“You’re supposed to give him mouth to mouth! And then he says to the chief, how do ya think this got started!”
It’s 2 a.m. somewhere in northern Wisconsin. The kids are mostly asleep. And we’re telling dirty jokes, as our RV hurdles through the night, toward our final destination.
The destination is Williams Lake Lodge, a fishing cabin near Lac Seul. We’re fairly certain Lac Seul is somewhere in northern Ontario, but that’s a job for google maps, not us. The ‘we’ of it, are my three uncles, yours truly, and a pack of kids that would make William Golding proud (Lord of the Flies reference for 300, Alex).
Mark, my newer uncle through aunt marriage (definitely a thing), is driving. I’m the one sitting shotgun, talking his ear off. The RV’s captain, Zoran, and Dane my other uncle (also our resident barbarian), are catching a few Zzz’s. After multiple coffee stops, we hit the border and keep on trucking.
Fifteen or so hours later, a band of road weary Chicagoans are unpacking supplies at a leaky cabin in the great white north. Man versus nature literary conflicts nervously run through my head, as I take in the vast wilderness that surrounds our cabin. Then I tear open a bag of cheez-its, and devour the contents in two gulps. I haven’t eaten cheez-its in a long time. They’re fucking delicious.
The kids quickly staked out their separate territories, while the dads cracked open a bottle of whisky to properly christen our first night on the outskirts of civilization. In other words, we were about to get in touch with our inner-mountain man. A pop country song come to life.
Our daily routine:
The wake up call: This was Dane’s specialty. As the one adult who pushed the bottle away at a decent hour, he proved to be the earliest riser, and he wasn’t quiet about it. One by one, the rest of us would stumble from our beds and join him in the kitchen, adding to the breakfast banter.
Speaking purely to the science of acoustics and decibel levels, eleven people, most of whom are teens or preteens, trapped in the same room, could give a coked up Kieth Richards a migraine.
Fishing the lakes: After coffee and bacon, and other less interesting things, we were prepared for the day ahead. We packed up our gear and walked to our fishing boats. We had five boats and four local guides for our party. All we were missing was a white whale and a vendetta.
On my first morning at the boat dock, I promptly realized that I was a bit under-prepared for this trip. The first and most glaring miscalculation, was that I never thought I’d be driving a boat. This, I assumed, would be covered by the guides. Unfortunately, to get to the guides we had to pilot our individual boats through a treacherous mile long maze of weed-filled disaster zones and what I imagine was possibly an ancient Indian burial ground.
On that first day fishing, and also my first time driving a boat, I found myself in a bit of a pickle halfway through this hell maze. I was stuck in what appeared to be quicksand and dead Canadian sea monsters.
Twenty minutes later, I managed to get free of it, but not before thoroughly embarrassing myself in front of our party, the guides, and any red-blooded American within a fifty mile radius. My manliness flag would spend the duration of the trip at half-mast.
Knowing a helpless doofus from the states, when he saw one. Bob, our guide, quickly took command of the vessel. He jokingly suggested we could call him Bobizoomi. Apparently, the original Bobizoomi was a celebrity fisherman of some renown. This was deep woods, Canadian humor at its finest. Suffice to say, a lot of it was over my head.
Bob tooled us around the lake, and we got down to the actual task of fishing. We jigged for walleye, and quickly began to pull one monster after another out of the lake. In the first hour of fishing we had caught the largest fish of our lives. This was a type of fishing more akin to dinosaur hunting, than pan-fishing with bobbers at a Chicago forest preserve.
Photo evidence:
Bobizoomi uses my phone to expertly capture the glorious incompetence of a beginning fisherman.
We kept the keepers and took photos with the ones deemed too big to keep, which were many. Also, providing constant entertainment through the week were the guides back and forth banter.
The very Canadian banter:
BOB: Eh, Brian, we gonna meet ya here or over there later, eh?
BRIAN: Here, eh. Or later, over there, eh.
BOB: Eh?
BRIAN: Eh.
Shore Lunches. This was the fun part. We parked our boats on one of the many random islands that populate Lac Seul’s waters. Our guides cleaned the day’s catches, as we explored our surroundings. Soon, freshly fried walleye and greasy potatoes were on the menu.
Odds and Ends:
One morning right before breakfast, Zoran passed gas in a kitchen filled with hungry youngsters. It’s said that the shrieks of those teens and preteens could be heard as far off as Minnesota. Mark would later remark, that the kitchen that morning was hit worse than the tear gas chambers he occasionally trained in as an ATF agent.
I’m not sure what it says of my psychological make up, but a fart that audibly disgusts children, is something that satisfies me greatly.
And that was just fine.
Our first fishing trip had started with a desire to catch the big ones. But as the days passed, and the big ones were inevitably landed, we adjusted our expectations. Our last days were spent together, living for a spell like a couple of characters in a Mark Twain novel. And when those days ended, we still had the nights to look forward to.
Nights that were spent engaged in lively conversations and the rowdy camaraderie of our cousins and uncles.
And along the way, there may have been a tale or two about the big one that got away. And yes, it may have been exaggerated.
So it goes with fishermen.
Even the beginners.
Nik Was Here 