Two Fish Tales Jim Johnson
Emeritus Poet Laureate of Duluth, Minnesota
Old Brook Trout Guys hen I grew up fishing Northern Minnesota brook trout, I met a few old brook trout guys. Marvelous individualists, I thought. I even longed to be one of them. They were old war veterans, now widowed, no kids who ever visited. Perhaps never able to handle the technicalities of domestic life. Or never lucky enough to meet that special woman who would introduce him to the wonders of civilization. These men lived alone so far back in the north woods waiting for that knock on the door of his shack that he may have hoped was a woman as lonely as he was. But was usually some young trout bum, like I was, wanting to talk trout. Eager for trout wisdom. Before one of these old men even opened the door, I was already longing for the ambiance of that rough-hewn cabin. Shelves of bags of sugar, salt, flour. Cans of beans and Arco coffee. On the oil cloth covered table a kerosene lantern. In a corner stacks of Outdoor Life, Field and Stream magazines, and other essential literature. In another corner, books, I was sure included Moby Dick, Thoreau, and Whitman, but too dust-covered to ascertain. And a pot of coffee always on the wood cook stove. This was an old backwoodsman who might have lived his life as a logger until social security set him up on the banks of a Northern Minnesota trout stream with twenty acres, a shack, plenty of popple trees to cut for wood to feed the wood stove, a spring or pump for water, and an outhouse. What more could a man want? He had all winter to read and enough mosquitos to keep him company in the summer. He shot his deer in November and caught trout all summer. This seemed to me to be the only life. And each old man brook trout hero of my youth was happy, happy to see it me, even in his deafness and the greater deafness of the faithful dog at his side, pounding at his door.
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Lost Lake Folk Opera 63
