Yoi, Canada

Weeks after I was born, and with Mom suffering from appendicitis along with other sundry complications I caused by being born, Dad took off for Canada to go fishing. My saintly mother must have been too weak to kill him.

All my life I’ve known that there was a time during the summer in which Dad disappeared for a week (or two) to go fishing on some hallowed grounds (or waters?) in the very remote regions of the Great White North. A place so remote that you drove north until the paved roads ended and then you hitched a ride on a freight train for another fifty (US) miles that dropped you off at a (still US) mile marker, not a station, usually at 1:AM.

No phone, no light, no motor car; not a single lux-er-yee. And on his return, he looked like he had just won an “I am so uglier than you!” fight with Robinson Crusoe. I could tell at an instant upon his returns that I may manage to keep all the hair on the top of my head, but any attempt to grow a beard would probably look as if my face had been dunked in glue and then smacked with a three-week-dead possum.

I doubt that Adam had the same relaxed gleam about him after he got kicked out of paradise that Dad always had on his returns. He never talked much to me about his experiences in heaven. He probably learned by then that people of the younger generation wouldn’t understand the joys around and beyond crapping in an outhouse and not bathing for a week at a time. He would have been right. The fishing, however fabulous, would not have normalized that equation for any of us.

He went to this isolated island lake every year with his work buddies commonly referred to as “The Joy Boys”. This name actually refers to the company they worked for rather than the fun they had together. Or so I always assumed. It may just be one of those puns that occur naturally.

Back in the days around when he abandoned the newly-born me (and Mom) to make this annual pilgrimage, he would bring along various and sundry of my elder brothers and cousins. During my more sentient years, I didn’t know him to do this. Perhaps he grew tired of whiney-ass Generation W types that did not see the beauty of crapping in holes and eating fish for an extended time, such as more than once.

The “Joy Boy” generation certainly never had any problem with any of this. Nor did they see anything wrong with “leech removal” as an expected après-bain experience. They drank and fished and played cards. Not always in that order. And everything was finally all right with the world for that period of time when nobody could reach them and tell them to cut it out.

But now we fast-forward 40+ years or so. Many of the Joy Boys no longer make the trip because of various disabilities including, but not limited to, being dead. Now that Dad has crossed the eight-oh mark, Mom (finally) had reservations about him going. I think she was afraid of him dieing while in heaven and thus possibly escaping the judgment he deserved for abandoning her during these trips all these years.

That was when I got the brilliant idea of volunteering to go along with him to make sure either that he didn’t die, or failing that would be there to tell the gods that their judgment should be put on hold until Mom got there to give her side. Mom was cool with this. My brother Hal (not his real name) and my son The Boy came along as additional guarantors.

What we found there, in this more modern era, was that sometimes our cell phones would find a tower willing to charge us pound-me-in-the-ass rates to reach out and touch our voice mail. We found light of the propane, flash, and kerosene varieties. But no motor cars. We were cool with that. There were boats. You can’t fish from motor cars. Well, you can’t troll for fish from motor cars. Well, you probably shouldn’t.

And there were some luxuries added on to the island over the years. A propane-heated water tank allowed us to bathe without leeches. A simple Jedi mind-trick helped you to ignore any spiders. They even had a flush toilet and a generator for recharging the cell phones. Plus, they had a refrigerator that kept the beer about five degrees colder than the ambient temperature. Propane can only do so much I guess.

Oh, and there was a radio that picked up MOR music and occasional weather bulletins. I think it may have been powered by coconuts. Since we didn’t have many of those, we didn’t use it often. We could do without the music and we could tell the weather forecast well enough by looking upwards.

We didn’t have to hitch-hike in by freight train. Apparently the railroad no longer offers that service. Instead, we hired a float plane to fly us in from an outpost on the outskirts of civilization. To the Joy Boys, this was like riding in on a magic carpet (only more expensive). For me, this was 30 minutes of terror (each way). But I have never much cared for the kind of flying in which you actually have to go up into the actual air.

The only other Joy Boy that made the trip with us was Jim. This is not his real name either, but it is the name that Dad kept calling him. Jim didn’t seem to mind. He was the guy who knew how to do everything and still could. And he did. If it weren’t for him, we would have spent a lot of time wondering about things like why our beer wasn’t getting somewhat colder. And bumping into each other in the dark. And he also brought more cigars than we could have ever anticipated needing, but did.

Jim, Hal, The Boy, Dad, and I had a wonderful time there last year. The Boy, being a vegetarian, was not so much into the fishing although he came along on our trolls around the lake and enjoyed himself with reading and not having anyone nag him about anything. Hal also preferred to read rather than troll. I don’t think he had any particular objection to harassing wildlife as much as he has a preference to reading (and not being nagged by anyone) over anything else in the world.

That left Jim and Dad and I to do the bulk of the actual fishing. To my relief, we were seldom interrupted with actually catching fish. I had gone fishing rather a lot as a youth, but not so much for the sport as just to be somewhere with Dad. Dad and Jim were the only ones who seemed to be disappointed with the low catch count. But seeing as how we always released anything that didn’t die from the harassment while in captivity, I failed to appreciate their disappointment.

A great time was had by all. Except, I guess, for that one pike I caught that died during our harassment and in spite of our best intentions to release it back to the wild in a less-dead condition. The whole event was like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie, what with the blood and the hooks and the pliers and all the flailing about the boat. And then there was the whole scene of throwing the semi-corpse into the water and smacking it with a paddle to try and get it to get on with life rather than with what I had dealt it.

The Boy insisted that we at least eat the poor creature. Dad, who is probably the most skilled fish cleaner still breathing, did his best. But as any of you whom may have ever had the experience must know, a northern pike is a fish that flosses your teeth as you eat it. That is to say, it is a creature with teeth on one end, slime on the outside, and bones interspersed with occasional meat on the inside. I did my best to pay respect to my victim and ate as much as I could actually chew and swallow without overly flossing my esophagus.

I trust his spirit made me stronger. I came back to do it all over again the following year. This year. Same cast and crew, except that my daughter Pete filled in for Hal. Pete, also a vegetarian, did put a pole in the water and did catch a fish or two. Sometimes with hilarious results.

She fished for the same basic reason I fished when I was a youth; just to be there to spend time with “Pop”, doing something he loved so very much. And by “Pop”, I mean Dad and not me. She always called Dad “Pop” for some reason. Dad never seemed to mind.