The Bass Hole
By John Luthens
It’s the lazy depths of Wisconsin summer. Dogs lolling in the shade, birds perched silent in canopied fortresses of green. Humidity presses deep and heavy as an ocean of glass and the clouds in the sky are billowed high and stranded like sailboats awaiting a breath of wind.
Basking in the silent sights, I drive towards the edge of town and squish from heated blacktop towards a farm turnout along a dusty country road, leaving my air-conditioned vehicle behind to bake in yellow waves of reflected fields and heat-wave mirages. The bass flies hanging from my fishing vest are wilted like the summer daisies and the gears in my fly reel are sticky and hesitant to turn. The clock of the summer season has stopped dead in its tracks as I wind towards the bass hole.
The wood lot surrounding the bass hole is sleeping away the afternoon like the rest of the outdoor world. Chest-high ferns, hidden deadfalls, and blackberry bushes with early pods of green surround the shore. Cottonwood trees have dropped their white blooms on the edge of the pond. I’m sweating beneath the branches and using the tip of my fly rod to stir the cotton into snow drifts across the water.
Minnows nip the surface, investigating the falling white strands, disappearing back into the green water disappointed with the offering. Leaning against the rough bark of a cottonwood trunk and resting in the shade, stringing up my rod slowly and listening to bullfrogs croaking unseen in the reeds; Still too hot, still too early. The sun sparkles like blinding diamonds across the water. I close my eyes and smell the heavy richness of bog mud and pond growth hanging in the air.
I’m stirred back to life by a heavy splash among the lily pads. It sounded like a turtle cannonballed off of a fallen-log diving board, and rings of water are still circling on the pond. The sun is sinking below the trees and settling into the surrounding fields, setting the horizon on fire, turning the fencerows into molten lava. Summer’s clock has begun to shed its lazy doldrum and tick once again. Time for the bass hole to awaken.
Bluegill are beginning to surface with abandon. They are not overly choosy, and I know that they will be fooled by a simple surface popper. Most are stunted and small, but I’m planning to catch a few anyway. It will limber up my casting arm, and I want the disturbance that hooked midgets create when they thrash around in the weeds and splash on the surface. Largemouth bass are like sharks. They’ll cruise into casting range like ravenous torpedoes if they get a whiff of struggling prey.
It doesn’t take much. A handful of small fish caught and released, before dark shadows begin circling through the algae clumps on the bottom. The bass are getting aggressive. One of them takes a swipe at a bluegill that I’ve hooked, and I need to pull the fish in fast to avoid catastrophe. I’ve seen largemouth bass swallow a hooked panfish whole, along with fly. Even in the hottest throes of bass-hole summertime, it makes for a frigidly unethical blood bath.
Switching to a gaudy, bass-sized fly, I roil the water and immediately strike a fish. Fly line strips out with a ratcheting hum and stretches across the pond. Mosquitoes land on my arms like miniature vampires, but I’m too engrossed in my battle to pay them any mind. When I play the bass into the shallows and grab him by the jaw, I pluck loose the fly and heft a solid two pounds into the setting sun.
I hook another, and then another. Some roll themselves into the bottom weeds and pull like tugboats, while others leap into the air like acrobats, spraying rainbows of pond water into the coming twilight. I don’t bother switching flies until the hackle is nearly gone and the shank on the hook begins to straighten out and resemble a sewing needle.
The day fades into shadows. Lightning bugs begin dancing in the fields, and a solitary deer paces nervously from the tangles to drink from the pond. Reeling in and breaking down my rod, I watch the sky as the constellations of the summer brighten above.
The heat of the day gives way to the cooling mists of full-blown night, the pond wavering for a moment longer in the humid gloom. I’d crawled to the bass hole like a desert wanderer in search of an oasis, but as it disappears completely into the ghostly fog of summer’s splendor, I dance away with enough bass to satisfy the urge straight into winter.
John Luthens is a freelance writer and photographer from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com., and his upcoming collection of short stories, Writing Wild: The Tales and Trails of a Wisconsin Outdoor Journalist, will be available from Cable Publishing this autumn.