“Did you hear about the Chinese spy balloon over Montana – and Biden won’t shoot it down?”
The lines were pulling off the back of the boat, down into the frigid St. Joseph River, hunting winter Steelhead in a sudden gray-white snowburst. It was about 18 degrees and ice was forming in the rod guides and on the banks upstream, sheathing off and floating by in small floes. A sweet-smelling kerosene heater warmed the cabin and we took turns thawing our fingers and hands, a rotation of guys from the fishing deck to the heater to the fishing deck, the captain steering us into the current and shooting the breeze.
“How do you not shoot it down?”
The captain is a Navy veteran and my friends and I met more than a decade ago in graduate school in Chicago. They all work in education and I work in criminal defense. We’d heard about the spy balloon that morning on NPR, the captain via other wavelengths, and the news had made differing impressions.
I said, “I don’t really follow the political game for balls and strikes.”
The captain said, “You know, I do.”
***
We started this winter fishing trip 10 years ago and have missed only once since, the year my wife was expecting. Otherwise, we’ve managed to get out on the ice – usually three or four of us, sometimes a couple more – in all kinds of winter weather in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana and twice now on the St. Joe.
We are not especially good fishermen but we like being outdoors in winter, in fact started out in deliberate celebration of the Midwest in its most defining season, and we like one another – each year a slightly different assemblage, every outing a distinct flavor, but always a testament to how well middle-aged men can get along.
Always a reconnection to the bracing and beautiful cold. And the shoreline view from the frozen surface of a glacial lake, especially the brown treelines and the frosted, flatted reed beds, the patches of snow-free ice glinting like a desert mirage.
And the quiet, when it comes. The irreplaceable silence and solitude of winter made perfect on the hardwater.
***
“Do you believe we went to the moon?” the captain asked.
This was after the spy balloon, after the Magic Bullet that killed JFK.
“I used to believe it, too,” the captain said.
I asked, “What changed?”
“It just doesn’t make sense anymore. When you think about it. Where is the lunar rover? Why didn’t we ever go back?”
I have no idea where the lunar rover is but I do know the space race was a front in the Cold War, and the Cold War featured a lot of shifting superpower priorities over a lot of years blah blah blah.
What do you say to someone who asks a question but seeks no answer?
Every year, every trip into the woodsy realms of outdoor recreation there is a moment where my friends and I are aware of our outsider trespass – the looks in the pick-up truck parking lots, the townie bars and pizza joints, the questions from younger, friendlier, probing guys on ice:
You’re really Democrats? Are you all gay? Ha ha!
I have a photo of my great-grandfather outside his ice shanty in Flint, Michigan in about 1940. He was a laborer for the county and his son, my grandpa, grew up and became a pilot when you could do that without a college degree. His son, my dad, graduated high school and ended up in Vietnam. He bounced around, knew failure, rode Harleys, loved manly uniforms and costumes, had a lot of opinions and emotions.
I told him once, on a phone call from Madison: Just because you don’t know something doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Collegiately worded but I’ll stand by it, and admit how little I still know but seek to learn.
***
Fish on!
There’s a scramble on deck, then the rod in my buddy’s hands and a long and heavy pull, winching slowly against the animal and current, before the trout is finally visible, up from the dark, a marvelous, shimmering leviathan, speckled and crimson-streaked, just shockingly beautiful and alive, now spooked by us and yanking away but well-hooked and doomed, fighting against the net, against a final and rude removal from this quiet, coursing, elating stretch of inland Michigan.
Music: “Catfish Blues” by Jimi Hendrix
