Lunkers
by Justin Larson
I’m not a fisherman but fishing was on my mind. So early summer of 2020, I rented a small motor boat on Gunflint Lake to get after whatever it was that was calling me out there. I watched how over-exuberance in my two kids tripped them up climbing into the craft with the bow pointed to the Canadian wilderness. Soon we were bouncing across the water with no apparent destination. Laughter and smiles seemed permanent among us broken only by screams of joyous agony when the icy blue jumped up in gusts of wind and sprayed us. It was a perfect day and I soon realized perfect cover from what I was really feeling inside. There the waters were dark around me, with a divorce lapping at my feet. My life was falling apart. How do I tell them I’m scared?
We pulled into a little bay and I cut the engine and dropped anchor. The three of us grabbed for our fishing gear and when my son reached over for bait for his hook, our eyes met and I was stilled and then unmistakably pulled back in time. I’ve been here before.
“Worm, minnow or leech?” My dad asked, and I at 13 didn’t know. I never liked baiting hooks and spent years trying to avoid it.
“Could I just use a lure that looked like one of them?” I asked. He passed the worms up to me.
I casted out a couple times but wether it was the thought of cleaning the fish back in the shack or just ADD, my own enthusiasm for fishing got away from me and in its place gathered a terrible boredom. But there was no where to go and nothing else to do. So I surrendered myself to the moment, bobbing in silence watching out after bobbers idling across waters that transmogrified in greens and black, dense and towering pines along the shore.
The waters threatened to induce a change in my dad too. I knew it in his averted eyes that were casted at me and then back out across the lake that he was turning over things in his head wondering what his mouth might betray. He was troubled. Anxious. Overworked. Underpaid. I sensed it even at that age in the way he lumbered off against his will on the occasion I had gotten up and out of bed and saw him off to work. The way he’d return at night with soulless eyes and collapse into the couch in front of the television using a cigarette in his mouth as a convenient artifice preventing anything from having to be spoken or revealed. Worse, the nights leading up to his work out of town that took him out of our lives for weeks on end. His only solace in those sixteen hour days refurbishing generators in the bottoms of hydro-electric dams was the dreaming about the fish above that we now pursued. I learned early to be predictable with him so as to be able to keep him predictable. He was often angry, intense and sometimes physical. I got the brunt of it— including a bloody nose that actually was my mother’s. It just felt like mine for many years stained as it was in my memory. I know now from my mother what I couldn’t learn from him then. She didn’t love him. And the lunker in the deep dark waters between us was that I was his adopted son. The boy in the bow loved dearly but also the ever present reminder of the man before him who still claimed a corner of my mother’s heart that in return troubled his.
There was a nibble on my line. My bobber dipped and danced and my heart quickened. Then it stopped. The bobber became lifeless and when the ripples that ringed it disappeared, I knew my worm was gone. But the tension between my dad and the things he wanted to say continued to build, slapping the side of our vessel and gathering the force and weight of a tsunami. Suddenly he jerked into action whipping the tip of his pole up into the air. A rip shot straight across the water to where his bobber used to be. The rod bent in a tight arc with his reel squealing in opposition to his turning the spindle. Our little boat spun around and rocked with the commotion. And then there was nothing. The line slackened and his bobber surfaced. Stillness had returned and he grumbled something under his breath. Had I turned and cast my line into him that moment, I might hook the thing he couldn’t talk about before it got away. Instead, I feared the unknown then too, choosing to watch my own bobber drift aimlessly back towards the pines.
I returned to my son and his outreached hand and the eyes that held me there for answers to questions he wouldn’t ask. And like my dad before me, I passed forward only the worms, leaving my boy to continue to troll beneath the surface of the things we say for things that we’re afraid to say openly as dads ourselves. But I think about taking him out again often. Maybe he’ll get that one big lunker tomorrow. Maybe one day he’ll take his own children fishing and together they’ll finally figure out how to land it once and for all.
