, their wings opened, and we fired, dropping four birds. I ran down to the water’s edge, tested the bottom with a stick, and then walked into the shallows and retrieved the ducks: two hen mallards and a pair of pintail, the drake’s beautiful rusty head cradled by a crescent moon.

The same tactic on a larger pond dropped two birds that fell far from shore. I hated losing game and went waist deep into the cold water to get one duck, a small bufflehead Birch called a butterball, asking me if a mouthful of duck was worth a wet ass. The other bird drifted toward the middle of the pond. We walked back to the barn, and Clark found Bert and asked him if he had a dog. “Dead,” Bert said. But he went into a shed and came back with a spinning outfit, the dented reel half loaded with heavy blue line tied to a melted rubber crayfish. “You know how to use one of these?” he asked me. “Yes, sir,” I reached for the rod. Back at the pond, my first cast came up short. Clark had an old bolt in his pocket, and I tied it on, but I still came up short. Birch gave it a try and hooked a fish. Clark and I laughed, and Birch took his time playing gracefully, without any drag, a solid two-pound largemouth bass. He flipped the fish onto the dry grass, took another cast, and hooked the duck. We gave the bass and ducks to Bert, who showed not the least bit of surprise; he just nodded, took them into the back kitchen, and came out with a bottle of homemade wine, handing it to Clark. “Don’t let your mother see that wine,” Clark said, passing the bottle to Birch.

Church had let out, and we could see people hurrying home to change into their hunting clothes. We stopped for coffee and then drove on to meet a large party of hunters at the edge of a cornfield. There were introductions and curious exclamations that I’d come all the way from New York to hunt White Lake’s fine pheasants. Marching across the field against four men stationed as blockers, Clark yelled, “Don’t shoot the blockers.” I laughed. “I’m serious,” he repeated. “Happens every year.” Wet pants chaffed my thighs, but I was happy to be walking the corn, the rustle of pheasants running ahead of us, suddenly flushing in wild bursts of cackling color. I was overeager and blasted one rooster just a few feet ahead of me. “Easy, New Yorker,” someone said.

So I took it easy, waited for the pheasants to fly up and out, and dropped a couple long-tailed cocks that would make good eating. I thought of those British driven shoots where tweed-jacketed gentlemen and ladies swung Purdey shotguns, retiring to brandy-warmed talk on leather chairs in mahogany-paneled clubs. The White Lake hunt included the poorest of men in ripped coveralls, women of all ages, high school kids in Mötley Cruüe sweatshirts, the town doctor, and a very old man in a forties-style orange cap and vest who bagged his limit of three male pheasants, drove the birds home, and came back for a second round. Limits were not strictly observed. Everything got eaten.

Birch and I were feeling achy from Saturday’s game, so we crashed out in the pickup. I woke cold and prickly. Birch called over his father and drove us home. I needed some dry pants, but the only ones that fit my thick thighs belonged to his mother. While my jeans tumbled in the drier, I toured White Lake wearing Mrs. Hilton’s turquoise stretch pants and Clark’s mucking boots. After lunch, Birch said we should drive the back roads to Mitchell and do a little road hunting. We uncorked Bert’s wine and, with our loaded shotguns resting between our seats, rolled slowly down gravel roads, watching for pheasants. Birch was great company, and we listened to Dylan and Hendrix and talked about the football season and Coach Bob Bozaid—how he had us pray after every practice and before every game, preaching that “God wanted us to win, that God would lead us to victory.” Bozaid was a decent man, but he was a losing coach. Not that he could have done much with my body and soul, but the team had potential, and he could have tried harder to draw from realms outside the supernatural. “It takes more than God to win football games,” Birch said. I agreed and handed him the wine. A coyote crossed the road and disappeared into the willows beside a slough.

Winters were long, cold, and snow-filled in South Dakota, and by April I was eager to fish. Without the demands of spring football, I could concentrate on studying and partying. One Friday playing eight ball at the Corner Pocket, a beer and pool joint downtown on Eighth Street, I met Woody. With a father in the CIA, Woody had lived in Abu Dhabi, Cairo, and Rome; he knew languages and cuisines. He spent four years in the Marines and thought he might try some college. When Woody discovered new things he got excited. One icy night he blew into my room with a bottle of whisky, reciting Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Aengus.” “They don’t teach this shit in the Marines,” he exclaimed, and I applauded.

Woody and I heard that northern pike and walleye were being caught on spoons in Firesteel Creek, so we stopped by the biology lab to talk with our professor, Bob Tatina, who confirmed the report. Tatina was setting up a lab, but he went to the board and drew a section of the creek down from the Lake Mitchell spillway, chalking in the bends and some downed trees, indicating spots where he caught fish. “Cast upriver and reel quickly enough to keep that spoon moving. Flutter and drop,” Tatina said. “And be careful. Water’s still cold and fast.”

Woody and I jumped in his old car and swung by the courthouse to get fishing licenses, but they were closed. “Screw it,” I said. We drove out to the Firesteel, parked along a barbed wire fence where some cows grazed, and walked through a stand of elm around heaps of crumbling bricks to the creek. The water was a little high and cloudy, but we were excited, hurrying down the trail to the spot Tatina recommended, casting red and white Dardevles and hoping. My well-worn green Penn spinning reel had a reliable drag, but the springs wore out periodically and the bail wouldn’t snap over. This was happening today, and as I fumbled with the reel, my spoon found a snag. “Goddamn it!” I said, reeling up tight and jerking the rod. There is nothing worse than a snag to disrupt and frustrate the joy of fishing, and learning to physically and psychologically cope with snags in fishing and in life is necessary for long-term survival. Cursing really helps.

Down at the water’s edge, trying to get a reverse angle on the hook, the mud greased my boots, and I slid into the cold creek. “Shit,” I yelled and walrused up the bank. Woody laughed and scolded me for scaring the fish. I got my footing, tried to jerk loose my spoon, slipped again, and snarled my line in a spiky bush. I took a deep breath, untangled my line from the bush, tightened down my drag, and broke off from the snag. Then I recognized the distinctive tan uniform and badge of the game warden coming down the trail.

“Creek’s a little high,” the warden replied. “Can I see your licenses, please?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “We stopped by the courthouse, but they were closed. It’s the first time out this year. We always get licenses.”

The game warden was cool and polite, but he confiscated our equipment and wrote us tickets for fishing without a license, one hundred dollars. We’d get our gear back when we paid the fine, but we’d lose our fishing privileges for a full year.

I didn’t have an extra hundred dollars in my checking account, so I called Aunt Lil, and she gave me a hard time but wired the money. The warden visited the dorm and returned my spinning rod and tackle bag. I thanked him and asked if he wanted a drink. It was four o’clock on a Friday afternoon and the improvised bar in our Graham Hall room was in full swing. The warden laughed, “I thought this was a dry campus.”

“How could a fisherman survive on a dry campus?” I said. He smiled and declined my offer. We parted on friendly terms.

The college officially prohibited alcohol, a ban that was not enforced in Graham Hall, an old granite building with large rooms reserved as a co-ed honors dorm. On most Fridays and Saturdays, not to mention many other nights of the week, the men and women of Graham partook in the honorable customs of drinking, smoking, and even bowling, using the third floor hallway as an alley with real balls and pins snatched from Village Bowl during the chaos of a power outage.

Woody did not pay his fine, and when he was absent from class on Monday, I explained to our beloved American literature professor, Joseph Ditta, that Woody had checked into prison. Professor Ditta questioned whether Woody, like Thoreau, who also loved to fish, was making a political statement against the government’s infringement of inalienable rights, such as the right to catch a fish. “No,” I said and smiled. “He just wants to save a hundred bucks.” Woody’s girlfriend, Xanti, a zaftig strawberry blonde partial to cigarettes and Led Zeppelin, shook her head in disgust. Another guy added, “Render unto Caesar.” There was talk going every direction. “Okay, let’s move on,” Ditta raised his hands, calmed the class, and continued discussing Walden. Woody’s time in the clean single cell with room service allowed him to study and read without interruption. He cleared his fine, retrieved his gear, and earned three A’s that spring semester.

State law suspended my fishing privileges for the rest of the year, but with Thoreau in mind, I continued to angle without a license. I believed in fishing licenses and regulations. My fine was just. But that fine had been paid, and the extended suspension of fishing privileges seemed unfair. I felt morally entitled to fish and so became a renegade angler, taking long fish-walks, assembling my rod and screwing on my reel in the wooded backwaters, pulling essential gear from a pocket, and letting go everything I caught. Releasing fair-sized, edible game fish was good for me, and I began to appreciate catch-and-release, especially when I caught the same twenty-inch pike with an obvious nick out of his tail two days in a row. This sharply distinguished fishing from hunting, where the endgame is death. There was no releasing those pheasants we blasted. Legendary angler Lee Wulff said it well, “Game fish are too valuable to be caught only once.”

Releasing fish keeps the game in play. And play it was, though still at the expense of the struggling fish. It was no longer emotionally necessary for me to bring home an actual fish and receive praise from my father and aunt or my brother’s admiration—though I did show off a photo now and then. A photo of a big fish documented the specimen and helped quell the doubters. But more than ever I loved to fish for the sake of fishing. So was this a sport? Canadian outdoorsman, writer, and courtroom judge Roderick Haig-Brown explained that recreational angling started with “the first man who sneaked away to the creek when the tribe did not really need fish.”

When Birch and our friend Ben Whitehorse started talking about the Missouri River and big walleye, I wanted to go. Birch was seeing a woman in Chamberlain, and he’d meet us on the water. Ben would drive me and Abe, a Methodist scholarship student from Zimbabwe, to the river, and I’d buy the beer. Ben was a heavyset Sioux Indian with neatly trimmed short hair and large glasses that always seemed smudged with something. He played football but had a gentle demeanor and spoke softly in a Lakota accent that reminded me, strangely enough, of the Yiddish-flavored voices of New York. Ben drove a dented, rough-running Plymouth Volaré with a good stereo and an overstuffed trunk tied down with baling twine.

We rode west, cranking the Scorpions and passing a flask of cheap whisky. Thinking a famous walleye spot on the Missouri might occasion a game warden, I decided to get a fishing license under a slightly different name with a new address—easily accomplished in the days before the Internet. Outside town, licenses were sold in mini-marts with fishing and hunting supplies. You could pull into M & H Mini-Mart and get a burrito, beer, whisky, a few boxes of shotgun shells, sinkers, hooks, and a fishing license. Reissued as Hal Hughes of White Lake, I bought us a case of beer and took the back seat for the long drive to Ben’s brother’s place.

“You’re on the rez now, so watch your step, wasi’chu,” Ben joked. I had fallen asleep and woke to rolling green hills and a wide horizon of bright water. I looked at Abe, a very black African with a shaved head and a beaded necklace. “What’s who?” Abe squinted at me. “Wa-shee-chu,” Ben sounded out the word. “You’re a black wasi’chu,” he pointed at Abe and laughed. Wasi’chu, roughly equivalent to honky, haole, gringo, or gaijin, refers, often contemptuously, to nonnatives, but Ben’s teasing use of the term lightened up the whole issue of race when we were together.

We drove over cracked streets spouting grass, and what looked to be a squashed rattlesnake, into town where we were further instructed to keep the beer down and watch the blue dog. “I’ll get him on his chain,” Ben said as we pulled into the drive and a gray-blue heeler jumped on the hood, barking furiously. “Oh my god,” yelled Abe, spilling beer on his pants.

Ben’s brother lived in a trailer home reroofed in tin sheeting weighed down with tires. He and his girlfriend hardly looked up at us when we walked in. The place was overflowing with ashtrays, dishes, wrinkled magazines, and cassette tapes piled over a coffee table. Ben came out of a bedroom with two heavy spinning rods and a tin tackle box. He asked his brother if he wanted a beer. “You can leave some,” the brother said and brought out a bong, setting it on the coffee table. Abe and I kneeled on the dirty rug and the others sat on the saggy couch, and we all had a good smoke. Abe loved to get high, and when I asked him if he smoked in Zimbabwe, he burst out in laughter and said, “Of course, Use.” Abe always dropped the “H” off my name. The woman, Sandy, was quiet until she smoked, and then she kept talking and asking me questions about what I thought of “backward-ass South Dakota.”

“I like it here,” I told her. She had a pretty brown face with some acne scars and shiny black hair to her shoulders.

“I’m sick of this place,” she said. Ben’s brother dropped a big Ziploc bag of deer jerky on the table. He said he shot the deer last fall, and when I asked him about it, he came alive with describing the mule deer buck and how it walked right up to him out of a draw.

“Take the bag,” he said. Sandy pulled out a big twist of jerky and bit into it. “Yum.”

High and happy, we bumped and dipped down Tribal Highway 5 along the river, past endless rises of buffalo grass studded with scrubby cedar and juniper, turning north to Fort Thompson and Big Ben Dam. “This is my goddamn dam,” Ben laughed. “So watch your step.” From the back seat, using phrases learned in sociology class, I asked Ben about “the Native American community.”

“Maybe you’re native American, man. We’re Indians. Indians. It’s life on the rez, man. We scalped the last New Yorker who came here.”

Ben Whitehorse was having some more fun with me, but I was interested in his life and asked more questions.

“Indians been fucked over for a long time, so we know how to do it,” he said. “I’m just doing my thing. Live and let live, you know? Get a little business started and help my folks out. Maybe marry some big-titted Norwegian gal.”

“Fucking cool, Use,” Abe said from the front seat, smiling and handing me a hunk of jerky. We parked below the dam and waited a while for Birch, then decided to head down to the water, climbing over big pink rocks that armored the banks. It was hard going over the rocks with poles and tackle and two sixes of beer; painful missteps killed my buzz. Abe said he was just gonna watch, but Ben rigged a rod for him and was teaching him to cast. I felt the need for a little space and climbed downriver a couple hundred feet, watched the high-shouldered pelicans swim and dip, and started throwing my crippled shad crank bait.

Before us was the Missouri River that once watered endless tall grasses, buffalo herds, and the Sioux high on their mustangs. The Missouri of Lewis and Clark, cattle ranching, depressed Indian reservations, eroding soil, riprap, five dams, and many cities. It was just getting dark, and there were lights and engine sounds from a few boats mixed with the steady hum of the dam’s generators. People seemed to be partying around a fire on the Crow Creek Reservation across the river. The south bank where we fished was deserted. The river smelled flatter than the saltwater around Long Island, but the sound of gulls and lapping waves were familiar. Cast and cast, that’s what you do, reeling fast, then slow, wondering if the next moment will connect you to a walleye. I stared at the darkening river, rubbed a bruise on my knee, and remembered my father giving me arrowheads that he found at construction sites. Long Island once had many flourishing tribes—Setauket, Shinnecock, Montauk—great fishing people wiped out in the early waves of European settlement. By the end of the nineteenth century, the plains Indians were also broken down. With land, water, and so many traditions lost, it was good to see the Sioux of Lower Brule still hunting and fishing.

After an hour of steadily increasing wind, I heard Ben Whitehorse whooping up a storm, and I scrambled over the rocks to see what was going on.

“It’s big, Use. Like whale, man,” Abe was standing and gesturing with his cigarette. Ben was fast to a fish. Birch showed up, honing in on our gusting voices and providing the only working flashlight. Something came into the beam. Was it a beaver? Its smooth black body spanned more than a yard, and it seemed to have the tail of a shark and the bill of a goose. “What the hell is that?”

Here was another fish I had long read about but had never seen or touched. After three runs the exhausted creature, firmly snagged at the base of its rostrum, splashed beside the rocks. Abe held the light, and Birch reached down and grabbed its bill. The fish was easily four feet long, and we carried it under a light in the parking lot. Dark, small eyed, and flabby finned, it had smooth skin like a catfish and a large toothless mouth used for scooping plankton that it strained through gill rakers. “Ram-jet feeding,” Professor Tatina would explain back at school. The paddlefish’s amazing snout is loaded with electroreceptors for detecting schools of plankton that it swims through openmouthed. Responding to breeding cues triggered by the faster spring water, paddlefish congregate at the dam’s tailrace each May. I imagined this fish finning like a right whale in the dark current until Ben’s barbed hook struck home. “They’re good eating,” Ben said. “All but the red meat—I throw that stinking shit to the dogs.”

We hadn’t caught any walleye, but a strong wind was building, and this was enough for tonight. “Let’s hit the bar in Reliance,” Ben suggested, lifting the heavy fish into his already full trunk, setting it on top of a barbecue grill he never got around to assembling and some highway cones and raincoats. “Okay, Reliance. Let’s go,” I said. Birch followed in his car, and we sailed out, feeling quite pleased with our mighty catch, lighting and passing the pipe, smoke rolling out of the widows—the rusty, dented, taped, and twined old cars plowing through the prairie night. Ten minutes down the road, we heard screeching tires and a horn. Looking back, we saw Birch stopped on the shoulder. There were no other cars, so Ben backed up. Birch was standing over something on the pavement. It was the paddlefish, his snout and head ironed by the Opel’s bald tire.

“Your fucking trunk started opening wider and wider, then shit, that fish jumped right out.”

“Hell yeah, my old man brought home a pheasant he hit with his pickup,” Birch added. “But never any fish.”

We all started laughing, really laughing, and Abe told us about a bus that once hit a buffalo and the town celebrated with a feast. Not wanting to be outdone, I told the men about a raccoon Herbie picked off Route 112 with a prime pelt worth thirty dollars.

We wrapped the fish in some plastic from Ben’s trunk, and I set it beside me on the backseat, patting it often.

I stayed up late in the dorm lounge watching a movie from the early sixties starring Rock Hudson as a tackle salesman and fishing pro who’s never been fishing. A beautiful woman has to teach him to fish. The movie was terrible, but the opening song, “The favorite sport of a man is girls,” and the photomontage of pointy-breasted women in sports attire stayed with me. There were parties where a girl from class and I would start talking, kissing, and if things felt right, we’d find a room or a bush or the backseat of a car. I had a lot to learn, and I paid attention.

One night after a few hours of steamy dancing, I hooked up with a girl and we had a wild time in the backseat of a friend’s Chrysler. I noticed that the currents were saltier than usual, in fact, the aromas and flavors were downright fishy. Almost exactly like peeled shrimp at a summer picnic. People joke about this, but I was fascinated by the connection, the oceans within, some deep channel back to our marine origins. After a one-night stand or a couple random hook-ups in my first years of college, I found myself playfully objectifying sex in the language of fishing. “Got my limit last night,” I grinned at Woody toweling off in the dorm bathroom.

Crude, sure, but such jokes allowed us to discuss those aspects of sex that swam below love.

Literature, I soon learned, took such crudities and turned them into art. A number of old poems compared courtship and seduction to fishing, but it was the women who were doing the casting, like Shakespeare's Cleopatra:

Give me mine angle; we’ll to th’ river. There,

My music playing far off, I will betray

Tawny-finned fishes. My bended hook shall pierce

Their slimy jaws, and as I draw them up

I’ll think them every one an Antony,

And say, “Aha! You’re caught.”

At once victorious with their lines and eyes,

They make the fishes and the men their prize.

And in “The Bait,” John Donne describes “sleave-silk flies” that “Bewitch poor fishes’ wand’ring eyes,” but a comely woman:

… need’st no such deceit

For thou thyself art thine own bait;

That fish that is not catched thereby,

Alas, is wiser than I.

The Holiday Inn’s Shipwreck Lounge in Mitchell, South Dakota, was a good place to hook up. There were older women eager to talk with college students, and I was taken home a couple times. In one instance, the woman’s separated husband came to the house at seven in the morning to retrieve some tools. “Shit,” she said and ordered me to “Stay.” I waited like an anxious dog in the bedroom until he left, and she returned to free me. Having coffee together downstairs in her kitchen, I saw a number of photos of the man still taped to the fridge. In one photo he was holding a huge walleye. “Damn,” I shook my head, “Where did he get that?”

In my junior year of college I started dating Janet, a perky, petite blonde who loved sex but also loved to think, talk, read, and even fish a bit. She was from Montana, and we launched a 1986 spring break trip into a blizzard. State police closed the interstate, directing cars into the town of Wall, where we bedded on the floor of a church and quietly consecrated the Lord’s blessing of sensual affection when the lights went out. The next morning brought some stares from the congregation, more tire-spinning roads through western South Dakota and Wyoming, over the border into Montana where we slept in our car at a gas station in Garyowen. Just to the north was the Little Bighorn Battlefield. At first light, running the heater, Janet and I talked about Custer and his men, the terror they must have felt when they knew the battle was quickly turning against them. I imagined a man my age, twenty, clutching an arrow piercing his side. We talked about the Indians celebrating their well-deserved victory, the cries and singing, the women coming onto the field to cut the cocks and balls off the dead soldiers.

Janet’s father met us outside Lewistown. Spending time with the father of a girl you’re bedding can feel a little weird at first. But he introduced me to good trout water and liked the way I fished, coaching here and there, only admonishing if I did something stupid like leave my rod unattended on a rock ledge while I went to the car for beer. We fish-walked rivers, casting spinners and catching gorgeous rainbows. Janet joined us in Lewistown to fish Big Spring Creek. She was a good stream walker and spinnerette, making precise casts behind boulders and under logs, catching a nice brown trout that I killed with a rock and carried on a willow branch pushed through its gills. We also plunked spillways with trout eggs that Janet’s father had saved from earlier catches. He wrapped dime-size clusters of eggs in small squares of stocking hose that stayed firmly on the hook while oozing the irresistible smell of spawn. Trout, like many fish, love to eat their own eggs. Janet and I hooked one- and two-pound cannibal rainbows, swinging them up and over the concrete. Retiring for drinks and lunch at the river-straddled Montana Bar, I stared down through the Plexiglas floor window at trout hovering safely in green light.

Janet’s family had a camper that she and I used for another trip to the Black Hills and Lake Pactola with Woody and his girlfriend, Xanti. Woody and I poached a couple ducks with his Sears and Roebuck .22 and then unfolded chairs on the cold, rocky shore, plunking corn nibblets for trout. Like the old Montana poet, Dick Hugo, we set our poles on forked sticks, eased our bundled-up backs into folding chairs, drank blackberry brandy, smoked a few cigarettes, and waited for the rods to dance. When it warmed up a bit, the women joined us. We caught four or five nice trout, cleaned them by the lake, played cards in the camper, and started cooking. Woody breasted out the ducks and cut the meat into small chunks that we salted and fried in butter and garlic. Xanti baked the trout in foil with butter, mushrooms, and roasted almonds that Woody shoplifted from a mini-mart. The food was great, and as we finished, I leaned back, patted my belly, and forecasted, “More nice ones tomorrow.” Janet looked at me in surprise. “We fished all day,” she said. “I was freezing out there.”

“We didn’t fish all day. We fished a few hours,” I retorted. I knew Janet found this kind of fishing boring—she was an active woman, and I admired that—but I had never been to a trout-filled mountain lake and was hoping to spend the next day working lures in deeper water. Woody and Xanti felt the tension and stepped out for a smoke.

Janet was, of course, making a reasonable request. For most normal people, six hours of fishing in thirty-degree weather was enough. We negotiated that I could have a morning of angling while she read. In the afternoon we would go for a hike near an old gold mine.

Early next morning, Woody and I fished-walked to the other side of the lake. With stinging fingers and freezing rod tips, we caught a few more rainbows. Back at the camper for lunch, we ate grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup and then set out on a hike through the spruce and ponderosa pine that proved perfect for getting the blood flowing, seeing the land, and bringing us together. This feels good, we agreed, warm in our strides. As we turned back, it started to snow. The women looked beautiful with crystals shining on their wool caps and in wisps of blonde hair. Three mule deer held dark against the whitening brush, and there were tracks of what might have been a cougar—big round prints as wide as my hand.

That night in the camper after another fish dinner, full, tired, and comfortably drunk, Woody and Xanti climbed in the bunk over the cab, and Janet and I got under the covers on the narrow foldout below. We started kissing and were moving into each other when I heard Woody and Xanti above.

College life opened up many possibilities and made clear some limitations. Although I enjoyed my biology classes, dewy dreams of becoming a naturalist like John James Audubon, John Muir, or Aldo Leopold evaporated over the increasing heat of data crunching, statistical analysis, and the glowing promise of computers. I wanted to be in the field sketching and writing notes about spawning bass and migrating osprey. I wanted to describe the colors, sounds, and movements of animals in ways that would dazzle and excite readers. I wanted to use metaphor. “Then you want to be a writer,” Professor Ditta advised. So I steered from biology to English, wrote poems and essays, worked on the school paper, edited the literary magazine, and put together The Birch and Henry Show.

Inspired by Late Night with David Letterman, Birch and I interviewed and roasted local personalities, featured live music, pet tricks, and our own parodic skits of campus life. In 1986 we hosted George McGovern, alumnus and former Dakota Wesleyan professor. McGovern grew up in the small town of Avon, South Dakota, and became a straight-talking populist plainsman. He had a progressive vision and a loyal following, but he lost big in the 1972 presidential election to Nixon. Cranking Van Halen’s “Running with the Devil,” we introduced McGovern—he was quick, funny, generous, and willing to roll with our irreverent interrogations. I asked him later if he liked to fish. “Yes,” he said. “But the fish don’t much like me.”

Unlike McGovern, Birch had never ventured far out of South Dakota, so I invited him to Long Island for a few weeks of summer fun. A handsome dark tower with understated humor and gentle, polite manners, Birch was a huge hit with my family and friends. “Why can’t you be more like Birch?” Aunt Lil said when he helped her clear the table and fold towels.

One calm morning in June, Eugene and I took Birch fishing aboard the China Cat. Port Jefferson Harbor and the Long Island Sound lay like glass, and we cruised smoothly to our favorite spots off Old Field Point, telling Birch about the time we almost lost the ship. “That’s crazy, man,” he said. Birch had never been on salt water, and after a swig of rum from Eugene’s flask and big smiles from two shapely women on the deck of a passing sailboat, he said, “I feel like a pirate.” We caught some small porgies and a blackfish pup, but bottom fishing on the north shore wasn’t what it used to be, and we decided to make the nine mile run out to Middle Grounds, a tiny island between Port Jefferson and Bridgeport, Connecticut. The bird-splashed island holds little more than an old boarded-up lighthouse electronically sounding and flashing for Stratford Shoal. Calm water allowed us to dock, step out, and walk around. Probably like many before us, we tried the doors and boarded-up windows, yearning for a peek inside. Surely these ghosts have seen whaling ships, frigates, and rumrunners crossing Long Island Sound. There must have been terrible storms and dreadful wrecks. Did they marvel over the canvasback ducks, sea turtles, and dolphins we never see anymore? A herring gull snuck out of a cracked vent, but we could only touch the rough stone and imagine.

When we got back in the boat, I noticed the gas hose had come off the fuel tank. I pushed it back in, but after an hour of trolling I could see we were sucking way too much fuel. We turned back toward Port Jefferson and made it halfway. “Shit. We’re out of gas,” I told them in the sudden silence of our starved engine. We were without a radio and adrift in water deeper than our anchor line. “Might as well keep drinking,” Eugene said. And we did. Beer after beer, moving slowly east with the outgoing tide.

It was getting on four o’clock, and I started wondering what would happen if we didn’t get picked up before dark. Huge ships crossed the sound. We had no running lights, no horn, no charts. How would anyone know where we were? Then Eugene, head wrapped in a red bandana and cracked sunglasses, pointed and rasped, “Arg, mateys. Sail on the horizon.”

We waved over a yacht named Euphoria, and they agreed to call the Coast Guard. We expected orange helicopters and an official boarding, so we flattened all our empty beer cans and hid them under the life jackets. An hour later, a sluggish cabin cruiser showed up, Coast Guard Auxiliary, skippered by our neighbor, ill-tempered Mr. O’Malley, whose house we egged every Halloween. He bull horned, “Put on your life jackets.” It may have been the first time we ever wore them, and they smelled of mold and beer. Our rescuers approached, threw us a towline, and kindly dragged us back to the ramp in Port Jeff, where my father and Eugene’s father were waiting. “What the hell happened?” they asked. We were late, tired, sun-dried, and beer fuzzled, but we explained, and Mr. Jones went over to make a donation while my father assisted getting the boat on the trailer.

Feeling too wasted to pilot, I once again gave the wheel of the family station wagon to Eugene—always a better driver—and we headed home. A few blocks from the water, we heard a terrible grinding noise and looked back to see a shower of sparks. Eugene did what any driver might do when something is wrong—he hit the brakes. But the trailer had come unhitched, and when our car stopped, the wheeling boat rolled on, crashing through the wagon’s back door and widow, showering us in blue glass. “What the fuck!” Eugene screamed.

“I don’t know,” Birch calmly replied, “but I’d say we just got rear-ended by your boat,” the fish chasing, seaweed festooned prow of the China Cat having joined him in the backseat.

My father must have felt some relief in my return to college. But when I called him to say that a student had been killed drinking and driving on a country road outside Mitchell, he got serious and said, “You better think about that.”

I survived my senior year, and my father, Aunt Lil, twelve-year-old brother, David, and my friend, Tim, drove together to South Dakota for my graduation. The occasion raised much revelry, and Professor Ditta and his wife threw a party at their house. My father, who had never graduated high school, talked and laughed all night with professors, parents, and my friends. Woody, Xanti, Birch, and Ben Whitehorse were there. There was a keg of beer, a few bottles of booze, and discreet smokes available in the bushes.

Janet planned to bake a six-pound brown trout I caught a month before from the Missouri River, but while thawing on the counter, the fish was seized and eaten by her two golden retrievers. She instead brought out two pans of baked walleye she had caught with her dad.

Tim and Janet hit it off, and by the time the party was winding down and my family had returned to their motel, I thought something might happen between the three of us. We walked back to my room in Graham Hall, mostly packed up in boxes and suitcases. The little fridge was still plugged in, and there were a few remaining wine coolers, refreshing after the long night of talking. I sat on the couch with Janet while Tim stood above us admiring Janet’s legs.

Tim kneeled before her and began caressing her thighs, and Janet pulled him forward for a long kiss. I joined in.

At seven in the morning, the phone rang. It was my father. “Hey, where are you? Your brother is waiting. You taking him fishing or what?”

“Shit. Okay, right. I’m on my way.” Janet was asleep on the bed, Tim snored on the couch, and I was a sticky, smelly, hungover mess. I shook Tim awake, and we both took hot showers in the communal dorm bathroom, looking a little awkwardly at each other.

Speed dressed and gear gathered, we raced Janet’s pickup to the motel. We were an hour late, everyone was watching television, and my brother was upset. But Tim and I were in high spirits, despite the hangovers, and we promised donuts and plenty of good fishing. I made a big deal over my brother’s new spinning outfit with a red Cardinal reel that Aunt Lil bought him the day before. “Be careful with him around the water,” Lil said. My father gave me twenty dollars. “Hey,” he looked right into my bloodshot eyes, “Watch your brother.”

We stopped for donuts and coffee. My brother, chubby like me at twelve, gobbled down two Bismarcks, drained a strawberry milk, and said he felt sick. Tim and I savored the coffee but couldn’t eat. We drove down a washboard gravel road—“I’m gonna puke,” my brother threatened, but he didn’t—to the grassy banks of the Jim River, where I told him we could catch some catfish. David could cast pretty well, but there were countless snags, and it was frustrating for him and us. I had to help him break off and retie a few times, and he said, “I hate this place.”

I had not fished with my brother for many months, and now he was straining my patience. In this same way I surely must have exhausted my father, a man who doesn’t even like fishing. But maybe that made it easier. I had expectations and got annoyed when my brother didn’t follow instructions or when he complained. David made another swift cast, and the top half of his rod shot into the water. “My pole’s gone! My new pole,” he screamed. “I hate this.”

“It’s okay,” I calmed him. “Just reel slowly.” Somewhere out in the river the retrieved sinker stopped at the top guide and brought the launched section back to us. “Man, Dave. Are you trying to spear the fish or what?” He laughed, and I told him I had shot top sections off my rod many times, explaining how some ferrules are prone to it and that he needed to check that the two pieces were snug. He looked at me and laughed. “That was cool. Can I do it again?”

It had been a couple hours without a bite, so I rigged up a night crawler under a bobber and told David to cast upstream and let it drift with the current. I just wanted him to catch something.

The sun came out and I joined Tim under a railroad trestle and watched my brother cast his baited rig. My little brother had come all this way, and all I did was get drunk and stoned, debauch myself, show up late and hungover, poison him with donuts and abandon him on the bank to fish and fumble alone. He reeled in, lifted the rod straight up and the line wrapped around the tip. I watched him struggle with the tangle but felt too tired to get up and help. He finally unwrapped the line and made a good cast. “That’s it,” I yelled. “Just leave it there a while.”

“That was pretty wild last night,” Tim leaned back on his rolled sweatshirt.

Tim and I fell asleep, waking to my brother’s cries. I looked over and saw him at the water’s edge, rod bent deeply, and something splashing ten yards in front of him. We ran over and saw him battling a large bronze fish. “Take it easy, Dave,” I coached him. “Don’t horse it,” Tim said. The fish fought well. I could see the bold scales and golden, barbeled face of a carp. Most Americans deem carp a trash fish, but this tenacious ten-pounder saved our day. “Good job, bro. He’s huge.” It was no mean achievement for a young angler to keep casting even after his brother passed out. And it takes skill to land a big fish on six-pound test. When the carp came up in the net, we high fived and hugged David. He looked like the happiest kid in the world.

We carried the fish back to town and showed it around. People took photos and congratulated my brother, asking if he planned on going to college in Mitchell. Ben Whitehorse hailed us, explaining that carp “was damn bony,” but he also told us how to prepare it, cutting off the head, gutting, scaling, and then knifing deep slashes in the sides down to the bone. “Deep fry the whole thing,” he made a gesture like a bounce pass. He said the little bones would dissolve and that the flesh was fine. We cleaned the carp and packed it in a squeaky Styrofoam cooler with ice from the motel. But there was so much going on with the move that I called up Ben and asked if he wanted the fish. “No Indian’s gonna eat a damn carp,” he said. “But I know a white lady who might.”

“I think maybe she is. Yeah, something like that,” Ben smiled. “Real nice.”

And that’s the last time I saw Ben Whitehorse, driving off with another big fish in the backseat of his old car.