Loneliness of This Wilderness Reaches Deep

 

I don’t know how many walleye there are in Kenoji Lake and its tributaries way up north in Ontario. What, millions? Hundreds? Certainly hundreds of thousands, wouldn’t you think? So little fishing pressure does it get in any one short season. 

These fish swarm in water where the “catching season” is cancelled out by nearly eight months of winter, and two hours flying time between points “A” and “B”. Civilization? There is none, unless you count the single cabin you are in for your stay. There is a radio phone. Hello. You can use that in case of an emergency, or try a smoke signal. 

Isolation: It’s one of the main reasons we go there. Well, that and the cool weather, and the fishing. Go there and you are going to catch some fish, and some more fish, and some more fish, and ..... well, you might eat a few of those golden walleye fillets, too. Maybe. You didn’t pack along any frozen pizzas, did you? 

No, we did not, although we could have. Mike and Renae Henry’s Pipestone Lake Fly-In Outpost operation (www.pfo.net) has cabins with electric refrigerators and freezers right next to propane ranges complete with ovens if you just have to have a pizza. You’re bringing your own food for the length of your stay. Mike is providing the pots, pans, boats, motors, gas, and near priceless location. You’re going to do your own cooking, so bring whatever kind of food you want. 

Brian Loveland, Lane Webster, and I chose instead various cuts of steak, pork chops, ham, eggs, hashbrowns, etc. to suffer through with on our wilderness adventure. Next time, I think, we’ll take along some canned cinnamon rolls and glaze for the oven. Gotta’ have dessert, and something to dunk in the morning coffee, right?

Sure, we ate fish, when we felt like it; both in the cabin, and over campfires pitched on rocky islands way out to hell and gone from the cabin, surrounded by a skyline gone jagged with spruce. Geez, that’s not right: to heaven and gone. That’s right. “Heaven.” 

A week before we left for Mike’s camp, my front porch was the second hottest place on the planet, if you are to believe the Weather Channel: Baghdad, 121 degrees; Death Valley, 113; Conrad’s front porch thermometer out here on Baker’s Branch, America, 115. You tell me what is heaven and hell. 

My grandson, Lane, ten, had just experienced some horrible “fisherman’s luck” dealing with two monster pike, and had put in a vote for some walleye action to break the spell. He had become in the two days we had been in camp a walleye catching fool, which surprised me quite a bit. Not the “fool” part, but his ability to hook the light biting, gourmet’s delight. Walleye are eager to bite, but their bite is often as hard to detect as deep-water crappie here in Oklahoma. 

They do not smash a lure as does a northern pike. Sometimes you think you feel one breathing on your lure, set the hook, and by golly there he is. It’s an acquired touch that you might not expect a ten-year-old to acquire. Lane did, and he loved fishing for walleye as opposed to getting “ripped” by giant pike. Who knew? I had one little session with him on the importance of getting his lure on the bottom, and fishing slower than slow, and it was “take-it-away-Leon” from there on out.

One of the things Mike did for us before dropping us off for the week was to mark with colored pen places on a map for both walleye and pike, dealer’s choice. Grass and lily pads for pike, rocks and moving water for walleye. We had great success fishing for walleye with a variety of Tulsa’s own Gene Larew plastic swimbaits and Bobby Garland crappie baits: excellent walleye baits, all. White, blue and white, and chartreuse were particularly good colors for us. 

One place about a mile from camp, a ridiculously easy boat ride, was called “the chute”. It was a spot where Kenoji’s water was forced between spruce-topped,rock walls maybe thiry yards across from one another, which in that country will cause a current, sometimes not easily visible, but certainly there, just as it will in this country when found on one of our lakes. Walleye love a current of any kind, even when it is not visible. It was one of Mike’s marked spots. I think there could easily have been a million walleye in the chute. I am kidding only a little bit. 

Once I ascertained we were going to definitely catch some fish there, I had Lane lower our meshbag, rock anchor where the current came into the lake. Before I could pick up my rod, Lane had a fish on, a nice one that measured 23 inches on the boat seat ruler,and qualified him for one of Ontario’s “master angler” pewter pins Mike and Renae kept at the headquarters. Then he caught three more about eighteen inches long, nice fish, in a row before I caught one. 

Ontario has both a size limit, and possession limit designed to protect the species from overharvesting. The limit for walleye is two in possession, neither of which can exceed eighteen inches. An eighteen-inch walleye is a very nice-sized, fat fish. Two, filleted, should do you. 

I was catching a lot of fish, but Lane was catching three or four to my one all that evening. The little sucker had found the “touch” and was putting the hammer on ol’ Papa. I thought I heard a stomach growl somewhere along about the last third of the action, and I knew I wasn’t the only one getting hungry. We’d go back to camp directly, and I’d teach Lane how to fix beans and rice, Louisiana style with grilled polish sausage. 

“Sun’s gettin’ low, Lane. We got things to do.” 

“Papa, I don’t wanna’ leave.” 

“You mean ever?” 

“Well, I miss my baby brothers. And my Mom. I miss her a lot. I miss my whole family, actually.” 

“Good. You should.” 

“Papa?” 

“What.” 

“I even miss my sister.” There was a long pause before he added, “Don’t tell her I said that,” a statement apparently necessary to re-establish longheld territorial disputes, lest there be some confusion at a future date when things were not quite so lonely around here. 

Lonely the wilderness is, and you don’t have to be only ten to feel it close in on you at times. Sundown, with a loon calling from the other side of a lake ebony black, and still as a piece of slate, will bring you to a place deep inside you where there are ghosts of things you have not thought about in years. 

“You hungry?” I asked. Lane jumped up, and began buckling on his life vest and “wheeeeeeing” like that Geico pig in the commercial as I cranked the motor. 

“Knock it off, you knucklehead.” 

The kid had found the perfect device for knocking the edge off of lonesome for both of us. I laughed in spite of myself. That, and the great fishing, were things one of us was going to remember as long as we remembered. Way up North. It’s not a bad place to be.

Copyright © 2012 Conrad M. Vollertsen