But Only For Me

I decided I’d have to write it more like Ahmad Jamal plays piano.

The Ahmad Jamal record I know best is called But Not For Me, and that’s a funny title because his playing feels strictly for him. He’s playing music the way he wants to hear it; he’s not concerned with communicating a song to you or anyone else, especially if you’re unfamiliar with it. The songs are deconstructed and pointed inward. The record should in fact be called But Only For Me. And that is its greatest strength.

Transplanting that approach to writing gets you to a kind of Hemingway place. Some idea about just capturing the essence of the story. Or the vapor of it. The distillation of it. And letting the boring parts fill themselves in or fall away. Whatever the case may be.

Anyway, in this case it’s hardly even a story. I went fishing for a weekend. I caught some fish. I visited some streams from my past and explored some streams I’d always wanted to fish but never had. I drank some coffee and some whiskey. I got very cold and wet. I listened to a whole lot of jazz.

If I were telling the story to a theoretical “you,” I’d want to talk about the flies I used and the names of the streams. I’d want to make the catching of the fish feel as exciting in writing as it was in reality. Since I’m not talking to “you,” I don’t need to do any of that.

It’s this whole problem, you see. It’s wanting the story to always be epic. What if it’s not epic but you still want to tell it? What if it is epic but you know telling the facts will not make it feel epic? Is this what art is about? Is it future nostalgia or dislocated sentimentality? Of course I want every fishing trip to be epic. Hell, I want every day to be epic. Maybe if you want that long enough, you run into the problem that even when they are epic, the days or the fish, they don’t live up to the expectation.

This trip, the one I set out to write about, was pretty actually truly epic. I caught more and bigger fish than I could have reasonably hoped for. I had a brush with nature in the sense that I got very cold and wet and was miles away from any means of getting warm. Moderate hypothermia is kind of epic, right?

Enough of that word, epic.

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All of the fish were brown and brook trout, with one sucker thrown in. The sucker angered me. Why should hideous bottom dwelling fish live in the same places as trout? And why should one eat my fly? I tried to get the sucker off my hook without touching it, because the sucker was disgusting. I had to touch him and it upset me. Suckers remind me of centipedes or spiders. They have no soul and are vaguely or maybe explicitly evil.    

Some of the smaller brown trout were prettier than the bigger ones. Brown trout are funny. They are the ugliest trout, except when they have that warmer golden color and evenly spaced brightly colored spots. Then they can be beautiful. But beauty is the exception among brown trout. We assume brown trout seek cover because they are more wary than other trout, more fearful of predators, but I realize now how silly that is. They seek cover because they feel ugly and they are self-conscious. And now I feel bad for brown trout.

I had never fished the Plover before and was excited to fish it. I’d driven by it on the way to Stevens Point. I like to go to Stevens Point when I’m up in Wisconsin because it has Ruby Coffee. Ruby is important to me. It is the work of a fellow Wisconsin native who, like me, tried his luck out West. I wish I had something I could contribute to Wisconsin. Wisconsin is better than the world understands. I wish I made something with my hands that people would buy. Instead I write sentences that no one reads and think thoughts about which no one cares for a giant corporation that many people love and many people hate. My grandpa, when I was young, advised me to be a plumber. He said that water would always mean steady work. Writing means steady work in my head, but not the kind that supplies a paycheck. It’s a forever river of thoughts and shapes and words and sometimes I’m wading, sometimes I’m floating, and lately I’m drowning. Writing is in my job title, but I don’t think my job has that much to do with writing. Water means coffee and water means trout. I am a Pisces. Maybe I should have listened to my grandpa.

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This started out as a matter-of-fact, standard issue blog post about my Father’s Day fishing trip. I felt obligated to write it. I caught fish. I took pictures. I dropped a camera in the Plover river and was not able to recover it. I got very cold and wet from the very cold and wet weather. My love of fishing overrode my survival instinct a couple of times. Which is to say, getting back to the cabin in the evening and taking a long hot shower and drinking some whiskey and putting on some dry cotton clothes and sitting in my dad’s old chair and eating a steak and listening to jazz on the cottage stereo, which despite its low price tag sounds better than any other stereo in the world, was as much a part of the experience as the catching of trout. Going to bed with the sound of loons and rain and the windows open to the temperatures in the 40s and owls and distant coyotes or maybe even wolves.

A predicate without its subject.

Only for me.   

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Lately I’ve been listening to lots and lots of jazz and writing about it while listening, and it has me thinking all kinds of wild thoughts. It has me hating the sentences I’ve been writing since I learned how to write. It has me questioning my own sense of rhythm. The other day I listened to Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure and wondered about the drumming of Tony Williams, and what that drumming would look like if it were writing. Tony Williams stretches the pulse of the music like so much silly putty. He’s reckless or maybe extraordinarily deliberate, which in jazz drumming might come off as the same thing. What would this mean for writing? Is jazz like poetry? What even is poetry? Should I try poetry again? Once I thought I understood it. That was in 1996.

I’ve wrestled lately with why I go fishing. What’s the point? Just because I enjoy it? Is that reason enough when daily life is full of things that I don’t enjoy? In a simpler version of life, one would have a weekend away and come back “refreshed.” That’s not how it works in my life. I might come back more tired than when I left, and “daily life” might feel harder rather than easier.

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I left Wednesday evening after dinner. Did I feel a little guilty? Yes. But my wife is not the passive aggressive type. If she says go fishing, she means go fishing. So I had a pleasant four-hour drive with podcasts and audio books and music and coffee. The drive from Chicago’s north suburbs to our cabin near Mountain, WI, is one that happens in gradients of civilization. The stretch from Evanston to Milwaukee is as ugly and corrupt a drive as you’ll find anywhere on the planet, a cultural and commercial purgatory of “adult” stores and truck stops and billboards for attorneys. North of Milwaukee, things open up a bit, and rolling farmland is your accompaniment. Combined with occasional glances of Lake Michigan out the passenger side window, it’s not so bad. Ninety minutes later you bypass Green Bay and find yourself entering the North Woods proper. Now the billboards mostly announce that you’re getting close to legal pot (Michigan); judging from their frequency, these billboards must excite people more than I realize.   

Soon you’re headed west on 64 and there are no billboards, only deer. Deer everywhere. Suicidal deer who hate life and want to die violent deaths on the front of your speeding automobile. We spend a lot of time talking about depression in teens, but what about depression in deer? It’s real.

Also, bears. There are bears, and they will run across the road right in front of you. They strike me less as suicidal and more as thrill-seeking. They run across the road just to see if they can make it to the other side. Crazy bastards.

At long last, I arrived at the cabin. It was around 11:30, and I wasn’t all that tired yet. Enough time for a bit of whiskey and the ceremonial rigging of rods. For this trip, I chose my Winston 4-weight and the bamboo 4-weight my dad bought me shortly before he died. I like a 4-weight for most occasions. With a 3, it can be tough to cast bigger flies, and with a 5, a small fish will feel like a small fish. Nobody wants small fish. A 4-weight lets smaller fish put a bit of a bend in the rod, and I assumed smaller fish would be all I’d catch. I was wrong.

I went to bed happy and slept to the cries of loons, those eerie sons of bitches who haunt northern nights. (Shout out to fellow Wisconsin native Justin Vernon for the lyric: “Lapping lakes like leery loons.” That’s from the song “Flume,” and, coincidentally, I discovered a stream by that name on this very trip. I’m onto you, Justin Vernon. But I digress.)

On the next day, Thursday, I fished the stream that will someday be named for me if ever a stream is named for me: the South Branch of the Oconto. (How would it be named for me, I wonder. The Andy Brawner Branch of the Oconto? The South Branch of the Andy Brawner? The South Branch of the Oconto, a.k.a. Andy Brawner?) In the annals of fly fishing, it will be noted that no one ever fished this stream as long and as well as I did. And for what? It is a beautiful stream, but also one where I caught virtually no trout for the first 10 years that I fished it. It is the stream where I learned to fish streams. I was both determined and very bad at fishing streams, and I flailed away for years before I started to understand how to fish a river. I was an embarrassment to myself, my family, my home state, and my sport. And this is where I will talk briefly about paying dues. I believe in paying dues, and I fear that life is increasingly set up for dues not to be paid by anyone for anything at any time. What do we work for? What do we work toward? And now I’ll conclude the crabby portion of this story.

I’m grateful to the South Branch of the Oconto for kicking my ass for all those years. It was an abusive and cruel river, but one that kept me coming back. Occasionally I’d catch a small brook trout or see a bigger fish rise, and I guess that was just enough encouragement to urge me on in my quest to catch trout in a river. (It should be noted: I learned to fly fish first in a backyard and then on a lake, catching idiot bluegills on big stupid flies. Those are good ways to learn fly fishing. An inexperienced angler shouldn’t step in a good trout stream and expect to have success. That’s just not how this game works. If that inexperienced angler does, by chance, catch trout in that good stream, the success will be ill-gotten, and karma will have its way with the rest of his or her fishing career.)

Thursday was to be my only good weather day, and even it was no picture of summer bliss. Overcast and low 70s, with rain and cold moving in later in the day. I stepped into the South Branch near the tiny town of Breed and began working my way upstream. I caught a decent little brook trout on an Adams and thought, well, at least I will have caught something on this trip. See, fishing in Northern Wisconsin is not like fishing out west. Out west, there’s rarely a question of whether fish will be caught, only questions of how many and how big. My home waters are nothing like that. If you catch a fish – even a modest little brook trout – you count yourself fortunate and drink from the flask in the side pocket of your fishing vest.

Much to my surprise, a few bends in the river later, I caught a legitimate brown trout. I’ll put him at an honest 13 inches — not a trophy by any stretch, but not terribly far from it in a river of this size. I read once that any trout over 15 inches is a “big trout” in the rivers of Wisconsin, and I’d maybe lower that number to 14. Of the hundreds of trout I’ve caught in Wisconsin, only a handful have been more than 14 inches. (Note, these are honest numbers. Wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone claim to have caught a 20-incher. I swear, we all instinctively add at least five inches to the truth.)

I caught several more brown trout that day and barely remember them. There was a time when catching even a single brown in that river would have made my summer.

At one point I heard the air above me beating rhythmically and looked up to see a bald eagle following the line of the stream just over the tops of the trees. This has never been the sort of thing that makes a bad fishing day a good one (I’m a guy who needs to catch fish to enjoy fishing, sorry), but it does make a good day that much better.

I was cold. Very cold. It was early evening now. There were storms coming in from the west. I was shivering. I trespassed and bushwacked my way to the nearest road and walked three miles back to the car. I was out of the river, where my passion for chasing trout was luring me into hypothermic shock. It’s far from the first time this has happened: I suddenly discover I’m shivering and my teeth are chattering, and it’s because there are trout rising and I’m powerless against trout rising.  

I went back to the cottage and took a hot shower. I discovered that when hot water hits a specific spot on the back of my neck, my entire body efficiently absorbs the heat. I made a steak with just a bit too much salt. I drank some whiskey. I listened to Herbie Hancock’s Empyrean Isles and contemplated its brilliance and beauty. I jotted down some notes on the day’s fishing. I drank a beer. I went to bed.

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I woke up Friday to cold rain, the kind that leaves no doubt about its agenda. This cold rain would last all day and then some. I had anticipated this and learned that over by Stevens Point, the weather would be marginally better. So, after meditating and eating a premium quality Trader Joe’s breakfast burrito, I headed toward Stevens Point. Once there, I enjoyed a fine cup of coffee at RUBY, one of the better roasters in the country. There, while sipping my coffee, I studied maps and books and contemplated the day’s fishing. A creek by the name of Peterson had recently been brought to my attention; I decided to check it out.

Peterson is small, tight water, at least in the stretch I fished (from County Q upstream to Jensen Road). So I was pleasantly surprised to catch a trout whose respectability was marred only by the missing upper half of his tail.

After feeling satisfied that I could check Peterson off my list, I headed for the Plover River. This is a fairly well-known trout stream, at least in so far as any Wisconsin trout stream outside the Driftless is well-known. I had never fished it and was excited; I’ve driven by the Plover numerous times, and each time I’ve had to control my impulse to stop the car and immediately begin fishing.

As the day progressed, the weather worsened. Temperatures seemed to drop constantly, and the rain became heavier. I fished just above and below County N, and found trout rising everywhere. Some even ate my flies. It was good fishing with colorful, feisty brown trout.

Another evening, another hot shower, another steak, another whiskey, more jazz listened to from the chair that was once my dad’s. I’ve passed the age where I’m afraid of ghosts; now I wish there would be a few. On nights like these, I’d like a visit from my dad, my grandma, my aunt. I’d like to tell them about the day’s fishing and about my kids.

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Saturday I woke again to cold rain. I pondered my choices briefly before deciding I needed more time on the Plover. The previous evening had been good and left me wondering where the bigger fish were hanging out. Only one way to find out. You pick a spot, you get in your damp waders, and you get your ass in the river. You pay the dues. You might find nothing. You might have the greatest fishing ever had. You might get cold. You might get eaten by a wolf. You never can tell. I’d rather get eaten by a wolf than spend another day staring at a phone. I know that for sure.

I started the day at Birnamwood Road. I felt good, warm in my dry clothes despite the cold rain. I had on a trusty wool Filson jacket that’s kept me dry in plenty of storms. Despite the weather, the day had a nice feel to it. It’s hard to explain this, other than to say it’s some kind of fishing sense, something in the air or something in how the bottom of the river feels against your boots. I caught some fish right off the bat and lost a very good one who snapped my fly off.

The rain kept getting heavier, and so did my wool jacket. Soon I was shivering, but I kept pushing on. It was that feeling I described earlier, that feeling that something good is going to happen on this day. It got harder and harder to proceed upstream, due to both my shivering and the thickening vegetation covering the river. This stuff can really test your mettle; climbing over and under fallen trees in the river just breaks my spirit.

About the time I was ready to give up, I heard what sounded like bowling balls being dropped into the river. This sound was coming from 10 yards upstream, a spot I couldn’t see through the fallen trees. It occurred to me that the sound could be fish rising, but if it were, those fish would have to be big and rising recklessly, probably eating big flies off the surface. This seemed unlikely on several levels, particularly for those wary brown trout, but it was a nice thought.

Once through the trees I saw something nearly fictional. Rising trout everywhere I looked. Big browns and brook trout making total fools of themselves to devour mayflies the size of tennis balls. It was a parade of mayflies marching downstream to their abrupt deaths in the jaws of trout.

I caught several trout, including the one pictured below, whom I will never forget. He was bigger than the picture suggests, just as they always are. I might have fished my way to full-blown hypothermia had I not run out of the giant flies that headlined the day’s menu.