Fleet Farm Time Machine

Suspended with feet drifting up for the surface in water as clear as the air, face down with one hand clamped on a piling grown slimy with feathery green algae.  Frozen in breath-holding time above a clean cobble bottom – this is how I first fell in love.

It wasn't big, but it was ours

It seems nearly impossible now, but there was a time when a simple auto mechanic and a school teacher, merely by the location of their modest ranch home amid the ever-multiplying McMansions along one of the most picturesque and adored lakes in Wisconsin, could be afforded access to a small private beach denied to those nearby with much greater means.   That is indeed how the world worked when I was young.

Records were kept on index cards in little wooden boxes at the public beach house back then, the gateway to all summer fun, much like Mom's box of cards for creating cherry cheesecake and Salisbury steak at home.   In a rite of spring dripping with that rare satisfaction rendered when the “have-nots” triumph over the “haves,” local kids would troop into that little clapboard beach house, and announce our names a little too loudly in case there were any rich kids from Illinois within hearing distance.   Surnames would be ticked off on the cards, and small fabric seasonal passes would be freely dispensed from a roll much like tickets at a raffle, square nylon patches little more than an inch square with the year embroidered in a circle around the perimeter.  One for each member of the household and a few extras for guests.  But ours came from the roll with the colored embroidery thread.  We got red or blue or sometimes gold, depending on the year, while those from away got only black and only after they payed.

That little colored badge of honor was quickly sewn on the lower left thigh of your trunks to be displayed proudly for the gate attendants and life guards the rest of the splashing and frolicking summer, and more importantly, for the kids emerging from shiny foreign cars with air conditioning and upholstery who had to hot-foot it all the way across the sweltering blacktop to the far entrance of the public beach.   The yuppie scum.

All socioeconomic injustices temporarily waylaid, we were free to cross the much shorter route to our gated private beach.   Or, more often, to simply hop the fence and tear down to the water in unbridled youthful glee for a day of cannonballs and jacknives on top of each other.   The gate attendants knew who we were anyway.   They were our babysitters and waitresses in winter.

In our house we had to finish our chores before mounting bikes for the almost daily speed run down the huge hill to the water, and I submit that was cruel and unusual punishment.   Dishes or vacuuming or the inexorable pain of cleaning a bathroom.   Imagine the horror.  But once our work was done we were set free to rocket our way to sunburned freedom.  On that ride down “The Big Hill” I was stopped more than once by Mr. Hutchinson, the town cop, for passing cars on my single-minded mission to achieve soggy summer fun.   The posted speed limit there was (and still is) a residentially staid 30mph, and I can happily recall glancing over to see the startled visages of drivers as I shot idiotically by on the double yellow line.   I cringe to think of the stitches and dental work (or much worse) that would've been involved had I ever put that old Schwinn down as it began to shimmy and wobble in my haste to get to the beach.

As we grew into rowdy young men, burgeoning with hormones but still too young to drive, the true proof of manhood among us was the ability to ride our bikes back up that same hill at the end of the swimming day without once touching the handlebars.  A feat I came very close to achieving many times, but never completed, I'm sorry to report.   I can rest easy now, from the remove of adulthood, with the fact that I failed.   I believe all claims of having achieved this monumental task were exaggerated or flatly untrue.   I don't think it's possible for a kid to do, and you wouldn't either if you saw the hill or a topo map.  Except for maybe in the case of Brian.  He claims to have done it a generation before me, and I believe him.   He's not normal.

Yet another rite into young manhood was the willingness to sleep “under the stars.”  There came a time when even the flimsy comforts of a tent and foam pad were eschewed by all who wished to deem themselves men of the woods.   We'd practice our young bushcraft skills, often giving up on the bow and drill fire in collective resignation that a one-match fire was almost as cool as a no-match fire and far more comforting than none at all.   Having mutilated a couple flimsy perch or shiners with a fillet knife and fire, and maybe with some wild greens or berries, we'd enjoy our paltry repast. Things were sometimes bolstered with hot dogs or beans or Oreos from home, but young mountain men in the making have amazing powers of selective memory, and these treats we summarily erased from the public record.

We'd stretch out in the grass and gaze up at the stars, fully codified in the belief that we would one day be remembered among names like Boone, Lewis, and Clark.   But here's the thing: Even on warm summer nights, even as a malleable, nearly indestructible pre-teen, you don't get a lot of sleep sprawled out right in the dirt.  Not if you've evolved past that stage twenty-five millennia prior to trying it again, anyway.

So we'd be up early.  Very early.   In that light that isn't really even light yet -- the bottomless pre-dawn calm. A time of day known best to duck hunters, third-shifters, and young knuckleheads who think it's rad to dirtbag it right on the ground.

What was there to do at this hour? The same thing there was to do every day all summer long – make for the beach.

Lake Geneva is one of the largest kettle lakes in Wisconsin.   A kettle lake, in quick and dirty lay terms, being a dent in the ground left by a retreating glacier and filled with water.  It is spring fed, deep and cold, and almost heartrendingly clear.  Like looking through a window into the earth.   One of those lakes where you park the boat in twenty five feet of crystalline water to fish for spawning bluegills in fifteen feet of water, instead of anchoring in five to cast up into two.   And sometimes, if you're paying close attention when you pull a thick spinning gill up out of those depths, you will notice a long, heavy pike or musky hovering deep down there in the wet void.   A monster of the deep glaring back up through the window.

Standing in the fishing section of the local Fleet Farm (a mid-western hardware store chain) the other day, I spied the cardboard and plastic packets of Eagle Claw snelled hooks.  The very same packs that inhabit every tackle shop, hardware store, and gas station peg board near water in the known universe, and seemingly have since the beginning of time.  They have bronze finish bait holder hooks or little gold aberdeens snelled with an eight-inch leader and a loop on the running end.  You know the ones.  I know who buys them too – twelve-year-old boys who ride their bikes down The Big Hill to the beach before the sun comes up.

Seeing those snells hanging there, I was instantly transported back to that little beach in the last throes of night, the sun not yet coming up over the drumlins seven miles to the east across the flat, dark plane.

Armed with the loop of one of those snells over your little finger, you could slip into that cold spring water and swim out to the weed line at the very deepest reaches of the white and blue swimming pier.   A few big breaths to prepare, and then a long dive down through the clear nothingness to the bottom in earliest slanting dawn.

Grab onto the pier and hover there.  The shimmering mosaic of flat round skipping stones before you in the quickly gathering morning, nature's most perfect fresco. Let the twinkling golden hook fall from your hand and hang by its leader.  Still yourself.  Just be.  If you are patient, if you become nothing in the water with your bowl cut hair standing on end and tickling, a curious sunfish will come up from the sashaying green and bite that bare hook, and you will be pinky fishing in paradise.

Garbage Bag Kid Assaulted By Savage Duck

My fly tying vice broke last week, and right in the height of the tying season for me.  I was laying a hook in, and when I went to tighten down, the jaw tensioner screw snapped in half, and doinked off my chin before being temporarily lost in the the bits of fur and feather on the bench.

I, being minimally mechanically inclined, if not downright confused about such things most of the time, was compelled to ask advice of friends concerning how to get the rest of the broken screw out and replaced.  Even with my paltry skills, after some coaching I was able to remove the remainder of the busted screw, and find a temporary replacement without too much wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Much more importantly, I was able to get back to tying!

 A screwdriver had to be used to set the jaws with the temporary fix, but at least we were back in business.

As far as outdoor-related calamities go, that little inconvenience was somewhere on par with a pesky hangnail.  No real problem, just a sudden and annoying tiny setback.

Most gear failures are just such a case.  Somewhat annoying, often cuss inducing, but almost never a singular moment of anguish or danger.  I bought an exploding baitcaster once.  It was a pretty sweet reel and a great deal.  Ron Popeil would've loved this thing.  It was all shiny and cool looking, with trendy little cut-outs and holes drilled all over, supposedly to cut down on weight.  It is rather torturous, after all, to heft those extra grams around all day, but we fishermen somehow manage to muster on.  This thing had all the magnets and spool brakes a gear nerd could ever hope for.  About the third time I threw it, one side of the case and the handle plopped off in the water.  Never have I been more impressed with a fishing product.  The rest of it went in the water shortly thereafter, and I learned, once again, to stick to more established brands and believable price points.

I've owned a set of rain gear that I'm fairly certain was constructed of sponges and dish rags.  It may have even created water on it's own, I'm not sure about the science on that.  I practiced for hours and hours with my first cheap fly rod, frustrated with the impossibility of creating a decent cast, before it was tossed unceremoniously in the bushes by a more experienced caster after having tried it only once.  My first ice auger, handed down to me I now think with a smirk and a wink, simply refused to cut ice no matter what.  Blades were sharpened, shimmed, replaced, and shimmed again.  If you had one guy apply all the downward force he could muster while another man somehow managed to turn it, and if you'd sacrificed a wombat to the Aztec god Amimitl, and if it was 80 degrees out, you might have been able to get one hole drilled in a half hour.  That lovely piece of equipment (you ice fishermen can surmise the brand, the light blue one that isn't Nils) was also cast tumbling through space like a 3-iron after a bad shank out of the long rough, and I never even saw where it landed.  Kept right on walking.

Equipment failures, as exasperating and annoying as they can be, generally populate the shallow end of the pool when it comes to true outdoor kerfuffles.  Far more interesting, scary, and amusing are the instances in which we the hunter, forager, or fisherman fail.  And fail hard.

I was almost murdered by a duck once.

Fishing off the Country Club pier in Fontana was a favorite boyhood pastime.  My best buddy Steve and I would pass the sunny hours catching rock bass and sunfish from the gin-clear waters of Lake Geneva, interrupted only by randomly shoving each other into the water and the very beginnings of girl watching.  We didn't catch very many fish, and never ever spoke to a girl.  Gross!

Being the inattentive youngster that I was, at some point, I left my Zebco combo laying on the pier to attend to a pressing matter like chucking rocks at seagulls or cannonballing my younger brother, the bare Aberdeen hook dangling mere inches above the water.  A hen mallard happened by with her fluffy little chicks paddling along behind.  I looked back just in time to witness the last little duckling take a curious nip at my sparkly gold hook, and impale itself.  Cue the Benny Hill music.

I swam over to reel in my catch, and attempt to release it.  I got a hold of the spaztic fluff ball, and was trying to set it free, when I was quickly taught about the protective nature of a mother duck.  As I struggled to free the duckling, I was suddenly enveloped in a hurricane of pissed off duck.  Mom blustered and bit, squawked and dive bombed.  She kicked and nipped and flapped all over me, making it nearly impossible to free my inadvertent catch.  By the time the melee had concluded, the baby was released with only a pin hole in the top of it's bill, and I was left shaking, covered in half-moon duck bite welts.  She then hung around for a while to taunt and berate me while Steve and my brother tried and failed to stop laughing uproariously.  It's no wonder I want to hunt ducks now.


Steve and I were hiking along the river behind the Abbey Resort in Fontana a winter or two after the Psycho Duck Incident.  We had sleds in tow, having just hit the runs over at the golf course, but that never held our attention very long.  We were much more interested in stomping around down by the river.  Building snow forts, poking around in the mud, daring each other to walk on the ice... boy stuff.  On one such adventure, Steve fell through the shore ice in only a few feet of water.  Using my cat-like wits and dexterity honed through years of  stumbling around outside, I quickly rendered aid to my friend in the form of cracking him in the face with my handy dandy walking stick.  I'd attempted a rescue, and managed only to bloody his nose to go along with his soaking feet.  That's what friends are for.

The stories are deep and many.  I can't even begin to recall all the instances in which I or my outdoor compatriots have blundered into comical situations.  However, as I was paddling Selma Kayak around Cherokee Marsh the other day, simply enjoying the sun and keeping an eye out for ill-tempered looking ducks, I thought of the Tale of the Garbage Bag Kid, a family favorite still shared almost without fail during long holiday gatherings.

The Kickapoo river is the longest tributary of the Wisconsin river, and a very popular canoeing and fishing destination.  You would be hard pressed to find a more beautiful river as it glides and meanders it's way through the bluffs of the Driftless Regoin.  And twist it does.  From headwaters to mouth it is only 60 miles long, but that run includes nearly 130 river miles as it bends back on itself over and over and over again.

It's also a bit a of a bugaboo for me, personally.  We paddled it often when I was young, frequently returning to it more than once a year.  I've also floated it fairly often as an adult.  It is a placid little gem, gorgeous and inviting to seasoned paddler and rookie alike.  None the less, that river has bucked me from my boat more often than any other.  I can think of only a few other instances of unplanned swims in my paddling life, but there have been almost a dozen on the comely, diminutive Kickapoo.

It was a cool, gray spring morning in the Kickapoo Valley.  Fog settled in the bottoms, and light rain misted down, giving the whole thing a cast like something out of Faust.  But we would not be deterred.  My family and I were there to paddle the Kickapoo, and it was going to happen.

My brother and I were still too young then to be trusted in a canoe of our own together, so he rode with Dad, and I manned (boyed?) the bow for my step mom Carolyn.  Carolyn and I were not great paddling partners then, nor are we to this day.  It started off as a joke that we seemed to complete a full circle directly after or right before launching or landing, but it soon became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  So we'd get our spin out of the way, and continue down the river.

Dad and Josh were even worse.  A long wet day in the canoe with a young son get can try a father's patience, I gather, and we can all recall the sound of my normally gentle, doting father's voice bellowing down the walls of the bluffs nearing the end of a particularly trying trip.  Josh!  Just keep your God damn paddle out of the water!

Being regulars on this section of popular river, we'd come to be friendly with the other families that frequented it.  Smiles and happy greetings were often exchanged as our caravan made it's way to the take-out.  On this trip, I'd somehow forgotten to pack my rain gear, after having been repeatedly reminded to do so.  Dad grumbled a little as he fashioned a makeshift poncho for me from a garbage bag.

Directly following one of our requisite spins, in a narrow section of the river, Carolyn and I were forced by the current into one of the many downed trees on an outside bend.  The canoe came to a sudden and complete halt.  I did not.  I tumbled into a deep pool of frigid spring runoff.  Suddenly finding myself in a bewildering low oxygen environment, I surfaced and immediately attempted to clamp onto Brian's passing canoe.  Being the wise river man that he is, he instinctively paddled away from my flailing attempts at self-rescue, knowing he'd be the next one in the drink if I managed to grab onto his boat. I eventually got my wits about me, and swam up onto the bank.  We caused a quite a backup, the other paddlers waiting patiently for me to get out of the water, and Dad to rescue Carolyn and the hung up canoe.

As I stood there, stripped down to my pre-teen briefs in the chilly rain, the other families paraded by.  Voices called out up and down the river wanting to know who'd gone in.  I was quickly linked to my most identifiable trait that morning -- my garbage bag poncho.  The garbage bag kid went in the water!  The garbage bag kid went in!  I finished the last hours of the trip looking like a half-drowned hobo in my dad's long underwear and my signature garbage bag poncho.  It simply cannot get much more demoralizing than that.  The moniker stuck with me on that river and in the campground we stayed at for seasons to come.

I've flipped boats on that river before and since.  Alone and with a crying girlfriend.  With my brother laughing like a demented hyena. With Steve glaring at me like I did it on purpose.  I came pretty close to real trouble once, my shirt sleeve caught on a strainer until Frisbee arrived to hoist me out of the water, but the precipitous fall from grace of the Garbage Bag Kid remains at the top of the list in re-tellings around campfires and dinner tables to this day.

The Good God Almighty Rapids

I climbed into my ladder stand in the pre-dawn dark of opening day.  There are plenty of opening days in my year, but the opening day of deer season is the only one that doesn't need to be qualified when speaking with friends.  The first day of trout fishing is called the trout opener, the first day of pheasant hunting is called a fustercluck, with every bird hunter in the region pounding the fields, and the first day of woodcock hunting just happens unbidden, in all it's blistery, sweaty glory without being named.  Opening day of deer season, in turn, earns the succinct title of "Opening Day" with all the glory and anticipation that implies.

I sat spellbound with my back to the river bank feet away, night slowly giving in to dawn, looking across an opening in the dense pine forest.  Multi-stemmed oak trees inhabit this riparian glade, as does my sneezy friend Goldenrod.  Ferns abound in spring and summer.  A small creek, not much more than a rivulet, its name unknown to me, makes a burbling entrance from the dark mystery of the pines extending up the bluff, and meanders it's way through the clearing to the river.  It twists and wanders over riffles and under secretive cut banks, as if trying to delay its fate, attempting to remain its own until gravity inevitably brings it to the river, and the end of itself.

While I saw not a single deer Opening Day, presiding like some humble and powerless guest conductor over the meadow, I was thankful to be in the presence of so much other activity.  With ready eyes and ears straining to pick up the tell-tale snap of that statuesque buck slipping through the forest cover, I had a full menu of woodland fare to feast my senses on.

In my heightened state of awareness, sometime later in the morning, I was severely startled by a series of snappy, wet-sounding barks and whines directly behind me.  Quick little snorts and bubbly wheezes right on top of me.  A crazed ferret in a full bathtub, panting while dragging his nails across a chalkboard, it sounded like something was being murdered in the river.  Honestly, it was making me a little uneasy.  I didn't want to look and blow my cover, but as I would soon find out, it was too late too to worry about that.

Four otters eventually appeared in my peripheral vision.  They'd busted me sitting in their tree on their river bank, and they were pretty pissed off about it.  They took turns, in pairs and threes, popping their bewhiskered faces out of the icy water to scold me.  I couldn't get a count at first, as they would randomly appear and disappear, rolling and splashing, making their disapproval well known to anyone within a quarter mile.  And they were committed.  They were going rip me up one side and down the other until they were content in knowing I was fully aware of my transgression.  Or maybe they just confused, having never seen a giant pumpkin sitting in a tree holding a rifle before.

In any case, their four-headed harangue was cut violently short when a bald eagle came rocketing down, out of seemingly nowhere, to make a breakfast burrito out of one of them.  This must have been one hungry eagle, as he payed me no mind at all, sitting not twenty yards away.  I'm sure the otters were more frightened than I was, but it was my second major adrenaline spike in as many minutes.  We see plenty of bald eagles in winter in this part of the country, especially around open water, but I'd never been this close to one in action.  My mind's eye very nearly could not compute the massive size and wingspan of the raptor.  The brilliant white of the head and tail, the flashing gold of talons, it all almost too much to take in as he climbed away, all four otters safe in the depths for the moment.  The gregarious otter brothers returned to check on me throughout the weekend, but they were always slightly more quiet about it after the Eagle Incident.

Back on dry land I enjoyed the slinky undulating gait of a weasel, running this way and that, doing I have no idea what.  He snaked and slipped, a mercurial white specter, all around the clearing for quite a while, no apparent destination in mind.  I'm no ermine expert.  I have no idea if he was hunting, lost, or walking off a bender with the boys the night before.

On the tiny creek his cousin the mink later appeared.  Rusty brown with the cutest little round face, he bounded up and down the banks, dove in and out of the water, stopped on a dime to sniff and look around.  While I suspect he was hunting for trout, my personification of him likes to think he was simply having a rip roaring good time.

And who couldn't on that little stream?  I don't know it well, but I grew up stomping in and out of it's brothers and sisters in the southern part of the state.  While completely different in it's specific environment, in that section it shares all the same qualities and character of the little rills of my childhood.  I was immediately drawn to it.  Like meeting a long lost relative with your family features plainly displayed in his visage and mannerisms.

I grew up in a place with water running out of the ground all over the place.  Springs, seeps, artesian wells -- there are braids of tinkling water around every corner.  Ponds and kettle lakes dot the countryside.  It's a place steeped in native American history as well.  The earliest known inhabitants were mound builders, later displaced by the Potawatomi.  With a nod to the statute of limitations on trespassing, I can say now that we spent a ton of time in winter on Potawatomi Creek as it passes through Big Foot Country Club (so named for the Potawatomi Chief, Big Foot).  I don't know much about golf, nor do I care to, but I do know that that private course, home to many springs and The Seven Sacred Pools of the Potawatomi, is also home to many of my dearest memories.

I came to know the heft and swing of a canoe paddle a full decade before I ever hoisted a fishing rod or gun.  While I now hunt a fish more than I spend time propelling myself across water, that was not always the case.  We canoed, kayaked, and rafted rivers and lakes from central Wisconsin to Tennessee, following Dad and Brian, and their love of both flat water and white water.  I've dumped more canoes in the Kickapoo river alone than most people have ever been in, something I'm oddly proud of now that I'm much better at staying in them.

The little creeks of Fontana are not big enough to support a canoe or kayak, but that did not stop us.  Among our countless winter outings on the golf course, from skiing to building forts, sledding to just wandering around, my favorite, the family favorite, was always floating boats.

Not big boats, mind you.  Not even little boats.  Miniscule boats.  The earliest "boats" were simply chunks of scrap wood pilfered from grandpa's shop. Or wine corks.  My brother Josh and I would spray paint them our favorite colors, and set out for the golf course with a pocket full of them, alone or with parents in tow.  Often, Brian would accompany us as well.  Our little boats evolved somewhat, but never really amounted to much more than anything that could be carried in our pockets, and happily lost to the whims of the stream.

The rules were simple.  Drop your boats in the creek at the designated starting line, and the first one to cross the finish, be it yards or a miles away, was the winner.  No getting in the stream, and no advancing your boat with your handy, specially chosen poking stick.  Only gentle nudges were allowed to free your boat from a micro-eddy or tangle of overhanging brush.  Of course rules were bent and flat-out obliterated in the heat of the moment, brothers competing with each other and the Old Man to win a close-fought heat.

I dreamed of my brightly painted wine cork, tossed and heaving in those currents.  I imagined it being beaten and dragged when I was supposed to be listening to a teacher rambling on about multiplying fractions or some other useless prattle.  Crewed by the heartiest of Lilliputians, it was the bravest little vessel ever to make the journey from one end of the golf course to the other.  Those daring, diminutive sailors, Vikings of my child's mind, were the only ones brave enough dare passage through the Good God Almighty Rapids.

The Good God Almighty Rapids, so dubbed after many mini sailing ships were lost to their tumultuous depths, were formed where a smaller feeder creek dumped into the main channel through a culvert under a cart path.  Our boats would be dropped in at the upstream end of the culvert, only to have Josh and I race to the other end, giddy with excitement at the prospect of our boats rocketing out into the tailwater.

We would tease and taunt, run and fall, fighting our ways through the streamside brush to help our little boats along the length of the creek.  Entire family days in winter were spent urging our micro-craft down the treacherous gauntlet of that creek.  A lot of them.  We'd leave the house to go sledding, but that never lasted long.  Everyone knew we were going boat floating.

My brother Josh was developmentally disabled.  With his beautifully simple mind he could make me laugh harder than anyone I've ever met.  He could also make me see red faster than anyone alive today.  I've never seen him happier than tearing up and down that little stream, poking stick in hand, splashing in and out of the water, exhorting his little boat to victory.

He's gone now, and so is Dad. As I sat in my tree stand this weekend, and whenever I see a little creek like that I look back fondly, sometimes with a tears on my cheeks, and remember our times braving the Good God Almighty Rapids.