The Hex

I've been sitting in cafes and bars that dot the flat, sand country of central Wisconsin in the early evenings. I'm waiting, reading newspapers, getting online where there is WiFi. Yesterday, I had a mishap in the stream and strained an already tender muscle in my thigh. Today it is very stiff and painful. So it goes...

For those that don't live around here: about the time the sun takes the final dip and the wind still and the temp cools, massive anvil-shaped clouds erupt on the western horizon. Then comes the hail, the heavy wind, rain and frequently a tornado. Towns have been leveled. About every third car has heavy hail damage--image if the hood of that car was your head. Living here can be dangerous--especially this year.

As I wait, I flip from news blog to NY Times reading the Op Eds for what I already know, that early November headline: Obama Kicks The Shit Out Of Crazy Old Bastard! I've never been so disinterested in politics in all my life as I am now. So, back to the other stuff.

I sit in these cafes. I go out fishing in the morning for little brook trout. I come in, I sip coffee, I lie around and do nothing. I wait.

About this time of year a mayfly emerges called Hexagenia Limbata. The Hex. It's that mayfly that brings out the snowplows to clear the bugs off of the bridges over the Mississippi and other rivers. It's going to emerge any time now. I've seen a couple here and there, floating downstream like little paper sail boats twirling on the dusk's black-orange reflection

There are trout rivers around here that get the big hatches: The Brule, White, Namekagon, Tomorrow, Prairie, Mecan, etc. I've been fishing one of these, and another that never gets named. These are all slow moving streams in their upper, trouty reaches. Quiet rivers slipping slowly through spruce bogs and alder swamps. Big trout live here. Big, big brown trout. Fat, lazy brown trout that sit underneath root wads until dark and come out and feed on other trout, frogs, mice--whatever gets in their way. Really ugly brown trout with broad, buttery sides. The kids of fish that get really excited when the big bugs descend on the water to lay their eggs by the tens of thousands, and do so only in the dead of night. This is night fishing. It's so quiet. Except for the whippoorwill's call, the cackling raccoons, the skunk. The fireflies are thick, spooking in the mist--the Ojibwa dead walking the swampy blackness for a time when their world and ours come together.

When all goes right the bugs come off the water right at dusk. They flitter above the water, a river of bugs parallel to the stream. The trout begin to rise. Little ones splash, the bigger ones slurp, the giants appear later--their sound is a toilet flushing. Everything goes wrong when it's 1am and you actually hook one of these things! Or you get sprayed by a skunk! Or an unseen, unheard black bear bellyflops into the pool you are fishing to scoop up handfuls of giant yellow mayflies that carpet the surface.

This is the Hex...

Bring the skeeter repellent and check for ticks.

Another Day, Another Big Fish

I caught smallmouth today. They weren't very big. The best of them was maybe 16 or 17 inches. But, it was a strange outing with the weather alternating between a hot summer and a chill, drizzly day. On top of that I caught a fish that one never equates with fly fishing--walleye, a good sized one too. They are they best eating fish. I usually don't keep fish but if I had a way of transporting this thing today I would have bonked it, fried it, dashed it with hot sauce, and let my digestive system go through the precesses rendering it into a turd. But, I let it go. It is still sitting at the bottom of the Beaver Pond.



I finally caught a pike that was big enough to take a picture of. Too bad you can't see the set of nasty teeth on him. I put the fly, a Clouser Minnow, down next to some water lilies and he shot out and inhaled the fly, then he ran all over the pond before I got my hands on him. He tore up my left hand while I was trying to unhook him. I have a nice collection of gashes on my thumb and fore finger.


Then I caught that damn walleye. It's our state fish. It's the state fish because we like to eat it, fried--which is why Minnesotans are a bit broad in the beam.

I love the big, fly-caught smallmouth.

Yet, Another Hog Smallmouth

I'm just that good. Actually, it was the first fish of the day. I caught one that was just a little smaller. I didn't catch much of anything till I got to the Beaver Pond (great name for a strip club or a whorehouse, huh?) and three fairly nice sized pike got away with three of my flies. My mistake was that I waded wet--no waders, just my wading boots and wading socks--so I was a bit chilly all day. I didn't even bother to lift or run today. I feel like such a heifer.

Heading Out

It's still raining. But, to the north it is not raining. Hasn't rained much up there for months. That is where I am headed today. Here, one of my quiet, central Minnesota rivers. Big smallmouth. I'm drooling just thinking about it. So, just to rub it in, I'm gonna catch huge fish while the rest of you bastards go to work. Sucks to be you. Good to be me.

My Middle-Minnesota Rivers

There is a river that I usually fish after the bass opener in late May, and then I do not fish it again. I've done that for years. It has been a poor decision. Saturday night and last night another series of anomalous and enormous August thunderstorms blew through the Twin Cities and north of the Cities that dumped quite a few inches on most of the central part of the state. My favorite part of the Mississippi came up about a foot and a half. It looked really good, but the sudden deluge uprooted all the eel grass that had been growing in the slow current. All I caught was grass. Every cast. A great percentage. But, no smallmouth.

So, I drove up the famous highway that leads to that most famous of Minnesota walleye lakes to fish the river the highway follows. This river gets no attention even from the locals, save a few authentic Huck Finns. The rest are on their way burning up the roadway with their massive deep-vee boats in tow to get to the walleyes--our sluggish battler of a state fish. The little river was really low. Too low for even a canoe. But, the quiet currents, the alder thickets separating the dense, white pine capped north woods from the water made it seem so wild. There were no cars, no outboard motors.

I began by walking downstream on a stretch that is earlier in the year impossible to wade. I began by catching small smallmouths, creek chubs, and rock bass--then I caught a little pike, then a bigger one. The farther I got away from the bridge, the better the water got, the bigger the smallmouths and pike got. I don't catch many pike on the Miss. so it's nice to have a change of pace on this stream. Actually, pike are very numerous here, and back in the day when I used to fish this stream often--back in high school--I frequently caught pike topping ten pounds. They are still there. They are big, green, and nasty. They have rows of needle-like teeth that steal a lot of my lures and flies. Wire leaders help keep flies and lures. But, the greatest moment of the day was landing a solid, four-pound, football of a smallmouth I caught out of an old beaver pond. While fishing this pond, the resident beaver, going about his evening business worked his way through a backwater of water lilies. I stood very still on the bank and waited to see how close he would come. Beavers must not see very well because he came right up to me. I had my camera ready, but when I moved he spun around and leaped in into the river like a Labrador. He surfaced and slapped his tail on the water as an alert to other beavers and glided back to his lodge on the other end of the pond.

The river flows south out of the big lake into the Mississippi. It flows through a part of the state that, prior to agriculture, was the point where the prairie, eastern deciduous woodlands, and northern forests met. Zebulon Pike, the guy Pike's Peak is named after in Colorado, wrote in his journal (circa 1800) while visiting the area of the huge numbers of Elk and Bison that thrived on the prairie mingling with the now extinct herds of woodland caribou and moose (now living hundreds of miles to the north). The bison, elk, and caribou are gone. But, if you pay careful attention to the landscape you can see the unique blending of prairie grasses, alder bottomlands, muskegs, and black spruce clusters and birch groves. To me, this is the part of the state that is so uniquely Minnesota. You can go to New England or eastern Canada and see the Great North Woods or to South Dakota and see the prairies, but this portion of Minnesota, the land neglected in favor of the huge area lakes, is what makes this state special, and it gives the rivers a character that I have found nowhere else. The last retreat of the glaciers left the river beds filled with stones large and small that can be found far into the arctic and out on the plains--granites, quartzes, slates, limestones, and basalts. It was also the glaciers that allowed for the migration of fish species--the pike, found in the waters surrounding the Arctic Circle on all northern continents and the smallmouth, found only in the meandering Mississippi drainage--to live in the same waters.

Along this river I saw several times a very large bald eagle, the beaver, king fishers, blue herons, white egrets, wood ducks, white-tailed deer, and plenty of leopard frogs. There were several crayfish of the size that you don't want to get caught in your swim trunks. There were also the all-important freshwater clams. This not only the sign of a healthy ecosystem, but sign of a waterway that is seldom traveled and used by humans.

The streams that I usually fish, trout streams in western Wisconsin, are today strictly the domain of Dry-Fly Divas--fashionably dressed yuppies out on the water to look good and practice their presentations for adventures in New Zealand, Kamchatka, or Patagonia. It's a scrimmage and not even about the rivers and land. But, they are also the sort of waters you'll find from Minneapolis to the Atlantic ocean. They are nothing special in that regard. Until it gets too cold I'll spend my free days on these central Minnesota rivers, largely forgotten--except by me.

If you flip open a map you'll see thousands of miles of such streams. They are small, often stained red with tanic acid, and run through thick woods dotted with remnant stands of red and white pine. They are also full of full. Most with have pike, lots of small pike. There will be a few walleyes, maybe some catfish. If you are really lucky they will have a good number of smallmouth bass. The rivers are everywhere. Explore them. You'll have them to yourself.

The Upper Mississippi

I have spent most of the last two weeks wading and fishing the Mississippi river well north of the Twin Cities. This is not the wide, slouching, muddy river of the south. Up here, it is fast, with many rapids and exposed boulders. The water is clear and clean. You can eat the fish from it, if you want to.

The river is so low because of severe drought that I could cross in many places. It is that shallow. I caught many smallmouth bass, a few walleyes, even a 34 inch muskie. But, it is the smallmouth that I love so much. When hooked the leap from the water and often spit the hook causing it to sail back over my head. They dig deep into the current. They never give up. The upper river has special regulations protecting smallies. They are now so numerous that while wading they even swim up to get a better look at you in the clear water. Sometimes, because of their feisty nature they swim up to you and flare their gills, flutter their fins wildly as a challenge. They have a lot of character.

One day a pair of mink kittens came tumbling over the bankside trail in play before they noticed me. They stood up, looked at me, and then continued to wrestle. Also, while walking along the bank of another stretch I noticed several freshwater clams (which are quite large and strong) had been split open and the meat slurped out. I then noticed the large tracks of a black bear made the night before.

Each day I fished I noticed expensive drift boats, the sort you see out west on the big trout rivers. They were filled with guides and fly fishermen. I did not see any of the old john boats manned by flannel-shirted river rats. Characters that knew every rock in the river, where the big fish are. Most have simply passed on. They were the personalities of the river. They told the great stories or stories were told about them. Everything was embellished at it should be. These were the sort of personalities that Mark Twain wrote about in Life on the Mississippi. They are also the sort of characters you see in the writings of the North by Jack London, Robert Service, Sigurd Olson, and many others. They were people who loved the river and the land because of its every changing aesthetic beauty. They were not interested in the American Dream--Wife, House, 2.3 kids, car in the garage, dog. They were haunted by waters. They loved the sky reflected in various shades on the river's broad pools, the sound of rapids rapping around boulders, birds like piping plovers beeping and running along the banks, the whistle of wood ducks taking to the air. And there was always the fight of the smallmouth bass. Indians called and later the French fur traders called the Mississippi smallmouth "the fish that struggles."

This is the stretch that consumed the final days of the expedition of Henry Schoolcraft. It was also the river of the French explorers Marquette, Brule, Hennepin, and Nicollet in the 1600's. It also divided the lands of the Chippewa--eastern woodland Indians, and the Dakota (Sioux)--western plains Indians. This stretch was not the waterway of mills in Minneapolis or barge traffic and paddle boats in Saint Paul and further south. This stretch was used by lumbermen who rode great logs of white pine down the river. These men were called River Pigs and specialized in untangling logjams--and not being crushed by the mass of huge logs. These logs were used to build houses and buildings all over the country.

Today all that is gone and that is good and bad. The river is a National Wild & Scenic waterway which prevents development. It is largely in a wilderness state. It is too fast, too shallow, and too rocky for barge navigation. Right now it is only fit for canoe traffic. The water is clear and clean, filled with clams and crayfish, schools of minnows. There are huge hatches of large mayflies, especially Epheron Lukon (White Fly) and the huge Hexagenia Limbatta (the Hex)--a rarity in polluted waters and a fattener of fish. You can often see river otter and beaver, eagles and ospreys. There are plenty of big fish and few fishermen.

It is a good place.

The Necessity of Wild Places

Out of all the authors that I read, the one that I keep coming back to is Sigurd Olson. Olson was born in 1899 and raised in northwestern Wisconsin. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and taught biology at Ely Junior College in Ely, Minnesota for the rest of his life. It was his time in Ely (northeastern Minnesota) where he was introduced to the Superior Roadless Area, a massive unspoiled wilderness made up of millions of acres of woods and thousands of lakes. It marked the beginning of the northern frontier--wild country that went all the way to the Arctic Ocean. Today, that plot is now called the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness--two million acres of woods, lakes, rock, moose, and wolves. It is also the most heavily used wilderness area in the country. It also borders Canada and Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park, another huge wilderness area. Olson (along with the late-congressman Bruce Vento) is largely responsible for the creation of BWCAW.

Sigurd Olson, first and foremost, was a best-selling author of nature writings in the 1950's and 60's. Through his writings he articulated very simply the spirit or the romance that characterizes the North. He often draws on the early French explorers that first came to the area northwest of Lake Superior in the early 1600's, the Indians before them, and the Scottish and British traders that came later. The significance of these people is that the ancient portages they used and the rivers they ran look just as they did hundreds of years ago because of conservation. Most importantly, he was able through his writings to use the imaginations of thousands of people to motivate them to conserve and enjoy wild places. But, things are changing and not for the better.

The Superior National Forest surrounds the BWCAW and the Chippewa National Forest is found in the Central Lakes Region of Minnesota. They are public lands to be used for timber harvest as well as hunting, fishing, camping, etc. But, the current administration along with our shill of a governor are allowing for the auctioning off of these lands for private development. The BWCA may not go away but the roadless areas that bump up against it are disappearing quickly. What is happening to them is that they are being bought by developers, subdivided, and then developed, usually by plunking down a log McMansion. Along with development comes the usual problems--pollution. Since there is no sewer system up north, septic systems are being put in, often times improperly, and then they often leak and contaminate streams, lakes, and ground water with various bacteriae--including every ones' favorite E.Coli.

People also have to have lawns. They put in sod. They have to fertilize. Since the soil is thin and the granite bedrock is very thick, fertilizers find their way into lakes through spates of run-off following rain storms and then dramatically increases a given lake's vegetation growth. When there is too much vegetation in a lake and it dies in the fall it produces a surplus of carbon dioxide which suffocates fish populations and other aquatic fauna.

Then there is the element of sad comedy what arrives with human development.

Have you ever been at a camp ground, and an obnoxious family pulls up at the next campsite in a 150 foot motor home with an external gas generator to run the 56'' HD TV complete with satellite dish outside in front of the family's portable theater seating? It has happened to me. The McMansioning of the North is the next step. Rather than living the sort of life that Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and Sigurd Olson advocated, people are hauling their shit to the lake.

I like my laptop. I like some stuff. We all do. Bush and the Cons are not totally responsible for the hole the Middle Class is in. There are the instances of credit cards, car loans, and zero-down adjustable rate mortgages. We don't save like we used to. Have have as a nation spent more than we earned last year--for the first time since the early 1930's. We have done our share to create the economy we have. We want cheap crap and we want a lot of it. Look at the clothing you have hanging in your closet. Where is it made? China? Is it something that is going to last for years? Do you need that many shirts? That many pairs of shoes? It used to be that we actually payed for the things we bought. We at least made a sizable down payment on a house and a car. Credit is a good thing when used correctly. It has enable us to own things like houses, but we can't use it they was that we do. We buy. We use. We throw out. We still owe. As Thoreau said, we are leading lives of quiet desperation. Just as we need to be careful with money we need to be careful with our wild places. But, it is our inorganic need to acquire stuff that is damaging the wild places that we so desperately need. We need to understand them. We need to understand ecological balance.

We are not programed to live in cities and suburbs. I know from first hand experience what the sound of water lapping against the side of a canoe, the light of a campfire, the howl of wolves, the sound of wind through a stand of primeval pine trees does for the human condition. It is important to protect these places and it is important to go to these places. We need to educate children about these places.

The saddest thing is we are losing any sense of adventure.