No kid my age is supposed to wake up stiff. Too young, too supple. But geez, sleeping on a billion year old bed was way too firm for me. So was the golf ball sized rock dent in my right shoulder blade. Uncle Emil said there was only one solution for my miseries, a good morning swim. Wash our drawers at the same time. One thing I've gotta say about swimming in an unnamed lake, men sure grow a lot of moles as they get older. Hope that doesn't happen to me. The mole part that is. Getting old is okay. Can't avoid that if I'm lucky.
Back in Minnesota, if the sun was out and I was wading the shallows off a sandy beach, there'd usually be sunfish nibbling at my toes. Whatever there was on my feet, it sure appealed to the little guys. Maybe they liked jam. Even here on No Name we had nibblers. Only the water was too stained to see what they were. For sure they weren't sunnies. More likely something with teeth and that made me nervous.
We came in when we got the shivers. Chilly water. Land of sky blue lips. Our icy dip woke me up and gave me the hungries. The two of us set to making the breakfast of champions, Spam and pancakes. Uncle Emil sure had a thing for Spam. Said it traveled well and could sit outside of the can for the better part of a decade before it began to mold. Anyway, that was his guess since he'd never seen it actually mold.
"A million years from now when people are a thing of the past there'll still be cans of Spam. Should aliens ever arrive from another part of the universe they'll think that's all we ate 'cause that's all that'd be left of civilization. Eventually they'd open up a can in a laboratory hovering out in space. One whiff and they'd be seduced into giving it a try and that'd show 'em we were an advanced race capable of great things. Umm-umm, good stuff. Probably spend the rest of their time on this planet searching for the wonderful animal it came from. Good luck with that."
Breakfast done, Uncle Emil trotted off to the tent and returned sporting a new eye, a fishing fly this time. Said it was a Royal Wulff. Like I knew what an that was. When I asked Emil if he had a plan, he pulled a white, three piece, eight foot rod out of one of the tubes. Said it was a fly rod. He assembled it, attached a reel and strung it.
"We're gonna have us some fun tonight. Walleye and sauger on the long rod. And it'll not be me doing the fishing. First we've got to get you to the point where you're no harm to either of us."
"This isn't like a spinning rod. And as fly rods go, it's not a fancy one. She's just a workaday Shakespeare fiberglass. So there's no worry about hurtin' it since there's plenty more where this one came from."
That morning and afternoon I got the basics. Turned out to be pretty much the same as throwing a baseball without the wrist break. He started me out working the rod with no line, then short line, finally I could throw close to fifteen yards of green fly line without screwing up too much. It took a while but soon my thumb could feel the rod bend and I'd know it was time to fire it forward.
"We're set except for getting the fly down to the fish. Walleyes, perch and sauger won't eat anything on the surface. Sinking the floating line I brought along'll call for a BB sized split shot or two on the leader. That'll up the line speed, kind of like tying a nail to the business end of a bullwhip. No doubt that'll increase the danger of one of us losing an eye but, what the heck, with any luck it'll be my glass one."
Most of me was thinking my uncle was crazy. Turning me loose in a canoe with a weapon tipped by a weighted hook was to my way of thinking a step in the direction of the looney bin or maybe a hospital. Visions of torn flesh, impaled ears and one of us for sure moving into the valley of the blind, danced in my head.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked. "Isn't this just a little bit daft and dangerous?"
"You'll do just fine Archie. If we go clockwise along the shore and you keep the rod at forty-five degrees like I showed you, the hook will be out over the water in front of the canoe and away from us. As I said before, we're in a place where we can't do anything stupid, so we won't. We'll pay attention and think a couple of steps ahead. Also, should it turn out to be a danger, we'll chicken out and go back to the spinning rod. You good with that?"
What could I say? I was going do something I'd never done before on a lake no one had ever fished before. We were perched on the edge of the world, ready to fall off at any moment and Uncle Emil acted like we were strolling out to his garage to get a rake. Don't know if it was fly fishing he was trying to teach me or a way of living. Given a moment's thought I figured Emil was right. We were going have some fun tonight. Maybe even a hoot.
It'd be nice to say all went well with fly fishing, that I was an undiscovered master. But it didn't and I wasn't. Lost a fly or two to overhanging branches. Another to a bottom snag. Removed my hat once. And, almost forgot, caught a seventeen foot aluminum canoe a half dozen times. Could've had a stringer full of them. But for the most part the fishing was beyond fun. Even caught what Emil called a wall-hanger sauger.
"Thing about a big sauger is few people would recognize what it was even if they shared a bed with one of the boogers. Why anyone would want to sleep with a fish is beyond me but you get my drift. Should you have a sauger mounted on a plaque most people would wonder what the big deal is about a twenty-two inch walleye. And a sick brown one to boot. Then you'd have to explain what it was. Before you'd have finished they'd have walked away because they didn't give a rat's patoot whether it was a sauger or an elephant turd. But, between you and me, she's a beauty. Maybe the biggest ever caught on a fly rod, in Manitoba, on a lake without a name and more than a hundred acres. One way or the other, only the two of us will ever know about your possible world record. But that's enough. Don't need a crowd for the earth to shake."
I slid the fish back in the water.
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