Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller That weekend, I am sure Noah  would have rather been fishing. Are you all packed up?” I asked my son on Sunday morning. “Yeah, I guess,” he said with his customary enthusiasm. “Did you make a list?” “No, I don’t need a list,” he said with disdain. I’m a list person when it comes to packing for a big outing like a canoe trip. And this was a big outing, even bigger than that. He was moving to a dormitory and going away to college. I could tell he was nervous about it, the way he snapped at me, so I let it go, and a few others like it. Pick your battles, I say. I probably did the same thing to Mom and my sister when I went off to college in 1971. I can still remember that car ride to the University of Minnesota, my sister chattering to keep me from getting too scared. Like I was chattering with my son on Sunday. It didn’t help much. I still had to go into the dorm, sign at the desk, get a key, go up to the seventh floor, and meet two strangers, ...

David Heiller My son Noah and I took on Crooked Creek last Saturday, and a trout fisherman might say we came out the worse for it. I would disagree. We parked the car on a bridge off the main road. The bridge is a slab of concrete 30 feet long, with no sides. You wouldn’t want to drive off it. But it doesn’t wash away in the spring. We had no idea how to fish Crooked Creek. This would be no Hollywood scene of a man in a vest and hat, bull-whipping 50 feet of line over his head. We were armed with three night crawlers and one worm from my mom’s compost pile, and two old rods and reels that we had scrounged from her basement. We snuck up to a big cottonwood tree and dropped our lines in. The creek formed a pool around its roots, maybe six feet deep. We didn’t get a bite. The creek looked mighty inviting as it sliced through the trees toward us, cool and clean and wholesome on a hot August afternoon. So we walked down the road about half a mile, until a path cut through t...

David Heiller It was late on Sunday by the time Cindy and I got to the beans. It was on our list on Saturday morning, at least in our heads, along with numerous other chores. But by the time we’d weeded flower beds and cleaned the house and baked bread and cleaned the freezer (to name a few), it was Sunday evening. Beets! To make matters worse, when we cleaned the freezer, we had found a dozen packages of frozen beans from last year’s garden. And here was another bumper crop waiting impatiently. Maybe that’s why we didn’t get to them till so late, why we weren’t excited about it. But we finally grabbed four ice cream buckets at about 7 p.m. on Sunday, and tackled the beans. It was a two-person job. We were tired, that Sunday-night kind of tired where you just want to curl up with a book or take a leisurely bike ride. But with that other person across the row, working at the same easy pace, the job wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was good. Queen Ida helping in the garden...

David Heiller Everybody knows Murphy’s Law, which states: “If anything can go wrong, it WILL go wrong. There are many other Murphy Laws, which I’ve mentioned from time to time. Mike Hruby, Askov school superintendent, calls these “Murphy’s Laws of Random Perversity: 1. Left to themselves—all things go from bad to worse. 2. Anything that can go wrong—will go wrong and at the worse possible moment. One of Murphy's children. 3. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong—the one that will go wrong is the one that will do the most damage. 4. If you play with a thing long enough—you will surely break it. 5. If everything appears to be going well—you have obviously overlooked something. 6. Nature always sides with the hidden flaw. There is one other one that parents all know by heart, Murphy’s Law 17-C: “If children are going to misbehave, they will do it at the worst possible time.” That came true this weekend for our family. We were at my mom...

David Heiller We took a family vacation last week to my hometown of Brownsville, Minnesota. I went fishing at the second spillway of the Reno Bottoms four times. The second spillway is a place where back-water from the Mississippi River flows under a spillway and into a huge slough. There is another spillway (called the first spillway) only a quarter mile from the road. Many people fish there because it is more acces­sible. I don’t like it, because the people leave their trash and dead fish and it’s not a very pleasant place to stand around, which is what fishing mostly involves. Malika and Noah with their catch on an earlier trip to the spillway. The second spillway is two miles away, so you have to work a little harder to get there. But the rewards for doing so are great, as I discovered again last week. My daughter, Malika, went with me the first time. We got up at 6 a.m., drove seven miles to Reno, then rode our bicycles to the spot. I carried the poles and tac...

David Heiller One of my Christmas wishes came true, much to Nancy’s chagrin. I had hoped for cold weather that would solidify the ice on lakes and ponds. I wanted this for two reasons, skating and ice fishing. Of course, I got my wish. Was there any doubt of that happening in Minnesota in December? The cold weather did arrive, and the ice did freeze, and it froze smooth. I mean smooth. Α Zamboni couldn’t have made better ice. So on Saturday, Nancy, Collin and I headed for Mud Lake to do some ice fishing. Nancy, my sister-in-law, is probably the most die-hard fisher-person I will ever meet. Not that she fishes much. She doesn’t have that opportunity, for a variety of reasons. But when she goes, she is as content as a chickadee at a bird feeder, and that fact became clear to me once again last Saturday. Α heavy snow was falling when we got to Mud Lake at 2 p.m. I carried the minnows, my nephew, Collin, carried the bucket of gear, and Nancy brought up the rear with the ice ...