I arrived in Grayson City at 6:33 a. m. He was sitting in the garage on a stool with his camo backpack between his legs.
I’m running 33 minutes late, dragging on 2 ˝ hours of sleep, tossing and turning and burping Taco Bell all night long. I have a gigantic stress pimple on my right cheek from trying to do too many things before embarking on this Huckleberry Finn replay.
Jeff, my 15-year-old nephew, is beaming and sleepy at the same time as he slogs his gear into my car. He’s running on 4 hours of sleep. Pretrip exhaustion, excitement…the great fishing trip we have talked about for months begins now.
A half hour farther north we meet up at brother Jared’s. He’s the one with the newly-purchased cabin out in Mississippi bluff country. And he’s the one that has far-reaching knowledge of fish and guns even though he is a suburban cat. Most of his info is from books although he did go on an African safari a few years back and we did grow up in a family of skeet-shooters.
When I pulled in his driveway I am very happy to see no canoe strapped to the top of his 4-wheel drive truck. First he was taking his boat, then the canoe, but he didn’t have time to go out on the river and scout out a route free of snags and other underwater dangers.
My brother, who has never had any interest in gardening before he bought this big house on 4 acres in Elk Horn, takes a moment to show me a flowering hen & chicks. It is remarkable. I didn’t even know they bloomed, a series of small white flowers in random clusters. It is the first picture of the trip.
We’re on the road by 7 despite the urgent call from Jared as I was leaving my house. “Turn on the weather channel...the whole state of Wisconsin is solid red…severe thunderstorms, tornado ripe.” “Doesn’t matter.” I tell him. “We aren’t camping, we’ll be in your house.” I am not going to let this road trip of a lifetime slip away. This trip was to be for a week, then it became 3 ˝ days and now because of business dealings, Jared has to be back Thursday morning. The door of opportunity is barely ajar. We are slipping through it no matter what. The hunt for the elusive 6’ long flathead catfish with a head twice the size of a man’s will be short and intense…a mere 2 days.
We manage a detour through Janesville, Jared making up his own alternative route. We get past that knaggy M, MM, PB route, past Oregon Correctional Center for Bad Girls (Wales, the Bad Boy School, is toward the other side of Wisconsin), and Jared pulls over at a BP for gas. I pull in right behind him. I don’t need gas so I pull over on the side near a pasture and get out to stretch. It is summer, July 12th, the rich rolling farmlands of Wisconsin are verdant, almost a fluorescent green. Jeff spies a piece of tree stuck in the barbed-wire fence. The wire was stuck right in the middle of the trunk. How did that happen? Picture # 2.
Jared pulls over and informs us that there is no way that we can go to meet the fur trapper Jacob. It’s 25 miles out of the way and well, no time. Okay. There were only 3 things we wanted to do: meet the trapper, see an outsider artist barn full of fish heads, and try to land one of those monster flatheads. One down.
the caper continues...
Links
Pre-Story
The Mississippi River Ouija Boards
