Northern Michigan is capable of days so perfect that only an idiot would not feel a sense of wonder. The air goes almost crystalline, with a clarity that seems to have a knifelike edge. I think it has something to do with Lake Superior, the big inland sea just north of us. I also think it has something to do with all the iron in the ground. Somehow maybe the iron energizes the air and gives it that something I can't describe. I don't even want to know if my theory is geologically possible; I just prefer to believe it. Laugh if you like.
Johnnie Voelker--aka Robert Traver--and I were in accord on this. When the Upper Peninsula handed over such a day, sometimes it was better to sit in the sun in camp and wonder over it. It would be a day for sitting on the church pews he had hauled into his fishing camp, on Frenchman's Pond, and speculating on things that seemed to need speculating about. Besides, the shy, wild brook trout in Frenchman's were tough when it was bright.
On this particular day--one of those special ones--John was a little annoyed. Earlier he had been moved to comment on the particularly pretty bird song he'd heard coming from the woods behind the shack.
"Why would you be upset about something like that," I asked.
"Lloyd told me it was a damned sparrow making that song." Lloyd was one of John's old-time fishing buddies.
John suggested we listen for a minute.
It wasn't a minute before a white-throated sparrow sang. If you've heard one, you'll know it for its unique cadence, which sounds like Old Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody.
"Is that it?" I asked.
"That's it," John said.
"Well, I hate to disappoint you..."
"I can see you're already siding with Lloyd."
Pete Treboldi had gone to our car for a box of cigars and was now coming back down the hill.
"Yer honor..." I began.
"Tank you, tank you," he replied with a bob of his head. (He didn't much like to be called "judge," although he often referred to himself in the third person as "judgie," but I would occasionally toss out a "yer honor" in deference to his years on the Michigan Supreme Court, which I knew he secretly got a kick out of.)
"I think we have a semi-expert witness here," I continued. "Pete generally knows a robin from a heron. Let's see what he says."
Pete passed out cigars and we asked him to listen. Sure enough, Old Sam Peabody trilled again.
"Oh, that's that little sparrow, what the hell's the name of it?"
"Damn!" said John. "At least tell me they're found only in the UP."
"Well, not really," I said.
"Damn!"
He was standing now, assuming a sort of courtroom pose. "For decades, lads, I've thought that song belonged to some exotic bird I never saw. It was always around the next bend in the trail or just over the next hill, too beautiful for words! For 50 years at least I've been waiting to stumble onto this beauty. And now it turns out to be a damned sparrow!"
Then he began to chuckle. "With a little luck, I'll be able to go on."
WE SAT IN THE SUN next to the long, narrow pond. Way up, a trout rose. Chipmunks scurried around our feet.
As it often did, the talk got around to writing. We talked about some of the people and places in the UP that became the bases for his books and stories. His two best novels, Anatomy of a Murder and Laughing Whitefish, were based on actual court cases, both of which took place in the UP. Upper Peninsula characters populated his two collections of trout yarns, Trout Madness and Trout Magic.
"Did you ever just plain make a story up, a complete and total fabrication?" I asked him.
He sat bolt upright and looked at me as though he'd seen a ghost.
I was startled too, and wondered if I had said something that offended him. He stood and ambled over to the ice chest on the picnic table next to the shack and got a beer. He returned, popped the tab and took a long pull.
"Everything I've written has had some basis in fact--almost," he said. "I did fabricate one yarn that had no basis in fact and it's always bothered me." I found myself in the ridiculous position of explaining to a respected author of many works that, essentially, anything goes in fiction. Pete looked amused.
"That's not what I mean, lads. What bothers me is that I don't really know if what I wrote about would really work."
Pete and I exchanged glances.
"But today we're going to find out!" he exclaimed.
Off he went again, this time to the shed. Pete and I watched as he rooted around. "Jamus, Pete! Come here, lads!"
Pete and I scurried to the shed. He had a ball of string and two long cane poles. "We're going to need about three feet of tippet. Who has a spool of 5X?"
Pete produced the tippet material and we followed John down to the pond.
"This will be a day to remember, I guarantee it, lads!"
John handed me one of the cane poles and told me to go around to the opposite side of the pond, which I did, sharing the bridge over the pond's narrow middle with a couple of chipmunks. Finally I reached a casting platform opposite John and Pete, cane pole in hand. It was long--10 or 12 feet.
I thought back over John's stories and I couldn't make a cane-pole connection. John and Pete seemed to be very busy with the ball of string, Pete's cane pole, the spool of tippet material, and various fly boxes. I could see John very carefully coiling string in a pile on the ground.
"Stand by, Jamus!" hollered John.
I watched Pete tie the string to a heavy stick. Then he reared back and threw it in my direction. The stick arced nicely over the pond and landed nearby in the brush on my side.
"Al Kaline couldn't have done it better!" John was full of directions now. "Jamus! Tie the string to the end of your cane pole! Be quick, lad! Pete, stand by to take up slack!"
A minute later I had the string tied to the end of my cane pole. Pete started taking up slack on his end and moments later the string was suspended over Frenchman's Pond. Near the midpoint hung a dropper. I could see a small dry fly at its end.
And then it came to me: the dancing fly in Trout Magic; Timmy and Pinky.
"OK, lads. Wiggle your poles so that the fly dances up and down on the surface of the pond." He was fairly cackling now.
"What do we do if we get one?" Pete asked.
"What do you mean if," said John, pretending to be shocked. "It's just a matter of time. Could be any moment."
I had the notion that perhaps history was being made this day at Frenchman's Pond, and I think Pete sensed the same thing. Between wisecracks we worked hard to develop a rhythm, which proved to be difficult. Sometimes the fly jumped eight feet in the air and never came near the surface; sometimes the string hit the water with a splat. When that happened, John turned away with a grimace.
Finally Pete figured out that if one of us remained motionless, the other guy could make the fly dance. And dance it did. Pete and I took turns. John looked pleased.
In his story, "The Dancing Fly," John writes as the character Al, who fishes a pond with his two buddies, Pinky and Timmy. On their first visit they notice a small fly that dances over the pond's surface, but no one has a pattern, much less a technique, that will imitate it. Al tracks down an entomology professor in a distant New England town who not only identifies the bug, but ties up some flies.
Naturally, Al, Timmy, and Pinky are betting men, and Al cleans house with his new secret pattern. Toward the end of that season Timmy and Pinky grow weary of emptying their wallets. One day, when Al is out of sight on the lower part of the pond, Pinky and Timmy fish the upper pond with their new technique and score big time. Naturally, Al catches them and in the end...oops! A rise!
"Are you happy now?" I yelled across the pond.
"I'm very pleased. I can see where this might actually work. I'll be ecstatic, however, when you lads catch one. Keep at it, fellas, I'm going for a drink."
Pete and I heard the cabin door, then the tinkle of ice cubes, then a barely perceptible chuckle, maybe even laughter. I looked at Pete. Pete looked at me. We both looked at our bobbing cane poles and the silly dancing fly. Then I started to giggle and Pete burst out laughing. I swore I heard more laughter from the cabin. We were both laughing like hell as I reached up with my snips and cut the string at the tip of my pole.
John was already making Old Fashioneds when Pete and I entered the shack. "Any luck lads?"
"What do you think?" Pete said.
"My, my, my, I do feel better," he said with a smirk.
INSIDE THE SHACK, TO THE LEFT OF THE DOOR as you entered, was a small round table just large enough for two chairs. The chair by the door was always John's. There, under the windowsill, he kept a yellow pad, a smaller version of a yellow legal pad.
On the surface the pad appeared to be nothing more than a way to list camp chores. There were always jobs that needed doing out at Frenchman's. The list might read:
There might be a couple of items crossed off, but there always seemed to be things that needed doing. Naturally, as a guest, you tried to help out, even when he wasn't there. Once, at the top of the list my brother-in-law, Ron "Olive Matuka" Randlett, and I found "Move woodpile away from cabin door."
Sure enough, he had hauled in a load of slab wood with his trailer and dumped it too close to the door. If you disturbed the pile, you got a cascade of wood right onto the doorstep. Here was a chore that clearly needed doing. Ron and I checked the pond: No risers. So we stripped to the waist and threw slab wood over what remained of the old pile. That way the seasoned stuff would be closest to the door.
It was a large pile, but with both of us working we had it rearranged in an hour or so. In fact, we finished just as a hatch of midges came off and the brook trout began to rise. I crossed the job off the list and Ron and I went fishing.
A few days later, at home, I received a letter that read, in part: "Imagine my surprise at arriving at camp on Monday to discover that somehow the woodpile got moved and I am no longer in danger of being buried in a wooden avalanche as I enter and exit the shack. It will remain a mystery! You and Ron are welcome back anytime! But you know that. Very mysterious--perhaps a mermaid moved the woodpile?"
To him the pond was a special place and he liked to know that others thought so too.
To that end, the yellow pads served another purpose. He often left the pages of the yellow pads intact as they filled up. Rather than rip them off, he simply flipped the pages over. And interspersed among the lists of chores were notes from those who had fished the pond, especially in the evenings, after John had left. (He stayed through the cocktail hour, but most often left to have dinner at home.) These reports almost always were about the evening's fishing, but many went beyond that. There, in the pages of these often moldy pads of paper, were tributes to the pond.
I used to wonder if the pond affected others as it affected me. As you flipped through the pad, you almost felt as though you were reading someone else's mail, but you couldn't stop. I quickly learned that others felt the magic of the place too, and the writing was wonderful. It was sweet prose written at the moment by people who were deeply moved. Sometimes you would find a poem written by Indian Jim, another pal of John's.
The yellow pads became a link between the man and his place, his friends and his trout. A pad would disappear to be replaced with a new one and I wonder still if he saved them and read through them to remember distant friends and how they felt the magic of the place.
I ONCE VISITED FRENCHMAN'S POND WITH A WOMAN I loved. John was much taken with her. She was a fly fishing novice and John went out of his way to be a perfect and charming host and nicknamed her Miss Boardwalk, after one of the casting platforms.
She was much taken with John too and, not long after we returned home, she mailed him a small, round, many-faceted prism as a thank you.
John hung the prism in the window of the shack on a short length of tippet. When the sun was right, he would give the crystal a flick with his finger and set it spinning. Sunlight, in all the colors of the rainbow, would dance about the cabin. He loved that prism and every summer I would take it down and shine it up.
Over the years the woman I loved came to fly fishing in a big way; our paths would cross and recross. We drifted in and out of each other's lives, two adventurers with eyes on far horizons.
She never returned to the pond and John often asked about her and my answer was always the same; either I was free and she was committed to something, or she was free and I was involved. Our timing left a lot to be desired.
When I was involved I would sometimes take the person of the moment to the pond, knowing what would happen at the four-o'clock cocktail hour, especially if the sun was shining. John would go through the ritual of preparing bourbon Old Fashioneds. My companion's eyes would be roaming the shack, for inside it was something to behold. John would serve the drinks and would begin eyeing the prism. I'd give him a little kick under the table. He would smirk. I would try to divert his attention, which never worked. And inevitably, he would say something like: "Isn't the sunlight pretty coming through the window?" I'd give him a pretty solid boot. And then, very casually, with his left hand he would reach up and spin the prism and then take a quick drink. At which point I always gave him a real good whack under the table and he would feign pain.
Naturally, my companion would be fascinated by the spinning prism and its light show. And, since John had spent a good part of the day showing my friend around camp, pointing out all the stuff he had hauled in over the years, along with a little story about where he found everything, it was only natural that the prism have a story too.
"Let me see. How did I get that?" he would respond to the question that always leapt from pretty lips. Sure as hell, what came next always came with the biggest smirk: "Jamus, help me out. Do you recall how I got this lovely prism?"
"I have no idea, John," I would lie through my teeth.
And then he'd have me and off he'd go, never quite getting to the answer, but never quite letting me off the hook. While the evidence spun merrily, I squirmed. It was courtroom drama at its best.
Whenever I was in camp with a woman, John always left after a cocktail or two. "You two kids can have the run of the place," he would say, pretending to do me a huge favor.
The minute the door of his Jeep slammed shut and the engine started, it would come; you could bet the family dog on it. "All right," she'd demand, "so what's the deal with the prism?
Finally there was the long-ago day that I got married at Frenchman's. It was a blustery October day with a stiff wind off Lake Superior. It rained a little and some of the wedding party, including me and my about-to-be in-laws, took to the shack. John began to mix drinks, all puffed up over the elegant flower someone had pinned to his sweater. He was, of course, on center stage and loving every minute of it. Suddenly there was a break in the clouds. A shaft of sunlight burst through the window. John stopped mixing and looked at me with just a hint of a smile. I shook my head ever so slightly. He began to fuss with the drinks again. And ever so casually reached up and gave that little prism a modest spin.
That time it was my about-to-be mother-in-law who asked about the prism. John's smirk was bigger than usual, but he skillfully changed the subject.
There was a knothole in a jackpine near the edge of the pond. He would ask first-time visitors to the pond if they'd seen any trout rising. If the answer was no, he'd say "Watch this!" and stick his finger in the knothole as though he were pushing a button. A moment later he would point up the pond and, sure enough, rings would be spreading across the water.
"My, my," he would say with a chuckle.
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