Memories, unlike fish, don’t get away ~ May 23, 1991

David Heiller

Jim’s voice carried over the tiny lake with the hushed urgency that only Jim could give it while watching a fellow fisherman fighting a lunker.

“It’s a big sucker,” he said. “Work him in easy.”

I had heard that voice a year before, when an eight-pound lake trout graced the net which Jim held. Now it was Dave’s turn, with Jim again at the net.

David and Paul entering the BWCAW bleacher.

Dave’s gold and orange spoon clung to the mouth of a beauty, all right. Even from our canoe bleacher seats 40 yards away, we could see Dave’s arm muscles strain, could hear Jim’s urging.

Dave brought him in once, but this northern wouldn’t hear of that, and peeled out another 20 yards of line. Dave worked him next to the canoe again, and Jim brought the net around the head, and halfway up the belly.

That’s when the fish had had enough. It flicked the spoon into the net, plunged back-ward into the air, then hit the water and in an instant, was gone.

We were all a bit shocked, I think, and for a split second there was silence on the lake. It had happened so quickly. Then Jim let some carefully chosen words fly, unrepeatable here, and aimed at himself. Good fishermen are their own worst critics.

It’s funny, but losing a northern like that has its place on any camping trip. It’s almost as good as catching one. Dave could marvel at its girth, at how it had attacked his spoon the second it hit the water, at how its teeth had chipped some of the orange paint away, at how it wouldn’t fit into the dog-gone net. He could even give it a weight: 12 pounds.

So much more than fishing.

Dave wasn’t angry. Our main goal in this five-day trip into canoe country has never been catching 12-pound northerns or eight-pound lake trout. Then you might feel frustrated and swear bitterly and remember angrily those near misses. You see guys like that, guys who pack in two pails of minnows and a seine and a live-box the size of a trunk, who fish morning, noon, and night. That’s fine I guess, but I think they are missing something.

Like our trip up into that chain of tiny lakes, just north of Insula, where Dave’s 12-pounder still resides. We carried, pushed and pulled our two canoes over logs and rocks from lake to lake, until we could go no further. Then we hiked on without the canoes. In thick brush next to the stream, we found morel mushrooms covering the ground, and picked till two hats were full.

We came to another lake, and wondered when anyone had last sat in the sun with their shoes off at its bank, eating gorp, or sprang on the muskeg, or saw that blue racer snake through the grass, or watched an osprey swing downstream, like we did.

We pulled in two smaller northerns from Dave’s Bay, then headed back. The sinking sun turned the lake golden. It caught two hooded mergansers as they watched us sweep around a corner; then they skipped into flight across our bow, churning the water, etching their maroon-and-white beauty into our minds.

Dave L, the camp cook, always kept the gang satisfied.

Back at the camp, Dave whipped up a pot of wild rice, and Jim sautéed the morels, and Paul took out his fillet knife, and I caught another two-pounder, and we ate the freshest fish supper ever, with trimmings no restaurant could match, no where, no how.

We recounted Dave’s fish fight a few more times over the campfire. The moon hung like a thumbnail in the west, flanked by Jupiter and Mars. The lake was quiet. No campfires, no man-made noise. We were full, content, and we carried another slice of memories to go with so many others, five years’ worth. Memories like a big piece of pie, the kind that melts in your mouth and makes you want one more hunk, one more crack at that 12-pound northern, one more bushwhack, one more loon call hanging over the dark water, one more plate of food as wild as this beautiful wilderness that keeps calling us back.

Yes, fish get away sometimes, but memories don’t. We’re lucky for that.

A little peace and quiet ~ July 24, 1997

David Heiller

That’s what we experienced last week. Peace and quiet. Our two kids were gone.

Mollie went to camp, and Noah went to visit a friend. So from Tuesday to Friday,

Malika was at camp.

we didn’t have the kids at home.

This has happened a few times in the last 14 years, but usually not for more than a day at a time. A four day stretch was a lot different. It took us back to the good old days, and maybe to some new days ahead.

When we came home from work on Tuesday, we could lie on the bed and read. We didn’t have to start making supper right away.

The house was quiet. The kids weren’t there to tell us about the blow-by-blow of their day, what Noah said to Mollie, what Mollie did back to Noah.

The house was clean, just like we left it in the morning. We could actually see our dining room table. It wasn’t piled with a basket of laundry and a couple books and a wrinkled newspaper.

The floor didn’t need sweeping, the living room didn’t need to be picked up. We didn’t have to ask Noah to put his shoes away, or Mollie to take her dirty clothes to the laundry room.

There were no basketball games to play, no softballs to toss, no chores to supervise. No arguing!

Hey, Dad, play some basketball with me?

No Sepultura. No Hanson. Those are music groups, in case you don’t have teenagers. They’re not my favorites, to put it politely. But my kids don’t like my music either.

On Wednesday we left work early and went to Duluth. We took our bikes along, and rode through the ritzy areas looking at mansions. We found a book store in someone’s house and browsed through used books. That was fun. One form of heaven for me would be a good used book store, and all the time in the world to spend there.

We ate supper at Taste of Saigon, bought candy at Hephzibah’s, and walked the board walk to the rose garden. Not once did we think about calling home to check on the kids.

A date is always nice!

We came home to a dark and quiet house. We were childless again.

We did think about the kids, Cindy more than me. We wondered especially about Mollie, how she was doing at camp. She never wrote, so we took that as a good sign, that she was having too much fun, or that she was too exhausted. Or both.

We enjoyed our time alone. It was a break. We were able to get a lot done. Not just work, but “quality time,” to use a phrase from the nineties.

Spouses need that, so they can become a couple again.

During their absence, I wondered what our life would be like without children. I kind of liked all that peace and quiet! A sense of freedom returned, that old feeling that I could go anywhere and do anything.

“Simplify, simplify,” Henry David Thoreau’s famous words, came to mind. The details of our life had simplified greatly without the kids: The big picture details that are a constant presence in the back of my mind, like how we’ll save enough money to send the kids to college. And the mundane ones, like how we’re going to get the kids to and from swimming lessons.

All together again!

Then it all changed, when a car door opened on Friday night and I heard Noah’s voice call out, “Hi Dad.” It was like a bolt traveled through the air between us, connecting us, triggered by his voice, by those two words, and I forgot about my new-found freedom.

On Saturday it happened again, when Mollie called me at work and asked if she could have Sarah spend the night. She was home, safe and sound! Wow, it was good to hear her voice.

It was good to give them hugs. It was good to have them back.

On the one hand, it would be nice not to have the worry and complications that our children bring. I’m envious of childless couples for that reason.

But on the other hand, I wouldn’t trade them for all the gold in Birch Creek township.

On the moonlit waters of Lake Insula ~ May 26, 1988

David Heiller

The moon slid above the western horizon about a third of the way into the sky before Paul spotted it through the pine trees. He and we three other men turned from our seats around the campfire to peer at it, yellow and soft in the spring haze. It didn’t throw much light as it approached its first quarter stage last Friday, May 20.

“Let’s go out on the lake.” I threw out the suggestion to my three companions, much like we threw out bait from the big rocks in front of our campsite on Lake Insula in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, hoping for a fish but not worrying about it.

“I remember once when we canoed in with a full moon,” Paul Dwyer said. The Duluth man was a veteran of this neck of the North Country.

“You couldn’t portage though?” I asked.

Paul answered with a healthy expletive, one not too strong for the campfire, but a little heavy for a weekly newspaper. “It was beautiful. Everything looked like a negative image of a picture.”

“So who wants to go out?” I repeated.

“Yeah, I’ve been out in a full moon like that,” Dave Landwehr answered, crouching over the cast iron grill that had “U.S. Forest Service” molded on top. “It’s nice.”

The Sturgeon Lake man’s voice said it was nice indeed, but it added a tone that said a soft seat on a boat cushion by a fire was nicer still.

Jim in the BWCAW

“C’mon Jim, whatdaya say?” I said, turning to Jim Ryczek for my last hope.

The Wisconsin man looked at the fire. “I don’t know,” he hesitated.

“Go,” Paul and Dave said almost simultaneously.

“I guess that's not such a bad idea,” Jim agreed.

We walked past our two tents, down to the bank to Dave’s 15-foot Grumman. We grabbed our Misukanis canoe paddles. I crawled in first, walking easily down the middle while Jim steadied the bow. It was easy keeping balance with none of our 100 pounds of gear on board.

Jim put one foot in the boat and pushed off with the other, leaving the shore without much notice. In that instance, we were in another world, a world of dark water and shadows and pale stars and that yellow, banana-shaped moon. For the past two days we had seen blue skies and bluer water. We had seen an eagle nesting atop a white pine. We had startled two moose, a cow and a spike bull, off an island hide-away, and paddled respectfully after them as they stretched and swam across a channel to disappear into the brush. We had seen mergansers mating, and 10-pound northerns flopping on the end of our stringers.

But the moon seemed to pull us to the dark water, and quickly showed us another side of the Boundary Waters.

We paddled west at first, seeking as much faint light as we could. We circled around a small bay, off the main western body of Insula. A thick shadow lay at the edge of the water, where the jack pines met their reflection.

“Get a little closer to shore,” Jim said, pointing his paddle to the northern shore. Butterflies rose in my stomach as we steered toward the trees, looming ever larger until they seemed to grab at the moon with their tips and smother what little light we had.

“I can see,” Jim said. “We’re fine.” Did he sense my butterflies, or maybe have a few of his own.

The whole crew.

We paddled along the edge of the bank, perhaps 10 yards off, maybe 10 inches. The darkness was too thick for me. But we could hear the shore, hear the closeness of the paddles as they dug into water, and the water as it split the front of the canoe and dribbled off with a metallic sound.

We cleared the bay and paddled across lake toward two islands north of the campsite. We could see the campfire’s red glow now, and see the two men lying on their pads alongside it. The water split up ahead, and we caught a blur out of the corner of our eyes. Then came a heavy ker-PLUSH, as the fish returned to the dark water from a high jump. The sound was repeated to our right. Some powerful northerns were showing off for us, and as their bellies hit the water with that heavy ker-PLUSH, I could imagine they were even bigger than the 10-pounders that Jim had pulled in three hours earlier a short distance away.

We continued on, around another island, losing sight of our campfire. But the moon stayed with us, following us south as we talked softly and paddled on. We came into view of the campsite again. Is there anything so reassuring on a dark, silent lake? We put our paddles down and floated. A slight breeze, barely noticeable, pushed us south, rocking the canoe slightly.

Then a loon called from the southern part of Insula, perhaps half a mile or more away. The cry was two syllables, the second longer than the first. The sound carried across the lake and bounced off the shore and back at us softly, so that the echo was repeating even as the first call hung in the loon’s throat.

Another loon to the north answered with a higher-pitched series of cries, like a gull, only deeper and richer. The sounds layered the lake, with the echoes adding to the spell. Their calls are hard to describe. Maybe they have to be heard on such a night to understand why the loon is the unquestioned master and symbol of the Boundary Waters.

The moon had climbed higher, now nearly overhead. Jim and I both sat up in the canoe at the same time, and headed back to the glow of the campfire. We had been guests of the moon and the water, the loons and fish. And we felt very lucky indeed because we knew we had been given something more precious than a fortune, an experience and memory to take back with us as we left the moonlight and the Boundary Waters.

It’s a memory we look forward to reliving, and exploring in a new light, again.