When she was twenty-one years old, Lisa earned $20,000 a week working as a model in New York and Paris. She slept with rock stars, cruised the Mediterranean, and got engaged to the heir to an American breakfast cereal fortune.
One morning she woke up and found her boyfriend dead of an overdose. She wasn’t entitled to a cent of his money, so she went back to modelling. But her hard living was starting to show and she wasn’t as much in demand. Her next boyfriend was a Saudi playboy who gave her hepatitis C. In an effort to wean herself off the sporting life, she started smuggling Rolex watches between Orly airport and LaGuardia. She got caught and would have gone to jail if it hadn’t been for Ray, a grizzle-haired ex-hippie with a pirate moustache who was one of the best organized-crime lawyers in New York.
Ray got her off, and they began dating. He loved her unpredictable brain. She had such a smart mouth, she could entertain an entire dinner party. They eventually got married and moved to Livingstone, Montana, where they built one of those phony Architectural Digest log homes and tried to figure out ways to spend Ray’s money. Ray took up fly-fishing and dragged Lisa all over North America in pursuit of Alaskan salmon, Bahamian bonefish, and Ontario muskies. When Lisa ended up in my boat, she confessed that she missed those nights in Manhattan, sleeping late, taking long lunches, and going shopping. But she knew that Ray was her last chance at a straight life, and if the price of being together was spending a week, every few months, lounging around in a fishing boat and working on her tan, she figured she could put up with it.
In her sunglasses and blue bikini Lisa was sprawled like a lynx in the front of my boat, smoking a joint and reading a paperback edition of Dune. In the other seat, her friend Mickey was tinkering with the ghetto blaster. Mickey, whose bare shoulders were as brown as varnished wood, was tougher, older, and slightly less forthcoming about her personal life. I knew only that she was from Aspen, had been married a number of times, and had lots of money. (One night at the bar in Minaki Lodge, she showed up wearing a necklace that spelled out ‘Rich Bitch’ in diamonds.) Their respective husbands, Ray and Steve, were off somewhere looking for muskies with my partner, Glen.
Lisa, Mickey, and I were ten miles north of Minaki, drifting on the flat calm waters of Big Sand Lake, trying to catch some walleyes. But the fish weren’t biting. We’d caught half a dozen earlier in the morning, but nothing for hours, and the day was getting quieter, and hotter – quite unusual weather for the first week of September. At noon, we reeled in our lines and headed off to meet the other boat for lunch. Mickey and Lisa had been feigning indignation about the slow fishing (“Jake, if we don’t start catching fish, we’re not going to take our tops off”). And when I started the engine and ran the boat across the immense flat, steamy lake, I think they were just as happy to be quitting.
At Skinny Island, Glen’s boat was already pulled up on shore and the men were unloading it. I approached the shore and nudged the prow of my own boat onto a granite ledge. The women got out and I unloaded the boat, including the bleached and very dead walleyes we’d caught earlier in the morning. The other guys had spent most of the morning fly-fishing for muskies. After getting the update on their morning (no muskies, Ray cannonballed out of the boat in his underwear, they saw a wolf), Glen and I got busy making shore lunch. We’d been guiding together for four days now, and I liked working with him. He was a better guide than I was, but he treated our partnership as a democracy.
Using the wooden paddle as a work surface, I cut and parried the fish, removed the bones, peeled off the skins and built a pile of fresh fillets, and kept an eye on the guests, making sure that they didn’t do anything to hurt themselves. Steve and Ray had fished all over the world, but I kept an eye on them out of habit. It was a normal part of the job. It was like being in charge of a group of youngsters at a lawn party. You never knew when one of them was going to get a bright idea, like sawing at a can of beans with a bowie knife or tossing a tin of gasoline on the fire.
I’d been guiding almost every day for the last month. And that was a good thing, because I was flat broke. Early one sunny morning, not long after the bear banished me from Tower Island, Dave knocked on the door of my van. He knew that I had some guiding experience, and asked if I wanted to come out of retirement. I quickly got dressed and accompanied him to Minaki Lodge, where we gassed up a couple of boats and fitted them out with paddles, life cushions, minnow buckets, and all the other stuff you need to spend a day on the water. I was a bit uneasy, having never guided on this river, but Dave said it wasn’t going to be a problem because we had an elderly foursome who wanted to stay together. “Just follow my bubbles.”
We had a good day on the water, and I learned some new parts of the river system. Every day, we went to new places, and I began to build up my knowledge of the river and all its attached lakes. The following week I picked up a few days of guiding out of Hoist Point, then Murray’s Camp, then Minaki Lodge. Soon, I was making money.
Minaki was a road-accessible fishing area, so the tourists weren’t quite as wealthy as the ones who patronized fly-in resorts like Great Slave. Some had saved up for years to come fishing in Canada. Even when they flew here, it sometimes took them a day and a half to make the flight connections, rent the car in Winnipeg, and drive to Minaki. It was as hard as travelling overseas, when you added up the hours and the expense. And frankly, I sometimes wondered why they went to so much trouble, just to catch a few little walleyes.
One night in the bar, I ran into a marketing executive from Ontario Tourism. He said that he’d polled twenty-seven thousand American anglers, and it seemed that they weren’t just here for the fishing. The survey asked the visitors to name their ‘top ten’ reasons for coming to Canada. It turned out that ‘catching a big fish’ was actually the least important reason, and ‘catching lots of fish’ ranked second-last. The most popular reason was something like ‘experiencing the beauty of Nature’.
Most of them, in other words, were trying to connect with God. All the equipment – the tackle boxes and fishing rods and polarized sunglasses and so forth – were just accoutrements. They needed to have an excuse for being here, and fishing was their cover story. Serious fishermen like Ray and Steve probably would have scoffed at such talk. But they wouldn’t have scoffed because they disagreed. They’d have scoffed because as a fishing guide, I was supposed to play along with the game. You couldn’t find God by following an agenda. You had to go about your day and hope that you’d catch a glimpse by accident. It was like looking up at the night sky. In order to see those faint constellations, you can’t look straight at them. You have to look a few degrees off to one side.
So I knew that even Lisa and Mickey, with their foul mouths and flinty hearts, were keeping their eyes open for some subtle glimpse of beauty that would make their trip worthwhile. And no matter how much they smoked weed and played loud music and nattered on about their self-indulgent lives, I knew they were hoping for a moment of spiritual connection. As their guide, it was my job to help them find it.
When I finished cleaning the fish, I walked up to the fire pit, where Glen was preparing the spuds. He was down on one knee, wielding his razor-sharp filleting knife with a blur of dexterity that reduced eight ultra-large Idaho red potatoes into a bowlful of dice-sized cubes in a few moments. As the fire kicked in, Glen set the huge frying pan on the rolling orange flames, laid out a pound of bacon, and with his other hand, broke eggs and stirred them in a plastic bowl. I prepped the fillets and opened cans of corn and beans. Meanwhile Ray, Steve, Mickey, and Lisa stood around us, watching. Ray had spent most of his life in a courtroom, trying to swing jurors around to his point of view, and he never stopped talking. His specialty was jokes and one-liners. I don’t know where he got them from, but he had an inventory of literally thousands of jokes, which he would launch into, unbidden, whenever there was a lull in the conversation. But when Glen and I started cooking shore lunch, even Ray lapsed into silence.
Maybe hunger and anticipation had something to do with it. There was nothing that worked up an appetite like being outside all morning. But shore lunch was also a spiritual ceremony. It took all the elements of angling – the excitement of the quest, the beauty of nature, the sacredness of wild things – and wrapped them all into this ceremony: the meal. Glen and I had done this job so often that it was like a dance routine – batter the fish, start the fire, wash the fillets in the lake, skin the onions, unpack the lunchbox. Don’t let them see the tin of Spam in the bottom of the box. (Every guide carries a tin of Spam in his lunchbox, like a trooper’s last bullet.) Remove the cans of beans and corn, and nestle them against a rock alongside the fire. Don’t forget to open the cans. Sitting in a fire for a few minutes, an unopened can of beans becomes a grenade.
We brewed coffee in a gallon can full of lake water, and laid a green twig across the top of the can to keep it from boiling over. I poured two cups of olive oil into the big frying pan, and tossed a wooden match into the oil – a floating thermostat that would allow us to concentrate on other tasks for a few moments. (When the match ignited, the oil would be ready.) I cracked an egg into a bowl of tinned milk and stirred it up with a fork, filled a paper bag with flour, dipped the fillets into the milk, and dropped them into the bag. Now the fillets were ready to go. I put them where they wouldn’t get stepped on. They were tender enough already.
Squatting by the fire, we worked silently, blinking our eyes in the stinging white smoke. It would be pleasant to wear T-shirts and shorts, but most guides dress in the standard bush professionals’ outfit of long pants, leather gloves, and Kodiak workboots. With all this boiling oil sloshing around, you don’t want to deep-fry your ankles. Shore lunch is one of those undertakings that sounds good as a concept but threatens to fall apart as soon as you begin. Myriad small details conspire to ruin the whole undertaking. Did you forget the spatula? Forget the matches? The week before, I was working with a guide who accidentally ignited a whole clump of wooden matches in his pocket. He jumped up and whacked his head against a coffee pot, spilling hot coffee down his back. He grabbed the kettle and poured coffee into his pocket, extinguishing the fire but scalding his thigh. He was a good fishing guide but was riding an unlucky streak. A few days before that, he’d been making lunch on a deserted rocky point at the top end of Big Sand Lake when his guests noticed an unoccupied boat drifting way out on the lake. “Hey, look at that!” he chuckled. “Some idiot lost his boat!”
There’s no such thing as a minor glitch when you’re fifteen miles from help. And if you screw up, it’s not the weather’s fault. It’s not the motor’s fault. It’s your fault, and you have to spend the rest of the day with guests who’d rather be with someone else.