Fencerows: “Deadfall Bend”
By John Luthens
For my cousin, Bryce: We fight because we have been to the wild places.
I fled towards Deadfall Bend with worry simmering on the backburner of my mind like a kettle of dark soup. In the beginning, the northern interstate sky was purest blue and the southern leaves of Wisconsin held tight to their color upon the trees, but the further I climbed the more the oranges and reds began to lose their luster. When I swung into Hayward, most of the trees were bare and the sky had turned a dull gray. The day seemed at the time a metaphor for life. An early rising sun of possibility and the sky above the limit, but the harder one drives and the further one goes, the further one begins to understand; there ain’t no pot of gold at the end of an autumn rainbow. There are only bare trees and winter looming.
Autumn sunrise along Lakes Superior’s southern shore.
A bell tinkling above the door of the Hayward fly shop; the smell of new rods and freshly minted flies, the smoothness of old wood beneath my feet, treading the worn and wise path of fishermen gone by. I paid 12 bucks and walked out with four flies. Hayward disappeared in the dusk, bumping behind me as I dusted down the back roads, thinking it would have saved me a stop if I’d just thrown 12 bucks out the window. My waders and fly rod case rattled and rolled in the truck bed. It reminded me of bones flopping into wet earth.
Sheltering for the night in Douglas County, clouds lifting and stars coming down with a brilliance that only a northern autumn can muster; I stared at the constellations until my neck stiffened. I breathed deeply the fallen leaf smells, feeling small and inconsequential beneath the cold lanterns of heaven. A coyote barked far off in the night. So many stars, but still my soul felt dark.
Frost crunched beneath morning steps as I started the final leg. North of Iron River the hayfields glistened in the rising sun, peeled barns and abandoned homesteads of Ashland County rising like cemetery monuments from the aspen and birch. My mood lifted gradually with the morning fog from the water as I hit Lake Superior in the harbor town of Port Wing. I’d come as far north as I could get without a boat. It was a pretty morning. Deadfall Bend swung closer and the air was alive with the silvery flash of life. I forced a smile, climbing into the Superior hills to meet the Flagg River.
The Flagg River is a broken sliver in a mirror of tributaries along Superior’s southern shore. From Chequamegon Bay on the Ashland shores, east to the Michigan border and west to Minnesota, it’s a complicated network of water that could never be properly explored in a lifetime. Steelhead, rainbow, brooks browns and salmon, rampant in the spring, tailing beneath the dark bank tangles in hottest summer, sliding up the rushing gravel beds to spawn high above in the chilling autumn air. The Flagg is only a tiny piece of water in the greater whole, and Deadfall Bend is smaller yet, only a fleeting shadow. Deadfall Bend is not simple. It is as complicated as life itself.
The Flagg River winds from the Deadfall Bend meadow.
An iron bridge spans a sheltered valley of rising hills. Birch and cut-over pines climb the horizon to stand guard over the valley. The river ropes around a goldenrod meadow that was perhaps a farmer’s field in a long-forgotten age. A deep run stretches upward, cutting invitingly under the bridge, but that’s not how the bend is fished by a solitary fisherman. If there were two, it would be different, one could start at the bridge and fish up while his partner crossed the meadow and fished down. Now, there was only me; a solitary fisherman against the river and the bend and the constant pummeling of the world.
Maybe it is the other way around. Maybe Deadfall Bend is simple and the rest of the world is complicated. I rigged up in healing silence, taking it all in.
Crossing the morning with milkweed fluff floating in the air, hanging from a branch to slide down a clay bank and enter the head of the bend; It was darker below, mysterious, comforting. Willow and oak and cottonwoods leaned. Countless have succumbed to time and the harsh Superior winds, falling to become a part of the river itself. Autumn sunlight pierced the leafless tunnel and slanted into the iron-stained water like arrows. I waded methodical; stepping and ducking the deadfalls one foot at a time, studying the shadowed water carefully to avoid stepping into the deep runs and mucking up the holes, aiming stone-fly nymphs and night crawlers over the logs and beneath the overhung banks.
As I wound the bend it became increasingly difficult to remember the worries that drove me to distraction. I lost many flies in the brush-hole tangles and was properly thankful for buying the four extra flies in Hayward. They were no longer valued in dollars alone. Dollars no longer mattered. I fished slowly, and with every step I forgot the harsh drum of life. And with every step I remembered olden days on the bend.
Blending into the wilds of Deadfall Bend.
I took my biggest brown from a pool that was now silted. The deep run where I once battled a half-hour with a steelhead trout was still dark and mysterious with promise. I saw my son catch his first rainbow in a bubbling riffle that forever seems timeless, and I once watched my father take a limit from beneath a single log that has long since washed away.
I passed those landmarks, log by log and step by step, fishing and fighting for what might come, not worrying now about limits and size. I was alive on Deadfall Bend. Today, that seemed most important.
John Luthens is a freelance writer from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com or by contacting the author at Luthens@hotmail.com