Ninety Seven Bass
An excerpt from a Michigan fish story.
I flew back to Kalamazoo to meet the movers. We’d been living in a Residence Inn in New Haven for two weeks, my wife, two small children, two Gordon Setters and two cats. My wife was starting a new job in Connecticut, and our new house wasn’t ready, yet. By default I became our new daycare and animal care provider, all in a few small rooms overlooking scenic I-95. This was the last hurrah—getting the old house packed and on its way, saying goodbye once and for all to a place I had come to love but never fully adapted to.
It was eerie walking through our soon to be former home, everything still in its place, the air stale from being two-weeks abandoned. Our near decade there pulled heavily on my heart, the familiarity of landscape, all the rivers and lakes and ponds I had worked so hard to come to know, the birth of two children, dozens and dozens of wonderful students and good colleagues. As much as we wanted to leave Kalamazoo, as excited as I was about going back east, still, moving is a tremendous undertaking, especially for a fisherman, for someone who connects with the landscape in which he lives on so many different levels. Everything had been thrown off kilter. I was uprooted, in between everything in my life up to then, no job prospects, yet, just the then vague notions about some non-fiction I’d been yearning to do—something more straight forward than the fiction I worked so hard at for so long within these walls. New walls, new work. I was trying to stay upbeat about the whole affair. But here I was “home” for a day, only to have that home packed up and taken away, brought back east to our new house. What I was feeling had a lot to do with the way landscape holds and defines us; it is our outermost skin.
The movers showed and jumped right in, started shoving all our belongings into boxes, everything, and I mean everything, was being efficiently, swiftly swallowed up. When they told me they’d be at it all day, and then load the truck and head east the next day, I called an old fishing buddy, Joe, and rescued some flies, an eight-weight rod, canoe, paddles…before they could be sucked away into boxes, onto the moving truck, and we stole off to a farm bass pond I had permission to fish—and no one ever fished there but me.
It was late spring, and I’d not fished out here since late fall when the bass were fat and lazy and finicky and getting ready to hunker down for a long winter. But now they were in that pre-spawn hunger, fattening up, going for anything that moved. I knew we’d be in for a good day as we came over the rise of the last cow pasture and looked out across the surface at splashes and boils everywhere. The dark gray skies and moderate breeze would help, though I doubt these fish would have been spooked on even the most still and cloudless day. The last fly they’d seen had been mine back in October, and who knows when they’d see another one, if ever.
Within ten minutes we each boated three or four nice fish. They slammed Joe’s floating frog lure and my small weedless crease fly with equal abandon. “Let’s keep a tally,” I suggested, something I’m not usually prone to do, but this was perhaps my last-ever trip here, and it would be nice to have some enumerative record, something to help me hold onto the memory. By noon, we were up over fifty, but the skies were getting darker, the winds stronger. None of this dissuaded the bass, and we figured if they wanted to keep playing, well so did we. By sixty-five or so, the thought struck me that we should go for one hundred, then call it quits. Joe was with me…. (To be continued).
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