Recalling the fanatics of fishing ~ July 28, 1988

David Heiller

“Boy, Peter is what you’d call fanatical about fishing,” I commented to Cindy as we rode home from a family gathering Sunday evening.

“Kind of like when you were 17, huh?” Cindy asked in more of a statement than a question.

“No, I was never like that,” I said firmly.

Peter and Noah fishing

But Cindy’s question got me thinking to when I was Pete’s age, between my junior and senior year of high school, growing up on the Mississippi River. Almost every summer morning, my cousin Kevin and I would take his flat-bottomed boat and head to the backwaters on the Wisconsin side of the main channel. We would stump-hop, fishing the roots of dead trees. Every tree would yield a rock bass or two. By 10 o’clock, we would have a stringer of fish, which we would split. I would fry mine for lunch.

Most evenings, I would go fishing in the Reno Bottoms, first for bass in the fast spillway water, then for panfish in the slough, and finally, as yellow light dimmed to dusk, for bullheads by the light of a kerosene lantern.

Peter is my nephew. When he was born, I was a college student. I would babysit him. I remember when he first learned to walk, his first words, when he first started watching football games. We would sing songs together. But Peter and his family started moving, first to Detroit, then to Dallas, where they live now. We would see them once a year, at best. Every year, Peter would have grown several feet, or so it seemed. For the first time in my life, I realized how my great-Aunt Clara felt when she would see me every few years and exclaim, “Why, look how David has grown.

You’re getting to be such a big boy.” I would roll my eyes and squirm away, much like Peter did.

Now Peter is tall, almost six feet. His face and limbs are tan. He has strong arms and legs. Cindy calls him handsome, and I would have to agree, much as I hate to admit it because he looks like his father and I would never call Dan handsome, to his face anyway.

And Peter is a fisherman. We saw him a total of about three hours over our weekend visit at my sister’s last Saturday and Sunday. Peter would get up, get in the boat, and go fishing for three hours. He would come back, eat lunch, and go out again for the afternoon, despite the hot sun and blustery wind. The same for the evening. He owns a bass boat and trolling motor. His tackle box is twice the size of mine.

He caught a few fish, a couple smallmouth bass, a one-pound rock bass over the weekend. That was almost immaterial. It was the act of fishing, the search for the lunker, the solitude, the freedom of the lake in his uncle’s speedboat, that drove Peter. He asked me to go with him several times. But it was too windy, or too hot, or I wanted to take a nap, or visit with my sisters, or play with the kids. I knew I couldn’t match Peter’s zeal, and I didn’t try. Maybe 18 years ago, but not now.

Noah tried. He and Adam, Pete’s brother, stood for hours at the end of the dock, fishing in three feet of water. Mostly they caught small sunnies and perch. But

Another day's trip with another day's glory.

Sunday afternoon, Noah came running from the dock to us, half crying and half-yelling. “My fishing pole fell in the water,” he called.

Cindy jumped up and ran back with him. We could see the Mickey Mouse reel bobbing out from the dock. Cindy fished it out, and reeled in a sunfish. Noah grabbed the pole from his mom, and walked back with a proud smile. Adam, who is six, weighed the fish for his five-year-old cousin, using a scale from Pete’s bulging tackle box. “It’s half a pound,” he called out from the dock.

They put the lunker on the stringer. Noah went into the house and grabbed Peter’s hand, led him to the dock. “See the fish I caught?” he asked proudly.

This wasn’t a real fish to Peter, not an eight-ounce sunfish. “Wow, it’s a beauty,” Peter said in a voice that made Noah smile.

Noah talked about the sunfish the rest of the day, and on the way home. I asked him as we fried it Monday morning, “Shouldn’t that be Momma’s fish? She caught it.”

“No, she just caught the pole,” he answered.

That’s fisherman’s logic. It wasn’t a fanatical answer, but bordered on it. That’s what Peter would have answered.

If scrapes and scabs could talk ~ July 19, 1991

David Heiller

If six-year-old bodies could talk, they would have plenty to say about vacations. Take Malika’s nose. The freckles are finally starting to show through the scab there. For a while, it looked as if someone had peeled it like a banana.

Swingset gymnastics at the old Brownsville school.

Mollie had been performing stunts on the swings at the school grounds. She would grab the ropes and lift herself out of the swing, then rotate backwards until she was facing the ground, like a gymnast.

Disaster came one afternoon when she let go while in this position. I could hear her crying a block away, where I was cutting weeds in the backyard. Her face looked like someone had hit it with a mud pie: a coat of dirt ran in a circle from forehead to chin. Her nose wasn’t broken, but oh, what a scab. Yet she was back at the park the next day. Playgrounds have a way of making you forget about a few scabs.

If bodies could talk, you’d hear grumbling from Mollie’s shoulder and knees too, from a spill off her bike. She had only been riding a two-wheeler for three weeks, and was doing quite well, except for a minor detail of not using her brakes. She used the Fred Flintstone braking method of dragging her feet until stopped.

Malika, always happily daring,
on her ten mile + huge fall, bike ride.
 I am so pleased to say that Ms. Malika
mastered biking and still loves it today!

We were on a 10-mile leg of a beautiful bike trail from Fountain to Lanesboro, Minnesota. All was fine until we came to a steep hill, with an 80-degree turn at the bottom. Mollie went down with her hands frozen to the handlebars and her hair stuck out from the back of her head by the stiff breeze and an even stiffer fear. I know she was scared, because I was scared just watching her, the way you feel when you can see an acci­dent coming but are powerless to stop it.

If yells could have slowed her, she would have stopped. “Use your brakes, use your brakes!” I shouted, as she disappeared in front of me. I found her at the bottom, off the trail, in the weeds, under her bike. She had gone straight when the trail had turned.

The Brownsville vacation David,
his mom, Malika and Noah, 1991.
 Malika's scabs don't show here!

Her shoulder and knee had bad scrapes, but otherwise she was fine. I guess parents always fear the worst. She was shook up and crying, but not too much that she couldn’t get back on her bike and finish the 10-mile trip. Bike trails have a way of making you forget about a few scrapes.

Then there’s the poison ivy. Mollie must have picked it up on our hike to Crooked Creek. We were so busy looking for rattlesnakes that we ignored the more common dangers. Cindy and I used to make this hike before we had kids, with Crooked Creek the perfect half-way point for a skinny dip. But this time, a herd of cows upstream had muddied the stream, so I just car­ried everyone across, and we hiked and pic­nicked on.

A poison ivy rash bubbled up on Mollie’s leg that evening, and spread to her other leg the next day. She was told not to itch it, but still it spread. Mollie was worried at first, but she soon accepted it, and now points it out to us proudly. Like her scrapes and scabs, it was another red badge of courage, and a sign of a well-spent vacation.

Playgrounds, bike rides, and hikes are only the half of it. Mix in a banjo, some old friends, a swim in the river, a stringer full of sunnies, a family reunion, and a grandmother who en­joyed it as much as we did, and you’ll have the best vacation imaginable. Scrapes and all.