Before the impending darkness descends, I high-tail it back to camp. I’ve forgotten to bring along a headlamp, and finding my way back in the moonless dark would not be fun. I have caught dozens of small to medium sized bass in a short time, in the magic hour after the sun dips below the horizon and before the real dark begins. For now, I have kept no fish. I don’t want to deal with the extra work of it, and I’ve left myself just enough energy for a short, naked plunge into the soft, cool water, diving deep, fingers forward feeling for rocks, branches, logs, feeling the sharp, slick edges of water grasses glide between fingers, washing away the long days’ worth of grime and sweat.
I dry off, slip into my favorite, thick-fleece sweat pants, a t-shirt and hoody, which I pull up over my head to help warm me. I boil water on my camp stove, whip up a pot of my favorite all time camp food, mac n’ cheese and a can of tuna fish, start a small fire and sit on a log eating from the pot, watching sparks fly upward into the night….and soon I am crawling into the comforting darkness of my small tent, turning off my headlamp, looking up through the mesh tent top to the infinitude of that star-filled sky, the dark and the quiet equally immense here in one of the remotest of places one can still get to in a crowded world of ever-vanishing wilderness. It’s as if I’ve entered a time machine, I think—that long paddle in across vast ponds, through narrows, traveled back to a world before motors and vehicles and electricity and noise.
The next day I begin the more serious fishing, up at first light, a simple oatmeal breakfast and quick clean up. The lake is right there, the reverberations of loon calls echoing out across its surface, the sun painting everything in a golden glow. Flat calm. Wisps of mist hovering just above the surface, and soon my bow pushes through it all, and I’m gliding along effortlessly with no wind yet to slow me, not a wrinkle of a wave to impede my progress. Then a fish breaks. Then another. I catch a bass in the exact same spot I did the night before, and I wonder if it might even be the same fish. I could stay here within a short paddle of camp and catch fish all day, I realize, but I want to explore, get into some of those oh-so-promising inlets and feeder creek mouths I have spied on Google Earth, marked on my laminated paddling map.
As I move on, passing lily pads, stumps, floating bogs, like strange floating gardens with their tangle of short, flowering bushes and wild flowers, I realize the entire surface area of this lake is potentially good bass habitat. Given its shallowness, and since it was once a river and is now the flooded low part of the river valley, means all manner of ambush-friendly structure abounds, bass lying in wait.
I catch fish everywhere, between a sparse, mid-lake group of lily pads, amongst the remnants of a pair of trees now nearly rock-like, enormous stumps, so white washed and weathered it’s impossible to tell what species of tree they once were. I pole my way through narrow, mid-bog channels, run aground on invisible, blackened stumps hiding just below the surface. Eventually, I find a large bay, a stream calmly flowing in, knowing it leads to a more-remote-still lake. I drag my kayak over a few beaver dams, hit several dead ends and give up, knowing there’s still the long paddle back. I’ve come in far enough already.
On my way back, I need to hold tight to the shore since a big afternoon breeze has started to blow, and given the shallowness of the lake, it will easily become what Adirondack paddlers refer to as “windswept,” a metaphor I love, one that sends me to envisioning a tall, invisible broom coming down from the sky, its bristles brushing over the water, pushing it up into a froth of white-capped, rolling waves.
Thanks to the wind, I tuck into a very shallow bay with little obvious bass structure for a break. I fill a water bottle with lake water and plunge my UV purifying light into it to kill any nasty microbes, this so much better than the iodine tablets we used to use. I can taste the lake itself this way, the earthy, richness of it. As I’m taking a long swig of lake water, an enormous, dark-skinned bass erupts into the air to make a grab for a big black dragonfly. Soon I see what is unfolding here, something I would have paddled right by had it been calmer. Dragonflies are diving close to the surface to gulp down some minute insect, while bass are then busting forth, sometimes leaping into the air, to try for a big, meaty dragonfly meal. I’m determined to join this chain of events: insect to dragonfly to bass to me….
At first, I am frustrated the bass prefer the abundant, real food buzzing all about to my concoction of foam and feathers. I try several different flies, even a meticulously-tied dragonfly imitation that to my human eyes seems a pretty good approximation of the real McCoy. Then I realize it is more about technique, that I have to splat my fly down hard several times in roughly the same spot, finally letting it rest there quietly, perhaps give it a twitch or two, like a dragonfly who has miscalculated and is now stranded, helpless in the surface film. This is more challenging fishing, and I am grateful for it after so much too-easy fun. The quarry is also both bigger and more elusive. I love it that I have solved this puzzle, found my role in the midst of the drama at play in this one tiny back bay on this vast lake in the near exact center of one of our last, extensive regions of unbroken wilderness.
A half dozen large, lovely bass and who knows how much time later, I realize it has gotten very late, much later than planned given all the paddling I have done, all away from my campsite. I can also see that the wind has grown stronger, and I am, again, exhausted. I reel in just as yet another big fish breaks, and set out on the long paddle back to camp, glad to discover the wind has shifted slightly, and it is now almost directly at my back. I find when I get too tired, I can stop paddling even, hold up my paddle above my head, using the blades as makeshift sails. I am grateful for my sit-inside kayak with its relatively small cockpit opening as I surf along, the bow sometimes digging into the trough of a wave ahead of me. I glide along on the crest of whitecaps then feel that unsettling plunge down, forward after cresting. I move along quickly taking care to not let the boat swing sideways, waves wash in over the sides….
By the time I am finally “home,” I realize I didn’t keep anything for dinner again, but I’m too exhausted to make another cast, and I know there’s plenty of camp food to sustain me.
On the paddle out the next day, I take a different route, and discover a still backwater that is a boneyard of fallen trees and rocks, and bass breaking everywhere. I catch several in a short time, all on my favorite, now-disheveled popper, one doll eye gone, half its deer hair and feathers remaining. The bass don’t seem to mind.
I could spend hours, the whole rest of the day, on into nightfall here and not catch all the fish there are to be caught. It dawns on me that this kind of plenty, this outrageous abundance of wild, easily-caught fish, far-far back in the deepest heart of the wilderness likely requires something more of me, something fundamentally different than the simple act of cast, catch, release. Here is a place to come and catch what you need to survive perhaps, a place to live out your life in a simple, more balanced way with the overwhelming bounty—and the overwhelming beauty—surrounding you.
Back finally at my own lake, my humble cabin, I’m more aware than ever of the endless miles of wilderness that extend out and away behind me. The wind is blowing in off the lake, carrying the far-off rumble of a big truck. The lights of other cabins and houses flicker out onto the lake’s surface. The owls have begun their calling, as has a lone loon who glides along far out in the near center. The cool of a late summer night begins to descend, and I’m thankful again to have this more permanent shelter to come to as I walk up the path away from the lake toward the glow of lights of the cabin, the dark, wild forest towering above me, stretching far out and away behind everything.
If you’ve been enjoying my writing, please consider doing any/all of the following:
Help me grow my audience by Sharing this post or my main site with a few people you think might enjoy it as well.
Upgrade your subscription to paid. For only $.14/day, you can help me continue to devote the many hours I do each week to writing, editing and promoting this page.
JourneyCasts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
You can also help a lot by making a one-time contribution at any time by “buying me a coffee” (or two). And certainly a good amount of real coffee has gone into the making of JourneyCasts.
As always, I encourage you to leave a comment.
Be sure to check out my podcast, “Hemingway, Word for Word.”