The Stand

 

Short Story Copyright 2018, Erik F. Helm

 

Author’s note: This is fiction. The settings and background are historical, but the events were inspired by a stand of pines on a small stream full of wild brook trout here in Crawford county in the Driftless region of Wisconsin.

 

Part One: The Cutters

 

My fly-fishing partner Henry ‘Heck’ Bounty and I had made our way upstream through a road-like cut, the bushes and grasses scrapping and plunking off the underside of his old Ford pickup. We were in Crawford county Wisconsin fishing a pristine stream for brook trout, and the day was overcast and cool, the trout cooperative, and the scenery immense but quiet and bucolic, as farms gave way to hills, and valleys carved by flowing waters twisted and wound, separated and joined, offering eagles overhead, wildflowers, and a gentle humming of bees.

 

The path we were following curved uphill to the headwaters of the creek through a narrow opening in a valley, and the hills rose on both side as the temperature slowly dropped and the sound of flowing water burbling and trickling provided a counterpoint to the wheels crunching on gravel and vegetation.

 

We had spent the morning catching native trout up to 10 inches, as wild and old as the land when the glaciers covered Wisconsin, but missed this corner of the state, preserving towering vistas of limestone, and a land full of rivers. Heck decided to drive to the source of the creek to provide shade for our lunch, and to show me the springs that formed this little gem of a stream that he had fished since he was a little punter so many-many summers passed.

 

He stopped the truck at the end of the cut, and we set up a little camp table under a large shade tree, and began making sandwiches and pouring the cool beers. As we ate and poured the hissing cold beer down our parched throats, I looked into the distance at the top of the valley where it merged with the surrounding hills and remarked at the enormous stand of white pines dominating the view.

 

“Those pines mark the very headwater springs of this valley and her braided streams,” Heck reminisced. “There is a story in that stand of pines, something very few people know anymore, more local folklore than actual history, but the historic part… well… that is for the record. It’s the other part that my grandfather told me one evening when we were camping in this very spot. I probably have forgotten some of the details, but the essentials… well, those are too powerful in image ever to forget. If you have a like for a good story, I can provide one for you right here, as we rest… that is, if you are up for another beer.”

 

I nodded in contentment as well as with curiosity. Another cold beer would go down well, sipped slowly with a background story. As the breeze gently shook the leaves overhead, I nodded and slowly sat back in the camp chair, closing my eyes.

 

 

“Those pines mark the end of the logging road, or the remains of it that we drove in on” said Heck. “Back in the day, 1931 to be exact, this hill, and all the surrounding hills were covered in old growth white pines. Many of these towns in the county were lumber towns. The valleys grew tobacco, and the hills provided lumber, floated down the Kickapoo River to towns like Soldiers Grove, which back when logging was big before the civil war, was named Pine Grove. The logs were sawed up into lumber and shipped off to the cities. These hills probably re-built parts of Chicago after it burned in the great fire. Anyway, some of the hills were still covered with the last of the pine growth in the 1920s and 30s, but logging them presented a problem, as no access roads existed, the hills were steep, and the individual stands of trees were small. The last of the logging was delayed for many years until it became economically viable for some company or another to come in and cut. The streams in this whole area were often warm and full of silt and suckers back then due to the bare hills where the logging occurred. The floods began around that time too, as the Kickapoo was and is a relatively small and very crooked river, and the rain that used to be absorbed by the forests just ran off the hills and through the row-crops and tobacco fields carrying mud and rock and too much water for the river to carry. Nobody knew any better in those days. The very land the towns were founded on was destroyed by the town’s livelihood. The fishing was poor too; except for this hidden valley and its old growth pines and wildflower and prairie grass. There were only a few farms up this way, and all of them hardy Germans and Norwegians. There was only one dirt road in and out. Grandpa Bounty and his friends used to drive up here on Sundays after church for a picnic of fresh bread, fried chicken and freshly caught brookies. He is the one who told me the story of the valley, and the little war that was fought here. That conflict is why those pines remain standing to this day.”

 

I took a long sip of the refreshing beer, and continued to listen, alert to his every word, and nuanced expression.

 

“In 1931 a logging company began driving a road up the valley toward the pines. There were no conservation groups in those days, and permits were easy to come by. The first inkling that anyone had that these hills were to be logged was probably when the graders showed up with the bulldozers and dozens of men. Anyway, nobody asked the locals. They cut all summer until they removed most of the pines on the south hills, and then moved up here in the early fall. That’s when the troubles began. The company had about fifty workers, mostly town-folk, some of them local, but many not. They had a base-camp at the bottom of the valley with a mess tent, and even cabins for the workers. My great uncle Thomas was the carpenter that built some of the cabins and all the outbuildings.”

 

“The company had cut about an acre of pines beginning by the oxbow of the stream at the bottom of the hill when things began to go wrong. The first occurrence was that the saws all went dull overnight. It didn’t delay them much, as they had sharpening tools, but the company had to bring in more saws and equipment as the problem continued. There was even a local lawsuit that never went anywhere when the company tried to sue the hardware store that supplied some of the saws. That went on for over a week, and very little was cut down in that time. Eventually the problems grew. Some of the dozers and the trucks broke down after a few hours of morning activity. The mechanic they had with them to service the equipment couldn’t locate any problem, until a local guy who worked at an auto-shop took one of the engines apart. One of the dozers was missing all the ball bearings in its transmission. On further inspection, the other vehicles were similarly troubled by missing bearings, and even one of the cars belonging to the work-foreman had every bearing removed from it overnight, even in the wheels, and no sign it had been done. Every time something happened, it happened in darkness overnight. At first the company turned inward and looked for sabotage within their ranks. A logger who was half-indian nearly got hung, until one of the mechanics pointed out that it was physically impossible for anyone to soundlessly remove bearings from vehicles, especially in the darkness and timeframe of overnight. Rumors and murmuring began amongst the workers, and some speculated that this was the work of spirits of dead Indians from the Black Hawk war. How else could the impossible be explained?”

 

 “Soon enough the equipment and vehicles were overhauled and fixed, and the men went back to work. It was a Monday morning when the crew was ready, but before breakfast was even served, some of the guys noticed little ornaments hanging from the trees, and all around the camp. Hundreds of four-inch long little mayflies constructed from a strip of birch bark curled in the back, and with duck-feather wings tied in with a blade of dried grass were suspended from the trees by tiny vine-cuttings, and moving with the morning breeze. The foreman ordered the things removed, but several of the workers had had it, and left with their equipment, and the rest silently grumbled over breakfast. Their pay was based on the amount cut by each crew, and since nothing much was being cut, no pay was being earned. Smelling trouble, the company foreman gave each worker remaining the equivalent of two-weeks pay to compensate them. The company also hired a retired sheriff and two local hunters to provide security and investigate the strange happenings. Each guard was armed, and the company provided a hefty bounty if they could catch the culprits, for by now, the men and the bosses were convinced that a whole range of natural and supernatural enemies and boogie-men were behind the sabotage.”

 

“ The next morning brought new mayhem. The guards were up half the night patrolling, but retired when by three A.M. nothing had happened. At dawn the cook came out of his cabin and was welcomed by animals all over the camp. Skunks and raccoons were everywhere. Small piles and trails of corn mush and sardines mixed with raisins intended for breakfast crisscrossed the camp, and the animals were following the trails devouring the free bounty. Two workers got sprayed, and the cook, armed with a frying pan, was bitten by a ‘coon when he tried to wade into the fray frantically swinging at the animals. As he was being bandaged, the guards examined the food-store shack, which they assumed he had left unsecured. The padlock was intact, and no footprints or sign of entry was discovered. One thing was certain though; someone or something had crept into camp, and without leaving any trace, had once again brought the work to a stop. The retired sheriff demanded the key to the lock from the injured cook, and upon opening the storehouse, was greeted by dozens more of those little mayfly creations dangling from the ceiling.”

 

“One wonders what must have been going through their minds, since none of the sabotage acts seemed capable by human hands. The whole crew and the guards became jumpy, and arguments and fights began to break out. The foreman even ordered one of the truck drivers to load all the liquor supply and the cases of beer for the workers and take them away for storage somewhere. He was taking no chances. That evening saw silence in the camp, and as the workers smoked after dinner, many of them brought out knives and began sharpening them. The guards retired in shifts, with one guard being on patrol at any time that night. The cabins were locked and secured that evening.”

“The final meltdown began the next morning. The retired sheriff woke up just before dawn to relieve his junior for the watch. His holster containing his colt revolver was draped over the bedpost near his head. When he reached for the belt to strap it around his waist, the holster disgorged a dozen of those little hand-tied mayflies. His gun was nowhere to be seen, and the door was padlocked from the inside… The funny thing is that the guy had seen service as a sheriff for something like 20 years down here and had seen it all, from murderous drunks, knife-fights, car crashes, farm implement accidents, bar-fights, and whatnot, but he had never encountered a foe that crept in on the pre-dawn mists, and had no face, no name, and left no footprints. He and the hunters turned guards just up and left the camp. He never spoke a word to the foreman. He just looked at him with a long stare, and shook his head slowly as he turned to leave. He never did collect any money or pay.”

 

“The driver that carried all the booze and beer away was never seen again, although there seemed to be a few rather oddly jubilant local family picnics in the area for the next few years… All in all, the crew was only in camp for less than two-weeks. After the beer and guards left, the workers followed, until the only remaining workers were two old stoic Norwegians, the boss, and a truck-driver. They took turns sawing one tree at a time for a few days until they were halfway through a tree and the saw stopped with a metallic grating noise. Thinking that the tree was ‘spiked’, an old trick used against loggers where large nails and railroad spikes were hammered into trees to cause the saws to fail, the tree was attacked by axes until it fell. The source of the obstruction proved to be a metal strong-box, which was quickly recognized as the pay safe for the operation. There were no hollows in the tree, and no way in hell that it could in reason have gotten in there. Departing for camp, the four of them visited the office, where sure enough, the safe was not in the locked desk, but instead found inside the live pine tree. The money was not missing, but a single one of those eerie little mayflies sat on top of the cash inside the locked box.”

 

“Well, that was it. The camp broke the next morning without further incident, leaving the final pines shading the headwater springs untouched to this day.”

 

I whistled low, popped the cap on another cold beer, and leaned back in the chair as the afternoon clouds darkened and the sound of the rushing waters of the headwaters seemed to increase not in decibels, but in clarity and intensity. One could hear voices in them, if one took the time to listen.

 

“Did anyone ever find out what or who was behind this?” I asked.

 

Part Two: The Interloper

 

“Good question…” Heck replied with raised eyebrows and a quizzical expression.

 

“There was an investigation by the Sheriff of the county, but nothing came of it. Officially, the case was closed with a note that the most likely cause was a disgruntled worker or two. They worked them pretty hard in those days.”

 

“Unofficially, my Grandpa figured it out. He was fishing one day when he ran into a tall thin fellow on the creek. The guy was fly-fishing with a bamboo rod he made himself, and with hand-tied flies. He introduced himself as Earl. Grandpa ran into him several times and they talked. Evidently the guy was some sort of educated gentleman from back east… college and so forth. He owned a large cabin in the woods at the top of the hill above the springs, and hunted and fished in the surrounding land. Now Grandpa was a farmer, but he was also a reader, what you might call a self-educated man, always with a newspaper or book and a slow pipe to smoke while he read in the evenings. Somehow he and Earl got to talking, and Earl invited him back to his cabin.”

 

“As he described it, the cabin was full of interesting stuff. A large library, a wine cellar all home-made, bottles of herbs, and antique firearms and even a wooden long-bow. He had artwork on the walls too. Not just everyday Saturday Evening Post cutouts badly framed, but actual art from Europe and back East. He served grandpa imported cheeses and home-baked bread and venison sausage and he talked of his love for the poetry of Robert Service while a phonograph played opera, La Boheme he remembered it as. That sort of thing was kind of unheard of back then. Some guy living in the woods who was educated and cultured, and who turned his back on the world. Apparently he was also some sort of armature magician too, for while several bottles of wine disappeared legitimately, Earl also made several vanish into thin air and then made them appear again. Who knows why he turned his back on society, or what made him pull up roots and move to a hill in Crawford County, my Grandpa never did find that out.”

“What made your Grandpa think it was him?” I asked.

 

“It was those little mayfly things that gave him away. See, Earl had a sort of thing… a mobile I think you call it, full of dozens of those birch bark, feather and grass legged mayflies hanging from the ceiling over his table. Every time the breeze blew in, they danced up and down and twirled. Earl said he liked to watch them late in an evening. Said they reminded him of spring on his little stretch of river.”

 

“Did your Grandpa ever report him, or tell anyone?” I asked.

 

“Nah…” Heck smiled… “Nobody would believe him anyway, but he only told dad and me, and that was after a few pulls of local whiskey. See, Earl did some good for the valley. Those pines are still there because he took a stand. He single-handedly defeated a logging company, and did it all non-violent. Other than the damage to equipment and the bite the cook got from the raccoon, nobody ever did get hurt. He haunted that valley and those hills himself. He was a one-man conservation group. How the heck he did it nobody will ever know, but Grandpa always referred to him as ‘special’. That magic he knew must have been special too, but anyone who read as much as he did, and knew about math and architecture, plants, and built all his own tools and fly-rods, and the cabin too probably knew a thing or two most men don’t know, and never will. Most folks can’t think beyond their own nose, much less imagine things and ways that may exist beyond our little mundane world.”

 

“That is one amazing story… too bad there is no real evidence that it was true.”

Heck smiled and turned to me. “Come on, I will show you something. Just a short hike up the hill.”

 We slowly ascended the steep incline in the shade of the pines, passing the springs and seeps that formed the creek, and found ourselves in a sort of clearing near the top of the ridge. At the center amongst the raspberry bushes and cow parsnip were the foundation remains of a wood cabin. Hanging from a small apple tree next to the ruins were a dozen or so of those little hand made mayflies, looking fresh and newly created, and blowing in the breeze like they were dancing.

 “Earl must have left several years after that stand he took. Nobody ever saw him again anyway, Grandpa included. He may have left those 85 or so years ago, but part of him, that special part must never have left. Something of him is still here, looking over his pines and the creek, a sort of river-keeper spirit… and watching his little mayflies… dancing into eternity.”

 

 

 

 

 

Gas Station Flies

Gas Station flies on hand made leather fly box cover and Wolf-River rod circa 1975.

A number of years ago I drove to the Brule’ river in far northern Wisconsin, passing through towns on the way that held memories of youthful vacations. I had not seen this landscape in almost forty years. Back in the day, the mid-1970s to be exact, our little family of three and our defective Volvo would take an annual vacation by driving to see relatives ‘Up North.’

‘Up North’ was a catch-all phrase for going somewhere rural where men went when they wanted to re-visit what it meant to be a man: away from the city… a place of muskies and trout, deer and cabins. To a ten-year old boy it was something exotic fed and conjured by elders in tales punctuated by beer and smoke with the spreading of hands and arms in measurement. My ‘reality’ of Up North was absorbed and simmered gently during the timeless hours of childhood summers reading Outdoor Life and listening to Dad. When I closed my eyes I saw rivers, smelled pipe smoke, heard winds through pine trees, and imagined groups of men wearing red and black checked wool hunting jackets.

For my mother, Up North meant time to spend painting landscapes and visiting local art and craft shops. For my father, it was a time to re-visit his dreams. He was an armchair fisherman and outdoorsman, so most of his dreams would be unfulfilled. Much later in life, I came to learn that perhaps a man with dreams is already fulfilled…

In those summers sitting and listening to him talk of the north woods, names began to be whispered: Brule’, Namekagon, Wolf, and Peshtigo. These were rivers of legend, and I can still hear Dad’s voice as we peeked through the birches and pines in our first and only glance at the rushing holy waters of the Wolf River. Maybe just attending this church by visiting was as good as participating in the worship or fishing. I never will know for sure, but Dad lowered his voice to a whisper when pointing out a rising trout to a wide-eyed and eared ten-year old. We never fished, but what I caught that day will be with me always.

As I drove through the towns again, I was out of place in time. My snapshot of Up North was decades old. I couldn’t believe how much it had changed. Most of those small hardware stores, and mom and pop places had been replaced for the most part with a plastic sameness as Kwik e Marts grew like cancers on my memories.

Back home some time later, I was going through old fly-boxes owned by a Wisconsin fisherman. Many of the flies were patterns I didn’t recognize, and with my penchant for history and old-things, that takes a bit of doing. When I say ‘Old’ it is rather relative, for most of these flies were purchased and fished during my lifetime, in fact in the very period of those youthful vacations. Old is relative, but I was alarmed by the amount of gray in my beard this morning when I shaved; like rust on those hooks of those flies… 

These flies were not commercial patterns in the strict sense; they were ‘Gas-station flies.’ They were not perfect by any standard, yet some of them were. Tails were often too long or short, wings too bulky, materials set off-kilter, and heads too obese. They would never make the quality test of a modern overseas fly company today.

Maybe that is a good thing. Today flies are tied in an almost clinical perfection in Asia and Africa by people who have never seen a trout stream. That kind of perfection can be flawed in economy of scale. How many hundred dozen do you want? Regional patterns and local ties like I held in my hand slowly disappeared or became scarce in that economy. These were unique and like a mirror in time. They held a place on a map…

Back when these flies were created, every great river had a local shop. I am not talking about a modern fly-shop in any sense. These shops were often places that sold gas, bottles of cold pop, flasks of brandy and bourbon, and sporting tackle. They were small operations run by locals. In a rural economy back then, they could exist on a shoestring, or maybe by selling a few shoestrings.

When one left the city and drove Up North, one always stopped at the local shop to fill up the Buick, add a quart of oil, pick up a needed item forgotten or worn-out, and to find out the local forecast for the fishing conditions and see what ‘They were biting on.’ The guy you went to talk to always knew your name as you knew his. Norm or Stumpy would be behind the counter. The flies that were working would be in a cardboard tray on the counter. They were tied by guys that fished the river every day. They knew exactly what was working, and the patterns were made up on the spot. “The Woodcock Special’ may be a great stone-fly imitation, but it could also be because somebody’s brother shot three woodcock last week. These people hunted. Other than a few materials such as the hooks, floss, and hackle, the materials used most likely saw the front porch of a hunting cabin, and spent a few weeks in borax and salt. The flies smelled like wood-smoke and deer hair. You purchased a half-dozen of each and clipping them into the tin fly-box, knew that you had the hatch all figured out because you trusted an authentic local expert.

Authentic…

That word summons so many images and feelings in me as I close my eyes… because I was there. I may just have been a little punter, but little punters have big eyes. What I saw and experienced as I walked through these local ‘Sporting-goods’ stores was real, authentic, rural, honest, local. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was breathing in history along with the dust. Yes… dust. Much of the shelving was covered with a fine powdering of dust. It lay on the boxes of muck-boots, the barrel of nets, and on the tackle that was timeless. I have grown to like dust. Dust is the most authentic thing of all, for all life is made of it. To a modern retailer, these places would need a massive cleaning and refit. There were no merchandising standards other than “The hip waders are in the back aisle under the shotgun shells.” Fish mounts and old bowling trophies sat or hung crookedly. There was no product rotation, so as a kid, I could always find an old Daredevil spoon or cap-pistol that was priced sometime in the past decade, and would be cheap enough for a pestered parent to buy. If you asked for something, the owner would furrow his brows, ask his wife, and she would root through an old box and find it. It was like a kind of magic. Muskie plugs and bucktail streamers appearing out of the primordial lost spaces of dust. The clutter was beautiful…

The fly-fisher never used all those local flies, but it was always a part of consideration and good conduct that one made a purchase of a few things to support the local store. The excess flies got stored away and now sit in front of me along with a fiberglass fly rod made locally for fishing the northern Wisconsin rivers. It is an odd rod by today’s standards…

standards…

Standards that have in time made these purpose made rods look obscure…. but they weren’t.

This rod is a seven footer for a seven-weight fly line. Short and with authority. It was designed and built off a Fisher glass blank by a man who owned a local shop like this. It was and is the perfect tool for the rivers it was born on. It was designed for brushy rivers with big trout and sweepers and log hazards. Throwing big size 2 hex nymphs on the Bibon marsh at night and catching alligators of brown trout as long as your arm while keeping them out of the rushes and cattails? Here is your rod. This wasn’t the Missouri river, and not all rods had to be 9 foot 5 weights. This was a specialty rod. When we look at the history of fly-fishing, we see as we descend the map a growing myopia of fishing culture, equipment, and tactics. These were grown locally and fed on long studies and days a field. The Letort and her micro-terrestrials and the rods to match. The Au Sable and the midge rod and long boat. The Wolf and her huge trout and deep rocky runs grew the large weighted stoneflies that made the rod in front of me a necessity. Each local fishery grew in myopia then, there was no internet, and thank god for that, for if there was, Marinaro, Fox, Flick, and the other local experts would all be told that they were doing it wrong… Instead, the local tackle and flies grew in a vacuum of sorts. The river grew the fish, which grew the fishermen, who grew the fly patterns and tackle, which became part of our history and culture. Yankee ingenuity at its best.

When we hold one of these flies in our hands, we must be aware that there was experimentation here and serendipity. They were purpose-built by a tier who lived in a small cabin and traded them for gas and cigarette money. That kind of small economy and craft is what made America rich…. not monetarily, but culturally. These flies are a time machine, with rusty hooks, faded colors, and hackle chewed by bugs and fish alike, small pieces of gut and nylon attesting to memories made on the rivers. The rivers grew all of this. We are all children of rivers.

A fly is an artificial deception to the trout, but also a word that means to travel through the air. This spring, a few of these that are in better condition will do just that at the end of my rod, a fresh leader, and a fresh perspective into local history. The honesty of knowledge that led to their creation in less complicated times will still deceive the fish, but my memories from those childhood travels through the Gas station sporting-goods stores will never deceive me or fade. The hooks on these old flies may need sharpening a bit, but my memories are as sharp as ever. I can still smell the pipe-smoke and the dust….. I can still see the Wolf River through the pines and hear Dad’s voice… whispering.

Dedicated to my Father and all the other dreamers back in the day, To the moms and pops that ran these small shops, the flies and tiers, and to Joe Balestrieri, and Bob Blumreich who remember… Up North.

Copyright 2018 Erik Helm

 

Coming Home

 

 

 

Connections….

They define us, they bind us to our inter-relationships, they flow and ebb, break and reconnect our concepts of identity. They are everywhere, but only if we look for them.

 Thus it was a connection I sought on Wisconsin’s Bois Brule’ river. Although the desired connection was a bright one with a wild steelhead, one sometimes seemingly as elusive as a unicorn, there would be another connection that, when the dust had settled, became more important.

 Our journeys as anglers are never straight paths. We seem to stray or explore different approaches and desired outcomes in our progress on the water. Thank god for that, for as one old friend reminded me, “Exploring paths in the journey along life’s road allows us to take side-steps and wind and turn throughout the one-way trip, thus adding miles and miles to what otherwise might be a straight, quick journey to the inevitable end.”

 As I get older, I am slowing down, and the explorations and approach, the history and lore seem as important, or sometimes even more interesting than the fishing itself.

So I drove up to the river with a wagon full of cane rods and hand-tied flies inspired by antique Scottish patterns fished on the Dee and the Don. The main rod was going to be a restored and newly cut and spliced Sharps of Aberdeen two-hander. It started out as a sweet rod several years ago, but after getting the ferules stuck together rather permanently, it got chopped and spliced to @ 10 ½ feet. Finding a line for it was a nightmare, as I sorted through my huge box of spey lines, for it started out moderately soft, but as I taped it up, realized that now it resembled a Frankenstein monster, cobbled together and chopped and sort of stiff moving, much like Boris Karloff’s flat-topped rendition. I drove to the local muddy canoe landing on the Kickapoo river and fitted it up with a 4 ½” wide-drum Hardy Perfect reel from 1917. To make a long story short, it was like casting a broom stick. I finally put on an old 10/11 weight salmon line and was able to make it work…. Sort of.

 Stubbornness runs in our family, and I got a double dose of it. That is the only explanation why the rod didn’t get left at home. “I can make it work,” I justified to myself weakly and often to reinforce the error.

 The weather was remarkably warm and beautiful when I arrived ahead of our party and settled in for lunch and coffee, dreaming of the river while I sipped and waited for Barry, who would accompany my foolishness.

 Steelhead are often a beat down. Not necessarily physically, but mentally. Bright cheery and eager faces entering the water at first light can often leave it after a fishless day not speaking to anyone, full-of self-doubt, self-loathing, and completely lacking in the confidence that was over-flowing in the morning. Everything gets the blame; Tackle, the sun, the water clarity, leaves in the water, the choice of flies, and our selection of aftershave. The truth is that confidence is the most important part of the game, and it is all mental and as fragile as a newborn despite our best intentions and egos. I have fished for steelhead all over North America for years and years on storied rivers. One would think I was used to this, but when Barry picked my pocket by landing his first Brule’ steelhead behind me in the second run we fished, I started to experience the downward spiral into self-questioning, misery and defeatism that we call steelheading. His fish was a stunner. Wild as the weather on Lake Superior and chrome. Translucent fins too. All that was missing were sea-lice. Here was the McCloud strain from California’s tributary to the Sacramento River, and extinct there. Transplanted along with rainbows and stocked in the tributaries to Lake Superior, they were all wild fish now, a rarity in the world of anadromous fish. Thus the happy congratulations and high-five we give each other often decays as we want a fish too…. And the mental beat down begins in proportion to the beauty and rarity of the fish.

 I stuck with the Frankenstein rod, making it work through stubborn will and body strength until in the morning of the second day, we screwed up, and took the wrong path for the morning fishing. This led to poor water and crowds and a path which we stubbornly followed with hope that things would improve and we would find better water and less anglers (who seemed to appear out of nowhere as soon as we set our feet in the water). The path started to give out as we continued downstream, and we had to crawl and climb through the beaver-falls and clay banks, rods snagging on pines stub branches, our clothing covered with brambles.

 We spent five hours hiking through the forest tangle, fishing here and there and swinging flies for a few casts until the water petered out, only to find ourselves back at the next parking area downstream where the other two anglers in our crew had put in. We walked back to the car soaked in sweat, dehydrated and pissed off, and when the rest of the gang met up with us for lunch in the parking lot, found that they had success, and Lem had hooked and landed his first Brule’ fish literally on his first morning on the river ever. The mental beatdown was now riding on my shoulder like a chattering monkey. “You suck,” it kept blathering endlessly.

 I kept with the monster rod throughout the rest of the day, but the physical exhaustion and muscle fatigue and doubt combined to make me take it apart and put it away before nearly passing out. Both Barry and I skipped the big party on the river we were invited to, and silently ate dinner after visiting three restaurants just to find a single available table. Back at the motel we knew we had to come up with a plan to beat the crowds. It seemed that half of Wisconsin and Minnesota showed up that evening for the weekend fishing. We had to have a plan. Well, the plan just sort of developed all by itself. By going to bed early, we awoke early and refreshed, and opening the motel door to the cool air of false dawn light, found that the parking lot was still full of cars. Everyone had slept in.

 We hoofed it into waders, choked down a doughnut and coffee or tea, and drove like the devil for the stretch of river I chose for the morning fishing. There were only two cars in the lot ahead of us, so we geared up by aid of headlamp and chanced it.

 Here is where the connection begins. I reached for a single-hand bamboo rod, and took it out of its case. A restored Clifford Constable 9’ six-weight restored by my friend Joe Balestrieri, and matched by a Hardy Perfect reel of 3 5/8 inches; a special reel, but more on that later. I tied on the new fly that, get this, I had not fished yet, lacking in confidence.

 Sometimes things come together in just the right way to make the connection. I noticed right away that I was fishing better as the light began to increase and the water chilled my legs. My swing was in zen mode, the little corrections to fly speed just happening as I didn’t struggle to fight the gear. Before the light was fully on the water, my fly was intercepted with authority. I had hooked my second Brule’ steelhead, the one last year having coming unpinned due to user (or loser) error.

 The bonus was some drama. The steelhead moved back and forth in the run, with me not trying to place too much pressure on it and screw it up. Then as Barry watched, it exited the pool and the reel began to sing and screech and protest the sweet music of an old Hardy. The run ended with a sharp left-turn of 90 degrees and a rapids which as I followed, my fish took my line into the tree branches at the bend, to be saved by Barry, alert as always.

 By now I was convinced I was not gong to land the fish. There was another 100 yards of rapids to go, but all of a sudden, the reel stopped screaming, and the fish buried itself in a soft pocket of water in the middle of the maelstrom. I spotted a small sand bar under water to the side, and a landing plan was put together. Maximum strain was placed on the rod turned upside down to equalize tension and strain on the bamboo, and the fish was landed. A sweet buck with a small bit of rose flank for color. The beat down had ended. I was staggering around in relief and joy when it hit me. The reel was owned previously by the late Andre’ Puyons, angling legend, former president of Trout Unlimited, prolific teacher and tyer with ever-present pipe and Irish hat and co-owner of Creative Sports, a fly-shop in Walnut Creek, Northern California. Walnut Creek is just west of San Francisco, gateway to the Sacramento and its now land-locked tributary the McCloud River. My reel most likely fished the McCloud back in the day in the hands of Andre’ Puyons.

The fish I landed was a ghost, an anachronism not out of time but out of place and now in last refuge from extinction. We all got tangled up and met in a connection on Wisconsin’s Brule’ river. I could almost smell the pipe smoke. The reel had come home. Old Andre’ was looking down and cracking a wry smile from somewhere beyond the pines and the mists of the river. I felt it. God, I dig this sport.

They say you can never come home again. I disagree. The time and place might be a little different, the circumstances connected with crooked lines of geography and chance, but if one closes one’s eyes, we can see it, it is all around us. We are always home through the connections that entangle us.

The Forgotton Valley

The Forgotten Valley

Author’s note:
There are moments that often stand out for sensory overload, where feelings, smells, and sights of an uncommon kind come together to form an impression so real and compelling that we never forget them. The less commonplace the experience, the richer the memories, even if sometimes the fascination stems from a sense of horror.
The name of the town in this story has been changed, and the cause of its decay and feral collapsed architecture and inhabitants is mere conjecture and fantasy, as are a few of the descriptions perhaps artistic embellishment, but the place exists as described still, and the images and perceptions are real. We found it on a fishing trip.
Erik Helm, 2015

I can’t remember exactly what led us to abandon the great trout streams of Wisconsin’s Driftless area to pursue a rumor, but I expect that the chance to encounter large Smallmouth Bass in their pre-spawn run up small streams could have been enough. Whatever the impetus, now long forgotten, Joe had the truck pointed south through the rolling valleys and was waxing on as only he can do, of the promise of trying to recreate an encounter he had shared with a friend ten or so years before.
Each spring Smallmouth would swim up the Wisconsin River to the Grant River, and on up into a small tributary called the Rattlesnake to procreate. He and the friend had had an incredible day catching huge fish on light fly rods, and we were now rattling toward Grant County in the extreme southwest of Wisconsin trying to defy the laws of probability and catch the lightning strike a second time. This time I was along, and as Joe says… I am “Strange Luck,” because something out of the ordinary always happens when we fish together.

As we drove on the county highways through rural Wisconsin the landscape began to change. The lush valleys and hills full with vibrant greens and yellows and bursting with a sense of spring Botticelli would have captured in a painting began to fade slowly to a more somber mix of browns and tans, with wheat fields predominant. Towns seemed smaller and farther apart the closer we came to our area of destination, and the traffic of mixed pickup trucks and scattered Amish Horse Carts fell off to nothing as the bare hills rose and fell around us, and the landscape became more monochrome and sparse. Both Joe and I have fished the areas of eastern Washington and Oregon where one might think he had been transplanted onto the moon, so alien is the landscape and so desolate, and we both commented on the similarity as we rose to the top of a series of rolling hills and began a decent.

On the hillside in the distance was an odd sight for this bucolic area of Wisconsin. It seemed to be a mass of abandoned and rusted-out cars, some by their shape to date back to the 1940s and 50s. What was odd was the complete lack of newer cars in the pile of a hundred or so littering the hillside. Also puzzling was the fact that there was no road surrounding the hill, and we speculated that maybe the road had been left to return to dust as the cars had sometime in the past… but why on a hillside, and not down in a valley where most communities too poor to dispose of hunks of old metal would conceal them? Why put them on a highly visible hill?

We began a decent into the valley to the south of the abandon cars. As we drove toward the bottom through wildly winding roads the valley became narrower and darker, and the vegetation that poked out of the hillsides abutting the county trunk road was nearly leafless and grew at odd twisted angles like it had gone mad seeking the sunlight. A small creek ran along one side of the road in a ditch. We figured it as a tributary of the river we were looking to fly-fish, and grew anxious with anticipation like two kids.

An instant later, the scrub-brush and hillsides opened up without warning or expectation and we found ourselves in a small town. In both of our memories the initial shock and wonder as we traveled the two blocks of the main street occurs in a slow-motion kind of flashback. At least that is how we describe it today.

I was looking past Joe to the left when a scene out of the poorest of the poor coal towns of West Virginia popped into view. A car was beside the road, kind of slewed in a front yard at an angle and buried up to the windows in dried mud. What color it may have been I have no recollection, but it was mostly rust colored now. The windows were missing, and feral plants were growing at random out of the inside. The whole vehicle gave the impression of being there awhile, buried alive except for the crown of plants now growing out of its upholstery and the mud filling it.

Standing on top of the roof of the car was a tall emaciated man in filthy jeans and a dirty and torn white tank-top. He had greasy looking waist long light hair in a braid or ponytail. What he was doing on top of the car with a long metal pipe in his hand we will never know. He never looked at us as the truck rolled slowly past. Then we spotted the dog, which also ignored us. It was a mangy and shivery mongrel chained to the derelict car. It looked to be half Coyote and half terrier. Where it stood and twitched, the ground was bare of grass, as if in its eternal confined pacing, the cur had worn what might have passed for a sort of front lawn into a dirt farm. The house itself was a dilapidated clapboard single story of failing paint and warped paneling. It too was buried several feet in dried mud, and old plastic milk cartons replaced a rotted and fallen front porch as a stoop to the elevated doorway. The only thing new looking was an American Flag on a pole off the left front of the house and fluttering in front of the broken windows that had old stained cloth stuffed into the cracks and holes.

Next to this initial sight and again on the left side of the road as we slowly rolled on with mouths agape, leaned what must have been the city hall. Built out of stone and mainly intact, with an inscription with a date of 18?? above the door, it looked to be no longer in use. The leaning seemed to be caused by the cliff and hill rising directly behind the structure. It had encroached on the rear of the building and caused it to lean forward into the street.
On the mantle above the door below the date was a single word, ‘Dodtown.’

“I don’t remember this, said Joe. I don’t remember any of this being here. I would have remembered this!” he exclaimed, shaking his head. “Maybe you took a different road last time?” I half asked and stated. “Must have” he smiled with eyebrows raised. “This is a mess! What the hell is a town like this doing here in this valley where it must flood every year? Who built this here… and Why?”

Those were the questions in mind as the old Ford Ranger rolled on and we both looked to the right side of the main street. Here was a new squalor to be seen. A decayed sort of tavern and general store stood there with about half of its white paint missing. Parts of it sagged here and there, but the sign above the door still was half lit displaying a ‘Hamms’ beer logo speckled with dirt and dead bugs. Three Harley bike gang guys in leather gear looked at us as we passed. They were seated outside the building on an old bench drinking beer out of a can.

We came to the end of the road and turned left to climb back up a steep valley road. Most of the houses here had visible flood damage and mud, rock and brush was piled about. Each house had a little culvert and bridge leading to their yard off the road so that water could flow down to the bottom of the valley. These houses looked a bit better kept. Old tires had been painted and used as planters and attempts at gardening, including some blooming flowers among the feral weeds grew out of them. Several more vehicles were buried here and there at the side of the road. As we climbed out of the valley, one or two houses looked very well kept, with new shutters, and fully green and mowed lawns. Lights showed behind windows without any panes missing. Children’s toys were scattered in the yards.

We reached the top of the valley and the full force of the sunlight made us squint. We stopped the truck at a crossroads and wondered aloud again, what we had just encountered. Whatever Dodtown was, it certainly had a shadow hanging over it. No sunlight seemed to penetrate to the center, and we discussed our impressions that as the elevation descended, so did the decay and squalor.

We turned to the right this time and followed rural county trunks looking for the road leading to the Rattlesnake, and after awhile, located one that Joe thought he remembered well, with some prominent markings in the form of a high limestone cliff and an old white building with an antique tractor in the yard. We followed this road for awhile, traveling slowly with the windows open looking out over the wooded valley sloping down either side of the road for a sign of the river as we descended. As the road neared the valley floor, the walls of the cliffs and hills crept nearer again and it became darker. In front of us were rows of yards on both sides of the road. Chain link fences were strewn and piled on each other and covered here and there with piles of rock and mud debris. The houses here were either pre-fabricated or single-story clapboard and all were small. The yards were overgrown with wild brush and strewn with abandoned appliances, bathtubs, rotting cars, destroyed furniture and dust. Several people were shambling or leaning in the yards, and they stared with vacant eyes as we passed. The road opened up, and to our amazement, we rolled into Dodtown from the opposite direction, stopping at the only intersection in town. We both turned our heads and looked at each other with an expression of mock horror. “This is getting downright creepy,” I said out loud.

This time while driving through the town, the taciturn and vague figures we saw stared at us. Perhaps they were used to strangers driving through town on their way somewhere else, but they could spot a foreign car or truck as it went through a second time, perhaps up to no good or ‘spying’ as we speculated further. We pulled out of the valley once again, and turned in the opposite direction, finally locating a sign pointing us down Rattlesnake Road. “This has got to be it,” Joe exclaimed with assurance, turning down yet another winding path and descending slowly downhill.

Well, of course the reader already knows what happened next. After five minutes of wooded hollow we emerged at the bottom, right smack in the middle of Dodtown again.

This time Joe stopped the truck and got out. “What the hell are you doing?” I asked with a smile half hiding real concern. He answered, “I want to see what is in there,” as he pointed to the old store with the Hamms sign.

I slowly got out of the truck, wondering as I did so, if this was going to be something I told my children about twenty years in the future as the “Time when…” What? I could only speculate as we walked to the front of the building now empty of bikers.

I stopped at the door of the place, my feet crunching peeled paint chips against the rotting wood of the stoop. There was a screen door, but it had only the remnants of a screen at the edges where they were rusting away. There was no doorknob or lever, but an old piece of electrical wire thick in gauge was twisted through the hole the knob must have occupied in better times long past.
I slowly opened the door inward and we stood in the doorway blinking, for however the lack of light at the valley floor, the interior of this place was darker still.

Old faded curtains of questionable color over dusty windows and one naked bulb provided the light for the single room. Against the wall on the right was a bar of sorts and a number of mismatched wooden chairs faced it. Behind the bar were arrayed an amazingly eclectic spread of goods attached to pegboard or lying on shelving: rubber boots, hip waders, shovels, kitchen cleaner, bib jeans, hand tools, saw blades, knives of every variety, cans of oil, etc, competed for space on the crowded back wall. A mounted fish above the counter could either be a trout or a carp; it was so covered in tobacco smoke, one couldn’t tell. A fat middle-aged woman sat on a tall crate behind the counter, her mouth full of something she was slowly chewing. She had on overly tight sweat pants and a massive T-shirt that doubled as a sort of dress or cover-all. She had no shoes on. Joe and I slowly made our way to the bar or counter and sat down a few spaces away from a guy in dusty and smelly overalls with long stringy hair and a stained NAPA parts ball cap. He was drinking a bottle of grape soda. I asked what the place had to drink, and the woman answered “Beer or soder, Whatchoo wan?” “Two cans of beer.” Joe said, looking at me when emphasizing the word ‘Cans’.

She bent over an old ice cooler set against the back wall, pulled out two cans of Old Milwaukee, and set them unopened on the counter. “One dolla.” she spit out. As we paid, I noticed the guy at the counter looking at us. “Soups O.K.” he said, “if your hungray…” “Its otta can too,” he added pointing to his own bowl of vegetable soup. “All there is anyway…” “Them’s above wont look nohow neither.” He added cryptically with a glance. “Let’s go outside and drink these I said to Joe, as he nodded.”

As we turned to go to sit on the bench out front, we saw an elderly woman mumbling to herself at the only table. She was smoking a pack of unfiltered Pall-Malls through her remaining several crooked teeth, and seemed to be playing cards. The odd thing was that there were only two cards. She kept dealing them to herself, turning them over, and cussing to herself repeatedly. She looked up for a heart beat and her eyes were red and surrounded by gray shadows. The other two had similar eyes I noted as we opened the door and took a deep breath of air.

“Cheers!” I said to Joe, as we first wiped off the tops of the beer and opened them. That’s when I noticed that my hands were really dirty; almost gray-black with a powder residue. I poured some beer into them and tried to wipe them on my pants, but it only half helped. Joe’s hands were similarly dirty, but neither of us could get them clean by wiping them. It was if they had been covered in oily graphite. “This place is filthy!” I said out loud, and poured my remaining beer on the ground with Joe following suit. “Even those bikers just drank their beers outside and got out of town.” We got into the truck, and after consulting a map, which we should have done an hour ago, located the correct route out of Dodtown and into the next valley over which held our smallmouth bass river.

We turned onto the original road we drove in on and turned up the only side road we had not yet driven on. It began to climb out of the valley.
The last impression I had of Dodtown was perhaps the worst. As Joe downshifted and we drove past a series of run-down and dilapidated hovels, I spotted a yard with long poles and ropes strung up. Hung on these ropes were the carcasses of numerous coyotes and deer with their throats cut, bleeding out. A thickset and meaty man with wild black hair peered at us as we past. His eyes were surrounded with gray like a cadaver, and they burned bloodshot and red as he held swaying in his hand a bloody hatchet.

When we found the river at last, the first thing we did before even gearing up, was to attempt to wash our hands. It took a few minutes to clean them of the gray soot, and we noted that we both had a funny dull metallic taste in our mouths. “Probably that old stale beer.” We stated with dismissal.

The fishing was awful. The banks of the little river were collapsed and eroded, and trees and debris were jammed at every bend. Joe caught exactly one smallmouth, I hooked a diaper lodged against debris on the bottom. We noted that the great floods of 2008 had destroyed this area far worse than we thought. That was why those cars were buried back in town. In two years, nobody had even tried to remove them. To add insult to injury, I fell down the muddy bank like a hippo and rolled into the water, causing us both to chuckle.

“Hell of a fishing trip,” I quipped. Joe smiled. “Always is when you and I get together.” Joe answered smiling.

We drove back out of the valley and turned onto the main state highway back toward the Driftless area trout streams and Joe’s cabin. The road took us through the largest town in the county, and after stopping to fill our bellies with a greasy burger, I spotted a building next to the post office with a sign stating it to be the county historical society.

“Let’s go in and see if we can’t find out more about that town and Valley.” I suggested.
The neat interior was covered in historical photos and maps. Rows of books and old bound newspapers sat neatly indexed behind the counter where we were met by an older thin woman wearing a light blue dress and horn-rimmed glasses who instantly smiled and asked if we needed help.

“We just came from driving through a small valley with an odd little community called Dodtown.” I stated, “and we wanted to see if we could find out more about it, and what its history was… and what happened there.”

She raised her eyebrows and looked at us with a wry smile. “Dodtown huh?”

“Yea, we would appreciate any information you could give us.” “We are just two fly-fishermen, but that town made us curious.”

“I have some coffee I just made, let me get you a cup and come sit down at the research table in the main library.” She asked.

Returning with two very welcome cups of hospitality, she set them before us, and taking a sip on her own, began to tell us the tale.

“It was a lead mining town founded back in 1830. There used to be two large loads or veins of ore right in town in the cliffs and running into the hills. It grew quite quickly to a population of almost five hundred people, mostly miners and their families. Cornish, Welsh, Norwegians, and some Germans and Poles mixed in. The veins were rich with lead ore, and they were easy to work as well. The miners drove their tunnels following the ore straight into the hills. Money rolled in, and for a time Dodtown was the fastest growing community around, and one of the wealthiest too. They built a road right out of town to carry the ore to smelters. It is abandoned now and blocked by an old dump filled with rusting cars.

Around about 1941 the ore began to run out. There was always plenty of lead in that valley, but the lead in the soil was almost impossible to remove, so when the veins began to dry up, the people followed suit and moved on… or most of them did.
I guess there were two types of people then, and two choices too. Those that chose to get out of town, and those who chose to stay. In all, the town lost two-thirds of its population in three years. For awhile the people who stayed did O.K. with cottage industry and what was left of the mining on a vastly diminished scale. By 1950 Dodtown was pretty much forgotten. People seemed to avoid the few residents, who grew increasingly insular, inbred, and suspicious of outsiders. The flooding didn’t help. God knows why anyone would construct a town at the bottom of a massive drainage area and flood plain, but I guess the founders were mainly concerned with ore extraction and not much else. The fortune extracted left Dodtown along with the owners of the mine and the few wealthy citizens when they left. I have newspaper articles from that time where people up here referred to Dodtown as ‘Floodtown,’ and ‘Poverty Hollow.’

It was in the 1960s that the state and county began to expand social welfare programs, and those workers that visited Dodtown came away with a look of concern and alarm. The census takers too had a hard time trying to make out the actual population. Knocks on doors went unanswered. Did you notice how shy and retiring the Dodtowners are? Not bad people, but strange. People thought there was something wrong with them too. They seemed to be underweight and developmentally disabled. They looked sick.

A few years later, in the late 1960s, some Dodtowner brought a sick child to the county hospital. The girl was lethargic, and was slurring her speech. Her eyes were sunken and red too. The doctors puzzled over her until a blood test revealed elevated levels of lead four times the acceptable maximum. That began an investigation in the county of well water and soil samples, and what they found was shocking. All the flooding had washed the mine tailings of lead dust down to the bottom of the valley and in addition to fouling the wells, had become so prevalent that one could get a coating of lead dust just walking about or digging in the dirt. Nothing would grow there either, except weeds.

I don’t know why those people are still there. Goodness knows enough agencies have tried to force them to move out, offering cash buyouts for the flood plain issues on their properties, and serving evictions based on unsafe and downright lethal pollution of lead, but over half of the inhabitants stayed on. Today it is, pardon the expression, our little ‘Piece of Appalachia.’ Sad. Every year the population decreases by a few people, and nobody replaces them. Should be a ghost town in ten years or so. In many ways it is now. None of those people really ever come up here anymore. I wonder what they eat for Pete’s sake. Some of them are so distorted that they can’t walk right anymore and seem to just shamble and drool. Lead poisoning is nothing to take lightly”

We thanked her as we left, and wondered at our chance encounter with a piece of history and decay.
“Next time I get to choose where to go fly-fishing.” I said to Joe.

“Nah,” he replied, “Then it might not be quite the adventure.”