Little Joe's Big Fish

Something from the tackle box:

       Adam and Eve had a son.  Then Eve said, “I’ll name him Cain because I got him with the help of the Lord.”  Later she had another son and named him Abel.

       Able became a sheep farmer, but Cain farmed the land.  One day, Cain gave part of his harvest to the Lord, and Abel also gave an offering to the Lord.  He killed the first-born lamb from one of his sheep and gave the Lord the best parts of it.  The Lord was pleased with Abel and his offering, but not with Cain and his offering.  This made Cain so angry that he could not hide his feelings.

       The Lord said to Cain: “What’s wrong with you?  Why do you have such an angry look on your face?  If you had done the right thing, you would be smiling.  But you did the wrong thing, and now sin is waiting to attack you like a lion.  Sin wants to destroy you, but don’t let it!”  (Genesis 4:1-7 CEV)

      I am the oldest of three siblings who are all pretty close together in age.  I was born in October of 1956, my sister a year and a half later in April of 58, and my brother a year and a half after that, in October of 1959, just three years younger than me to the month. 

       I would like to be able to report to you that my brother, sister and I always got along well as young children growing up together out in the countryside, that we laughed and played together in constant mutual love and admiration, binding ourselves together as lifelong allies, bound by the ties of both blood and kindred spirit, to face whatever a wicked and hate filled world could throw at us in it’s demonic attempt to rend our bonds of familial love.  But that would be a bald-faced lie. 

       It’s not that we never laughed and played together.  Why, that might almost be as likely to happen as not on any given day, at least for short spurts of time.  We never woke up and set our hearts on actually killing one another in the fashion of Cain, at least not that I can now recall.  But I can remember plenty of times when I felt though I would not have minded watching some horrible accident befall one or both of my siblings, and a few times when I would have positively welcomed such an unfortunate event.  Please remember that I was a child and regrettable sibling rivalry has been a constant in the human condition since chapter 4 in the bible. 

       The usual way it would play out between my brother, sister and I was that, sometime during the day, two of us would join forces to get the goat of the third one until the desired effect was achieved.  My little brother was the easiest to get to cry, because he was the littlest.  My sister was the easiest to get to scream like a girl, because she was a girl.  And I was the easiest to get to turn red-faced with impotent fury, because I was the oldest, and the slowest.  As the senior sibling I thought that deference and respect from my bother and sister were my birthright.  They did not.  And for many years they could easily outrun me once I blew my top, magnifying their victory, as my anger would burn even brighter for the fuel of their laughter beating its hasty retreat out of my reach. 

       The saving grace, perhaps for all of us, was that I knew that within hours the alliance could, and often would, shift and I would be part of the gang of two, causing my little brother to cry like a baby or my little sister to scream like a girl, getting my revenge on both of them in turn with the help of the other.  

       Now, these facts about my childhood don’t really have any direct bearing on the fishing story I am going to relate to you, other than to let you know that, while we could get along, and occasionally did get along when it suited us, benevolent goodwill was not the default emotional setting between my brother, sister and I for most of our childhood.  So, on with the story.

       For much of my youth both of my parents worked as teachers at the local high school, which meant that we all had a lot of free time during summer break.  Now, my father liked to use some of his summer break to go and do some pike and walleye fishing in northern Ontario.  Quite often he would go in company with his teaching colleague and friend, Mel Kivela. 

       Mel and Dad had a lot in common.  Apart from both being industrial arts teachers at Maple Valley Junior-Senior High School, they had each grown up as children of Finnish immigrants in the hardy out-of-doors culture of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which is a special kind of bond to share, just ask any Yooper. 

       Neither one of them would have ever referred to themselves as being “avid sportsmen,” but cold-water lake fishing was in their blood, genetically and culturally.  And so they would go to Longlac, Ontario after northern pike and walleye for a week or so, once or twice a summer, sometimes by themselves, sometimes taking other friends and colleagues along, and sometimes… taking their families!

       Yes!  About once every other summer or so, starting when I was around ten years old, Mom, my siblings and I, along with an occasional aunt, uncle or grandparent, all got to go fishing in Northern Ontario with Dad.  For a young lad like I was, that was the stuff of dreams.  Wilderness adventure, par excellence! 

       Now, we all expected to catch lots of fish on these trips, and we always did.  Back in the 1960’s the Ontario game laws were truly generous in regard to catch and possession limits on most fish, even for out-of-province guests.  There were far, far more fish than people in and around those thousands of lakes and it wasn’t an issue back then.  There was a limit and you were likely to be pulled over and your coolers checked at the border when you left Canada, but unless you had more than one ice-chest full of fish per person in the vehicle, you were probably OK. 

a nice day's catch

       So numbers would not be the determining factor in who would be hailed as the best fisher-kid when we all went north with Pop, both within the family and within the circle of other people, locals and visitors, around the fishing camp.  We would all catch our share of fish.  Everyone did.  But who would catch the biggest fish – of that day – of that week?  The answer to those questions really mattered in our minds.  That is what would make a difference in our Adventurer standing within the community!  

       Here’s the set-up:  We stayed at a fishing camp, which was a commercial operation that rented its cabins, boats, and various other services to visiting fishermen.  I remember there being about five or six cabins, each of which had a rustic but functional kitchen/dinning area with running water and electricity from the camp generator, and two bedrooms with about four bunks each.   A couple of community outhouses served their traditional function for the entire camp.  The whole place could accommodate about forty plus guests.  

       You could fish or rest at fishing camp, whatever you liked.  If you wanted to fish, you could fish, morning, noon and night.  If you wanted to stay in the cabin, talk and play cards most of the time, you could do that too.  Mom spent the bulk of her time in the cabin.  I never let a boat leave shore without me. 

       The only other building was the camp office and fish cleaning station.  The only reason it was called the office was because there was a phone on the wall with a pencil and pad of paper hanging from it by a string.   It was also where the camp owner could be found, along with a couple of other locals who would clean, filet and pack your fish in ice so fast and cheaply that everyone used their services even if they were good at cleaning fish themselves. 

       The office was also where these same locals would post the stats on the camp’s biggest fish of the day, of the week, and of the season, on the blackboard.  Separate columns for walleye, pike and lake trout.  Each line would record the length and weight of the leading fish, along with the name of the lucky fisherman in each time frame, for all to admire. 

       My dad told me that there had been a few occasions when his name had been up on that board in the biggest catch of the day category for both walleye and pike.  What we didn’t learn until much later was that it usually happened when he and Mel were the only guests at the camp who had gone out fishing that day.  In any event, to my ten-year-old mind, to see your name on that blackboard was the sign and seal of fishing greatness.  It was an accolade truly to be desired. 

       Although the fishing camp was on a lake, and boats were kept there at the camp, most of the serious fishermen and women didn’t fish the lake the camp was on unless bad weather threatened.  The camp also kept boats on half a dozen or so other lakes within an hour’s drive and hike, which was often ten minutes driving and fifty minutes hiking.  Most of these lakes were big and clean, and without a single building or any sign of human industry at all to be seen other than the camp’s boat chained to a tree where the trail met the water.  It really was wilderness.  And boy, there was a lot of fish! 

       We would troll those big beautiful lakes using wooden minnows and spoon lures, and I learned a lot about fishing.  I learned that when we trolled past grasses and weed beds we were quite likely to hook a northern pike or two.  When we went past a bunch of barely submerged rocks you could expect to be hooking up with some walleye. 

 

norhtern pike

      I liked the pike best, because they thrashed around and fought a lot harder than the walleye did.  I had my favorite blue and silver Rapala minnow lure with two sets of treble hooks, a bit shorter than the standard three-hook rig. I caught a lot of fish with that one lure, all pike, and I thought we should stick to the grassy banks and the weed beds where I could use it to its best advantage. 

walleye

       But, of course, the adults liked the walleye better, because it really is a better eating fish, and it’s what you want to show off with by serving to company when you got back home.  In any event, when you made a long circuit of just about any of the lakes the camp kept boats on you would hit both weed cover and rock cover in turn, so we all got the kind of fish we wanted.  I don’t ever remember going to any of the lakes for a morning or an afternoon and coming back to camp without at least a couple of nice fish for each person in the boat. 

       It was satisfying and it was fun, - but none of our names were going up on the board.  And least of all mine.  Although I caught my fair share, I never had the biggest fish of the day just from our boat, let alone for the camp, and no one from our boat ever had the biggest fish of the day for the camp in any species category.  That is, until the last afternoon of our last day for that trip up. 

       My mom, who did go out fishing with us at least a couple of times on each trip, had decided she would make our last outing before packing up.  Which meant that we would be fishing one of the lakes that wouldn’t be quite so hard to reach as some others were.  Dad picked one called Chrystal Lake.  It could be seen from the road and was only a short walk from where you parked to where the boats were chained up.  For this reason it got fished a little heavier than some of the remoter lakes we accessed from our base.  The camp kept a couple of boats there, and you might reasonably expect to see other fishermen on the lake at the same time that you were fishing, which rarely happened on some of those lakes.  It was a baby’s lake in my opinion. 

       Chrystal Lake was also not considered a good pike lake at all, which chagrined me, but walleyes could be caught as there were plenty of the rock formations they liked.  It was also a lake where you had a good chance to hook up with a lake trout, which is a critter that I had never even seen, let alone landed.  If I was to get my name up on the board on our last day in Canada for the summer, that category would be as good as any I guessed.  So we got there and put out for our last afternoon of fishing, the whole family, my mom and my dad, my brother and my sister, and me, in one boat.

       We fished all afternoon, and it felt like a long afternoon because the fishing was not all that good.  Nothing like I had come to expect.  As evening approached and mom started hinting that we should head back to camp for supper, we only had four fish on the stringer, none of which would get any of our names on the calk-board at camp.  I had caught one, but it was the smallest of the four.  Even though mine was the smallest, at least I had a fish.  My little brother Joe had been skunked so far.  In fact, about a half hour before we turned our boat towards the landing, he had handed his rod to my dad and had curled up in the bow of the boat for a nap, which hadn’t bothered my sister, my dad or I, but was probably the biggest reason my mom had suggested that we call it quits for the day. 

       And so we turned in that direction.  One last cut across the lake, one last chance to catch a fish, before we got in the car and left with our memories and our cooler of fish. 

       The last run into the landing was as unproductive as most of the afternoon had been.  As dad cut the engine on approaching the landing and we all reeled our lines in and stowed our rods, dad, mom, sis and I.  Joe was still semi-napping in the front of the boat.  When Joe had given up on the fishing earlier my dad had just propped his rod up in the back corner of the boat, lure still trailing out behind us.  Five lures are better than four after all.  So now he handed it back up to my little brother with instructions to “crank ‘er in Joe.  Were done for the day.” 

       Joe yawned – and started to reel in his line.  It had played out there quite a ways and would take some cranking.  And you already know what’s going to happen next, don’t you? 

       All of a sudden his rod tip jerked in three quick pulses before bowing over in a deep arc as line started to scream out of his reel.

       “Hey, - I got one!”  he shouted with a big smile on his face, as we all sat there with our rods stowed away.

       “Good for you!” beamed mom.

       “Yeah Joe!” shouted my little sister.

       “It’s a big one.  Let him run for a while and tire out a bit before you start to reel him in,” advised my smiling father.  “If he comes towards us take up the slack.  I’ll have the net ready.” 

       I just sat there in disbelief, and actually hoped that the fish would get away.

       But it didn’t.  Little brother managed to eventually crank that fish in close enough for my father to net into the boat.  And it was spectacular, the biggest walleye that I’ve personally ever seen to this very day.  I was mortified. 

       As we were getting our fish and gear out of the boat another couple of men from our camp were just arriving to do some evening fishing.  They took one look at that fish and said, “Holy Mackerel! Someone’s getting their name up on the board tonight!  Who caught it?  YOU!   The littlest always catches the biggest fish I guess!  Where’d you get him?  Right there!  Well Frank, forget the boat.  I guess we ought to just fish from shore right here tonight. Ha, ha, ha!” 

       My brother just beamed. - I did not.      

       It was the same back at the camp, especially with the locals working in the fish cleaning office.  “Holy Mackerel!  Are you sure you don’t want us to save this one whole to be mounted?  No!  Well then, let’s measure and weigh it before we clean it.  This one is going up on the board!  -  Oh my!” –

       The owner walked over to the chalkboard.  First he erased the current biggest fish of the day in the walleye column, set down the fish’s stats, followed by the name, Joe Jarvie.  Then he erased the entry in the biggest walleye of the week slot, and wrote in Joe Jarvie again.  And then – he erased the info that was in the biggest walleye of the season line, put in the new fish numbers, and in all caps printed out JOE JARVIE – 7 YEARS OLD! 

       It was a long ride back to Michigan the next day.  I don’t remember speaking one single word to my little brother the whole way home.

       But I do remember him whispering something to me with mom and dad right there in the car to keep him safe.  Which was wise, because if I was ever going to play the part of Cain it might have been the very moment that he whispered across the back seat to me,  “It’s OK big brother, - I may have caught the biggest fish, - but you sure did catch the littlest one!”  

 Something to take home in your creel:

       I do not know if my little brother’s entry on that fishing camp’s wall of fame was able to stand up for the whole season or not.  I may have, or it may not have.  I did not ask, and no one ever told me.  But all these years later I like to think that it did stand up.  Which is funny, because I don’t think that Joe ever really cared one way or the other. 

       Joe didn’t really care about fishing back then, and he still doesn’t. Joe doesn’t fish.  Joe has never even owned a fishing rod as an adult that I know of, unless he kept the one he was given by my dad to go fishing with in Canada back when he we were kids, the same one he caught that walleye on.  I imagine that it was sold at a yard sale years ago now, or just discarded into the trash.  I wish I had it now, just for the memory it holds, but Joe doesn’t. 

        Joe’s idea of outdoors recreation is to work on his Upper Peninsula hay farm whenever he’s not busy being the band director at Lake Michigan Catholic High School.  He and his wife Julie are two of the people that I love the most in my life.  Although I admit that list has grown larger as I’ve matured.  He asks me to take time off from my church duties and be a chaperone for his trips with the LMCCHS band to Orlando Florida and Disney World every other February.  I believe I’ve been on eleven of those trips with his High School band now, and I am anxiously looking forward to the few more that may possibly happen before Joe retires in about five years.  I love every minute I get to spend with my younger brother. 

       I wonder if Cain would have ever come around to that way of thinking about his brother Able – if he had only been able to grit his teeth through his anger for just one more long trip home?