A series of blunders compounded by ignorance led to a botched job of jumping between Microsoft Word and this blog. Hopefully this reads and looks a little better.
Elbow Lake – 2017
The Plan and the Man
Planning a fishing trip is a
crapshoot at best. If you're lucky you know the water or hopefully will figure
it out over the days, how to get there, and what to pack. Even packing can be
hit or miss. Do it right and you won't starve or walk around naked any more
than necessary. Weather, ice out, finicky fish or even broken ribs can change
the plan any number of ways. And that doesn't begin to dip into the nether
region of being seventy
years old. I
like being my age. After all, what choice do I have? Acceptance might be a
better word than 'like' but either way neither my brain nor hands work like
they used to. Beyond that it's pretty hit or miss.
Can't say I recall how the
Elbow Lake Lodge came to mind. Both Allan and I knew it existed; discovered
that back on our 2002 canoe trip in a wind bound conversation with the Kansas
party we shared Claw Lake with for a couple of days. Each day they’d head in
from the lodge, motor through a pair of lakes, and hump the two ugly portages.
Then spend six hours dredging for lunker walleyes. Back then staying at a lodge
and using their stashed boats and motors to float wilderness lakes seemed like
cheating to me. Where were the hours of sweat, misery and packing of heavy
loads over flooded portages, and a hundred miles of paddling into the teeth of
the wind that made the effort feel noble? Don't know about Allan but to me it
sure felt like the easy way out.
But like I’ve said way too many
times, I'm seventy. Wrinkled, shrinking, suffering bouts of occasional
tom-foolishness, and generally not as strong as I used to be. So, on a lark my
arthritic fingers pecked out an Internet search and discovered the Elbow Lake
Lodge to be affordable seven-day trip. Keep in mind I'm a retired hourly worker
and by affordable I'm not talking three hundred bucks a day per man. Still a lodge
didn't seem a moral choice till I mentioned it to my son. He simply said,
"let's do it,” and my back immediately breathed a sigh of relief. Guess we
both liked the idea of a bed with a shingled roof above.
So let's start with me tripping
over the doorstep of the land of my senior years. Had I stepped lightly over
that threshold Allan and I might have paddled down the Grass River and survived
on bark and bullheads just like true woodsmen. After all, that was the original
plan. Al had thrown the idea of a real fishing trip my way a couple of months
earlier; our cabin, Boundary Waters, or even back to Grass River Provincial
Park and do it right. At the base of the trip was fishing. My son likes to fish
so long as he's throwing lures and boating big fish. The man has no use for
bobber watching or jigging over the side of a boat for walleyes. And if he's
going to pitch lures they best be in-line spinners, the blade better be a
number five red and white, and if there's no buck tail dressed treble hook trailing
behind he might just pack up his rod and go home. In a pinch Al will fish with
store bought but seems to have a fondness for homemade.
Once our goal was clear I fired
off an email to the few years old website listed on the first page of my Internet
search hoping for current information. I figured the rates must have gone up
since the posting, just how much was the question. An hour later I was emailed
in return that the lodge’s web page no longer existed. That sucked. Three
entries down I found another email address but again had it thrown back in my
face. Finally, on the next page for the Elbow Lake Lodge I struck gold and
received a response from Steve Japp along with the current rates. Yup, the
price had indeed risen but not enough to change our minds.
From that point on Steve and I
began a two month game of phone and e-mail tag, an understandable problem. As
far as I knew the lodge was off the grid and he had to go elsewhere – that
would be a forty-mile by boat elsewhere - for a connection. Throw in the fishing
season and I figured the man was up to his skivvies in customers, maintenance,
and hopefully, pickerel and pike. Also, outside of his satellite phone he
had no other means of communication. Over the weeks one thing became certain,
Allan and I were going to be standing on the government dock in Cranberry
Portage on the morning of July 22, 2017 and Steve would be there to pick us up.
From our first conversation on, I got the feeling he was going through an
electronic change in his life. Not sure what the change was but it did affect
how we'd pay the man. Finally, a week before we were to hit the road, all was
resolved.
Over the next weeks I filled
our gaps in gear, Allan opened up ten days in his design business, I made a
reservation at the Viking Lodge in Cranberry Portage for Friday the 21st, we
coordinated food, and
with the grace of Al's wife Maria and a pair of grandmothers, we were set. Once
again we’d managed to do all the usual crap it takes to get ready for a fishing
trip.
Five a.m. Friday morning we
left my son's house, the back of his RAV4 filled to the gills with more stuff
than any village in the third world would need to move into the second. For
sure we were more than ready. Also absolutely sure I'd forgotten something
important. Forgetting the important is a skill I've honed over the decades.
Sleeping bag, tent poles, stove fuel, clothes, yes sir, I've left them all
behind. As it turned out, this time it was only butter.
Nine hundred and twenty-five
miles sounds like a lot of time on pavement but the truth is the hours flew by.
Well, at least till we hung a left a couple of hundred miles north of Winnipeg
onto Highway 60. Dear Lord, two hundred and fifty miles of ditch, brush and
forest sure does stretch out the minutes. But, as usual, crossing the border
had been a snap, "Off to do some fishing? You boys have yourselves a good
time, eh." Have love the Canadians, they sure are a friendly lot.
We ate on the fly, sandwiches
and snacks in the car and only stopped to put fuel in the car or get fluid out
of us. Once past St. Martin Junction there's a three and a half hour stretch
lacking any form of public john. When the urge strikes, you do what most
everyone else does, pull over and stare meaningfully at the woods till the
coast is clear. Being a man comes in handy now and then, especially when
there's a horse fly hatch of epic proportions like in '06. Yes sir, that was a
terror all right.
For the first time in our nine trips north we stopped in The Pas only
long enough to gas up then were off to spend the night an hour north in
Cranberry Portage. Seems the town used to be the site of a noted portage and in
season, sprouted quite a crop of cranberries. Hey, I don't make this stuff up.
On the south side of town we turned right toward the big lake and the cabin
waiting on us at the Viking Lodge.
It was 8:30. Long drive. Pooped and excited
was what we were. Cabin twelve turned out to be a step or two below the Waldorf
but was more than enough to satisfy our needs.
We made breakfast in the
morning, wandered down to the office to buy fishing licenses then putzed away
the minutes awaiting Steve the mystery man. You know how that goes. Three phone
calls gives you a picture of a person that covers the gamut from Godzilla to
Brad Pitt. I was hoping for someone in between though I'd have taken the big
lizard over Pitt most any day of the week.
I saw Steve first. Oddly enough
he looked like his slightly gruff voice. Taller than average, solidly built, ball
cap, wrap around sunglasses perched on his deeply tanned face, short sleeved
shirt and long pants but most of all, the man was sporting a red life jacket.
The jacket said a lot to me, he knew his priorities. Good fishing doesn't mean
squat if you fall out of the boat.
Of course me being me, I had to
start our conversation after the obligatory handshake and greeting with
something both inappropriate and inconsiderate, "What happened to your
eye?" You see, Steve was missing his right eye just like my fictitious
Uncle Emil.
Steve parried with, "We'll
talk about that later." Truth was, he took my callousness well. Me, I
figured it was like a first date, get the uncomfortable parts over with right
off the bat and move on from there.
Allan was warmly greeted and quickly
shagged off to get the car. Normally we'd have loaded at the government dock
but the dock was no more. Ice out had arrived two weeks late and was
immediately followed by a June full of cold rain.
The entire chain of lakes
rose three feet and did a job to both the main dock and the fishing. Those
who'd shown up for the usual hot June fishing had been greeted by constant
downpours, cold weather, and pickerel in hiding. Over the week we discovered
this had been the worst spring fishing in over forty years. No one knew where
the walleyes were and the big pike had fled to parts unknown.
Turned out Steve's boat was an eighteen,
wide-bodied, rear tiller Lund powered by a sixty-horse Yamaha, high-tech and
old school at the same time. Have to love that. Things were looking good.
The Lodge
Truly, I didn't think we'd
brought that much stuff but Steve's boat was filled to the gunwales. A double
check of the gear, Allan
parked his truck, we untied, and were off in bright sunshine. Most
everything in the bay appeared the same as it had on all our trips, even down
to the Cranberry Air floatplane that’d nearly run us over in 2000 but at the
same time the bay looked and felt completely different. Maybe I'd been in this
picture enough times to make an exotic, north woods, jumping off point feel
near ordinary. Those things happen to most everything in life. Of course I
wasn't thinking that at the time, instead was simply engrossed in looking and
remembering.
Thirty seconds of puttering
brought us to the lake proper and Steve opened the throttle. Moment's later we
were skimming past the little chain of islands Allan and I had struggled along
in the storm of ‘00. That was about as close as we ever came to floundering.
Hard to believe our hour-long struggle had ended less than a mile from shore. From
this point on I was deep into bouncing between the passing scene and memory.
First Cranberry Lake looked as
I recalled but sure was flying by, hard to take it all in as we had from a zigzagging
canoe. Didn't take long before my eye caught how Steve was directing the Lund.
In a canoe, waves are a big deal, as they grew each required attention to
angle. Throw sixty horses and a wide boat into the mix and waves don't matter a
lot. However, when we came on the first set of swells thrown by a passing boat
he quartered them like a true sailor. I relaxed knowing we were in good hands.
Sometimes it's the little things that tell the tale of another person.
A dozen minutes took us to the
connecting channel marking the end of the lake. Immediately I scoured the
shorelines in search of the shorter trees that would mark where a lodge once
stood. At least I think it did. Whether fact or fiction, that's where Emil
guided his Lund in my novel. It was there he and his nephew Archie left the
motored Lund behind and paddled off into their ten days of unknown at the unnamed lake. This
time Steve was at the helm not Emil and carrying us toward his lodge; I sat up
front in the swivel seat and was passing through twenty years of personal
history and writing.
Five years earlier a forest
fire had devastated the area, so large and intense Cranberry Portage was
evacuated but fortunately not touched. The scorched west shore of Second
Cranberry we were now passing still smelled of smoke. Thousands upon thousands
of charred sticks and bare rock spoke of the spruce and pines that had been.
The slightest beginning of soft green underbrush said they'd return to their
glory in a century or so. Regardless, it hurt to lose a part of my past. The
shaded portage into Bear Lake was now a passage over naked rock without a foot
of shade, the same for the path Emil and Archie had trudged into
Wedge Lake.
Third Cranberry was no
different. However, the bald eagles were easy to spot. Over our week we saw
dozens - maybe. To me they all look the same. White head and tail, you've seen
one you've seen 'em all. Maybe if I spent a few months or years in the park
it'd be
different? Nah, I'm not made that way. One moment I'm bustin' a gut and paying
attention to the damn birds, a moment later I drift off into how good breakfast
will taste in the morning.
Once on the river flowing north
from Third Cranberry, we left the fire of ’12 behind and the forest returned. This is
the first section of true-river and its green waving bed gives the Grass its
name. The crow line distance between the Cranberries and Elbow Lake is three
miles; the travel line is closer to a dozen. In '88 the area from the river
north had been burned to bedrock and most of the remnant black trunks still
stood surrounded by head high aspens when we’d paddled by ten years later. Al
had said the area reminded him of the land of Skeletor from the Saturday
morning cartoon show. What we were now seeing was Mother Nature in action. What
had been six-foot poplars were now pushing twenty and the scorched trunks were
down and returning to soil. Not breathtaking but sure as heck was pleasant. A
good sign for what would happen on the lakes behind over the next decades.
Steve
carved the tight river turns like a surgeon. What could have been terrifying -
and if you knew me and my fear of a painful, tearing death on a carnival ride -
was actually almost fun. I'm not trying to paint the man as more than he was
but to this point he was solidly okay.
As the river widened and opened to the lake, the surrounding hills rose.
They're not majestic, snow covered mountains, nope; they’re not even the bluffs
of the Boundary Waters back home but they are hills and add a wavering stripe
of green to the horizon. For the next fifteen minutes we weaved through a maze
of islands, Elbow has around three hundred of them, nearly all are spruce
thickets and give them the look of ships at sea. Finally, near the north end of
the park we approached Webb Island and the little bay that held the lodge.
What
first struck Allan and I as we entered, were the three solar panels atop the
main building, another sign of high-tech in the wilderness. Several
green-roofed, brown log-sided cabins flanked the main building on the freshly
mowed lawn. Lawn? A closer look said the grass was much like what grew at our
cabin in Minnesota. What looked green and lush from the distance was a whole
lot more natural up close. No chemicals had touched this clearing. Probably
bloomed wild flowers in the spring and a variety of what us city dwellers call
weeds and grass for the rest of the year. Still, an occasional mowing added a
touch of order to the bush. We tied up to the dock and began the offload.
The Lake
First order of business
was stowing our gear and clothes, making supper, and stringing rods. At the
moment Allan and I didn't as yet understand the whirlwind that we’d climbed
aboard back in his Eagan, MN driveway and carried us non-stop to the land of
Steve Japp. Also didn't as yet realize how much a part of our trip Steve and
his one-man operation would become. But for the moment we were into eating
steaks and spuds. We'd kept the menu simple, fairly healthy but heavily
weighted in protein. Yes sir, every day we chowed down on man fare though we
did throw down enough roughage to aid gravity in pulling food through our
systems.
When we'd left the Viking Lodge
Allan and I had high hopes our Elbow Lake cabin would be a step up but also
feared it wouldn't. It wasn't so much the Viking didn't have all the basics, it
was more it lacked any form of charm. We needn't have worried. Our one bedroom
cabin wasn't large, call it no more than four hundred square feet, but had
atmosphere in spades. North woods blankets on the beds, knotty pine walls with
the patina of five decades, a little barrel stove, shower, and a bump out,
screen porch kitchen with a new stove, sink, table, and refrigerator. Steve
called his operation 'your grandfather's lodge' and it was - only now I was a
grandfather. To me it was a blast from the past.
By mid-afternoon we were ready,
poles, tackle boxes, life jackets, and most of all, I was sporting a straw
fedora to keep my ear tips from crisping. Almost natty you might say. Steve
took one look and said, "My God Mark, you look like an old Panamanian in
that hat." Can't say I'd ever heard that before. Guess the mood was set;
we hopped aboard the whirlwind and were off to see what we'd see.
Steve had owned the lodge for
seventeen years, fished the area for a decade or two beyond that, and come to
know Elbow Lake well. And for darned sure had an interest in big pike. In one
of our earlier phone conversations I'd brought up walleye fishing, not so much
that I'd wanted to target pickerel but thought a master angler award would go
nicely with the ones for pike Allan and I already had. Can't say I was actually
a master but I'd thrown enough lures and had gotten lucky a couple of times.
Watch Al for a minute and you knew which one of us had the touch.
My mention of walleyes might
have crossed wires between Minneapolis and Manitoba. Allan was up for pike, big
pike, and the bigger the better. Me, all I wanted was time in the boat in a
land I found beautiful and a chance to relive a few memories. Once we arrived
it still took a couple of trips on the water before all the smoke cleared and
the three of us were in agreement as to what the goal was.
Steve had his list of usual
culprits that most always held big fish, a double handful of possibles, a dozen
plus maybes, and even a few spots he'd always passed but was interested in
fishing. Elbow's a bigger lake on the water than on the map take my word for
that. Manitoba's DNR puts the lake's total shoreline at thirteen hundred miles.
As I'd written earlier, that mileage has more to do with all the points,
islands, and bays than water acres. She's a complex, maze-like lake with
dozens, maybe hundreds of good-looking fishing spots. From our experience over
the next week, no doubt every one of them held fish.
Ten minutes of travel brought
us to an open water location with no indication whatsoever this would be where
we'd fish. No way would I have ever cut the motor and said we were there.
There? Steve simply said, "Ten to twelve feet and beautiful weeds. Cast
any direction gentlemen." And that was the pattern for our six and a half
days on the water. Yes, the lake had obvious structure most everywhere you
looked but that's not what Steve saw. He knew the bottom and what was growing
there. When we cruised to a stop you could be assured we were on a cabbage bed
though Steve called it hydrilla. Either way it was a classic pike weed and as
it turned out, was often mixed with coon tail. Slowly I came to realize why he
said late July and August were the best times of the year for big pike. Yes
sir, it was all about the weeds that were now in bloom.
As it turned out Steve was right and the big pike
were definitely in hiding. Though every spot we drifted produced a mixture of
pike and walleyes, the forty-inch plus fish he wanted to put us on were nowhere
to be found. And believe me we searched hard and threw lures constantly. The
late ice out and eternal flooding of June had thrown the biological calendar
out of whack. For Al and I the answer was simple, put in the hours and pitch
the spinners. We'd come to fish and that's what we did. Call our boat time
sixty hours and thousands of casts.
Slowly, oh so slowly, we began to find some
wide-backed, line-stripping pike. Not a master angler one in the bunch but they
were all big gutted and healthy looking.
Confusion and Resolution
When we'd spoken on the phone
in the weeks leading up to our trip I'd asked Steve if Allan and I could hire a
guide to get the lowdown on the lake. At the time I was clueless as to how his
lodge ran. In an earlier website, no doubt from the previous owners, guides
were available for a hundred bucks a throw. I'm not a fan of guides but, then
again, I've never used one. But one thing I knew for sure, Elbow is a complex
lake. Our trips in '98 and '02 told us little more than this year's trip would
be a hit or miss proposition at best. Since we might be cramming a lifetime's
worth of time on the lake in six and a half days, hiring a guide made sense.
Steve simply said, "Tell you what, I'll take you out once or twice to give
you the lay of the lake. Maybe even feed you a shore lunch." Wow, what a
deal.
As we found, Mr. Japp runs a
one-man operation with occasional help from the other lodges in the area. Seems
they've formed a corporation with the idea of balancing the load. I'll let you
figure out what that means. At Steve's lodge he is owner, cabin cleaner, chief
cook and bottle washer, guide, and most of all, an interesting man to spend a
week with.
 |
| Steve with his Painting Shorts On (sorry Steve) |
Not that he's a saint, believe me the man has his quirks like we all
do but it's the oddities that add a splash of color to the picture. As the days
quickly passed, the three of us meshed, even let down our guards a bit to let
the warts show. I'd say more but that's Steve's story to tell.
It turned out we only spent a
single evening on the water without him in the boat. Seemed we fed off each
other's energy. Steve wanted to show off his lake in the best possible way but
the weird spring had thrown the fishing off kilter. Of course there was nothing
he could do about that but assured us we'd simply hit it wrong. And there was
nothing we could do about it but keep hammering the water in the hope it'd pick
up and over the days it did.
Each morning, well past the
crack of dawn, I'd trot around to the woods side of the cabin in search of what
Steve called 'the best outhouse in Canada'. Up the slight hill to my left Steve
would usually be sitting on the lodge's porch having a cup of coffee. We'd
exchange a good morning and he'd assure me we'd find the lunkers today in such
an upbeat voice I had no doubt we would. Looked to me like the man figured he
could improve the fishing by attitude and a smile.
A time or two on the water told
Steve both Allan and I had already thrown a few lures in the park. Also told
him Al was one fishing-son-of-a-gun and I wasn't likely to fall out of the boat.
Hey, every fishing circus needs a clown. He once briefly mentioned he liked our
work ethic and that being on the water with the two of us was like Disneyland.
Not sure what he meant by that but I took it as a compliment not that he
thought I was Goofy.
As to Allan up front, he threw
red and white spinners. That's it, nothing else. He lost two right off the bat
due to poor knot tying. Finally, Steve re-rigged him and Al was good for the
rest of the week. In total my son fished with a pair of my homemade spinners.
They were tied as small musky lures with three and a half inch, colorful buck
tails. He fished the first till it shredded to bare hook then switched to his
second and last. So call it six days, forty hours plus hours of throwing lures,
hundreds of fish, and two lures. Also, as usual, no leader. We’d stopped using
leaders in '99 and haven't been bit off more than a handful of times. Steve
loaned me one after our single bite off. I briefly used it but felt like a
sinner. That evening the leader found its rightful place as a bookmark souvenir.
As to my lure choice, yup, spinners. It's what I do. Make 'em, beat 'em to hell
on fish, save the parts, and make more. The plan next year, if we should go, is
two small, pocket-sized tackle boxes, a dozen red and whites in each, and a
dozen snap swivels, maybe some backup line.
The pike fishing wasn't great
by Elbow Lake standards but was damn good compared to most anywhere else. Throw
in a couple of dozen walleyes to sweeten the pot, a few in the five to six
pound range and we were definitely catching our share - whatever the heck that
means. When Allan or I would boat another good-sized pickerel, Steve would
shake his head and say, "This is nuts. It sure as heck's not like this
most years." Usual for him while drifting the huge cabbage beds at Woody's
on the south end or in the channel across from Chinaman Island would have been
a half dozen or more pike of thirty plus inches, and a fatty or two officially
verified on Steve's Master Angler Board. Yeah, we were tying into some of those
usual fish but in nowhere near the numbers expected. Such is life.
What struck me was the strength
of a pike when it reached the thirties. The ladies go to straight down and make
you dredge them up. No head wiggling, just a log on the bottom. All the while
you've got the rod's tip pointed to the sky with your arm tension set on high.
The only way to gain line is to reel in the lowering tip without any line slack
then hoist the rod back to eleven o'clock. Makes a man feel more like a power
crane than an angler. Can't say I was fully aware of that method before
climbing on the boat with Mr. Japp. No sir, Steve coached me through the proper
way to handle a big fish. He said, "Knowing how to land a big pike is what
puts the Master in Master Angler."
Over the decades Steve had put
in the hours, paid attention to the old timers, and grown to be a master of his
craft. The funny part was that pike fishing wasn't his craft, only his passion.
Since his days on the water as a seven-year-old fishing with his dad and
grandfather, being a fishing guide had been his dream. As is usual in life,
putting food on the table and change in his pockets got in the way. From the
moment he left home on the day after high school graduation, Steve had lived
the life of an entrepreneur, built and sold several businesses but always in
the back of his mind the dream of guiding bimbos like me lived on. Seventeen
years ago he bought the lodge and lives there three months out of the year,
fishes till bear hunting season then organizes a few hunts. His remaining nine
months are spent in Panama with his family. The details are Steve's to fill in.
Though we caught a few pike of memory, such as the
ugliest pike I'd ever seen which had something of a Michael Jackson complexion,
only one truly stands out. We were drifting Chinaman's on a blustery evening;
rollers big enough to tell me if Allan and I had been on a canoe trip we'd have
spent the evening in camp. Yes sir, a sixteen-foot Lund sure does build a man's
confidence when the whitecaps are running. Simply put, this was a pike hooked
up on the end of a long cast. The hammer of a hit told me it was a fish of size
but its run also told me it had no interest in diving. Instead, the fish began
a ten second display with a porpoise-like leap that started me laughing. Don't
know why that is, causing panic and pain in another animal is no reason for
laughter but laugh is what I did. Another two seconds beneath the waves and she
came straight up, fully out of the water pretty much like a tarpon and did a
full back flip. Would've looked good as a piece of hardware store calendar art
from 1953. Even Steve said he'd never seen the likes of that before. Of course
the leap upped my laugh to a roar and I lost the pike. Only fitting for such an
acrobat of a fish.
Over the years I'd heard when a mayfly hatch was on walleyes won't eat anything else. Also read in a trusted fishing magazine that just wasn't true. What Elbow Lake taught me made a lot more sense than the conjecture of experts. Near as I can figure we went through two hatches for sure and maybe three. At least that's what the screens on our bump-out kitchen told me. I've become nosier as I've grown older. I see a mayfly on a screen and I'll go nose to bug body to check it out. The reason I'm not sure whether there were two or three hatches has more to do with my fading memory and simple chance than actuality. For all I know there might have been ten or maybe it was simply a case of no two mayflies looking alike.
As it was, Allan and I turned pickerel most everywhere we found pike, sometimes mixed within, more often on the edges of the big cabbage patches.
Can't say we saw any mayflies in the weed beds so that might be the reason they were still on the bite. However, we did pull into a few protected, weed free bays where millions of spent mayfly bodies floated. There we'd also find walleyes hammering a new hatch like schools of bass. Never saw that before. Dozens of boils surrounded us but not a one was interested in our spinners. Made me wish I had my fly rod and room enough in the boat to not impale anyone. Lesson learned: when you see pickerel chowing down on mayflies you best check out the big weed beds if you're looking for a shore lunch.
End of Days
Besides guiding us for six
days Steve kept his word about a shore lunch. Over the years client input told
him the best spot for that was back at the lodge where there were fewer bugs
and better seating. Truth is the bugs weren't all that bad though I was bitten
by three kinds of flies, one of which went through a tennis shoe and a sock to
find the meat. Tough monkey.
The main building wasn't huge,
probably was the size of a 1960s suburban rambler. The kitchen was a snapshot
of 1961 when the lodge was built; red Formica counters banded in nickel,
varnished plywood cabinets, stove, ice maker, and a refurbished slab wood table
big enough to seat a dozen in the middle. It was there we ate plates of walleye
fillets, home fries, and corn. On the second go-around the fillets were simply
seasoned with salt and pepper and fried in butter. Should you get the chance,
that's the way to eat Minnesota's state fish.
While we were there the main
room was unused. When Steve has a group on the American plan it becomes the
dining room. For now it was simply his makeshift office surrounded by knotty
pine walls covered with large mounted pike, elk antlers, a variety of other
critters, and a bearskin large enough to cover a king-sized bed. Oddly, though
we were forty miles from the nearest road the lodge has an Internet connection.
Go figure.
Allow me a side-track; if
you've read my other blogs or are among the dozen who've read my novel, you
know about my fictional Uncle Emil and the adventure he and his nephew
Archie went on in ’61, the same year the Elbow Lake Lodge was built. Emil was
missing his right eye, as was Steve. Both owned a rear tiller Lund fishing boat,
were about the same age, build, and Emil was nearly as hairless as Steve, all
no doubt a coincidence but interesting nonetheless.
Call our seven days a hoot in a
fishing tornado. Our hour-long afternoon siestas were a necessity and proved just
enough rest to revive the three of us for an evenings worth of pike. We had the
full gamut of weather as expected, light on the rain end and heavy on heat. Two
days with ninety degree highs weren't in our plans but made me thankful for my
straw hat, that and looking natty as all get out when I’d strut out to the boat.
Didn’t
snap a photo and sure didn’t get enough viewing time, not that would have made
any difference. The eagle’s nest was perched atop the tallest spruce on a
midsized island probably a dozen feet down where the first cluster of branches
was strong enough to support its enormous weight. Steve said the Manitoba DNR
estimated another that’d sat in a toppled spruce at a few tons. This one wasn’t
yet in that class but would grow to be over the years. Seems eagles are into
maintenance. We saw a lot in our week but that few seconds view will stick.
Come Friday Allan and I loaded our memories and
tired butts on the Lund and were off at seven-thirty, on the road by nine, and
home a bit after midnight, a tad over ten degrees of latitude south. Hell-of-a
day. Would I do it again? - in a heartbeat.
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