And Fishing Too

Mulak Reader - ...AND FISHING, TOO.

Writing stores that contain memories of being a little boy is always as much fun for the writer as (hopefully) the reader. Here’s one that qualifies. Since it was about Quabbin reservoir, it received a lot of local press when Sports Afield used it in the April 1986 issue.

"...AND FISHING, TOO."

"I wish that guy who sold me this rig was fishing with us this morning... He'd damn well WALK ashore."

Henry Mulak

(Muttered while un- tangling a bird's nest on a new reel).

There's a place in central Massachusetts where the state built a dam fifty years ago and flooded out a bunch of little towns in order to provide a water supply for the city of Boston. They took over all the surrounding land that made up the reservoir's watershed, too. In the years since, the area has come to represent a wilderness preserve, where everything isn't allowed (The signs read "No hunting, trapping, camping, hiking, picnicking, or trespassing". It's always fun to stop and read them, because no one can resist the temptation to invent new forbidden items as you go along. "It says, 'No hunting, fishing, camping, bird watching, tree climbing, teeth picking, leak taking...") The only way an ordinary citizen can get into the place is via the one thing they do allow; you can fish on the main body of water.
          Ah, but the fishing is what Quabbin is all about.
          Fishermen from miles around line up at the three access gates before dawn each morning, trailered boats in tow, and the overheard conversations in the dark stillness are invariably of rigs and baits and depths and water temperatures and, of course, the fish: Lake trout and rainbows and walleyes and largemouth bass. For those who live in the western part of the state, Quabbin reservoir is to fishing what Uncle Josh is to pork rinds. It's a standard of excellence, maybe not the one best, but certainly everybody's idea of top drawer. It is the most heavily fished body of water in Massachusetts. (The swan boat pond on Boston common is the only possible exception.) There aren't any sailboats or water skiers or racing boats—they're not allowed. You can take a canoe to see the scenery, but the place is so big and the fact that you are forbidden from stepping ashore makes the place less than "sightseer-friendly". Quabbin is for fishing, and whether the fishing is any better or worse than other places is something I'll leave to those for whom that sort of argument is important. It's enough to say that for years Quabbin was what fishing was all about for my dad.
          When I was a kid, I thought so, too.
          There are still a few heavy-duty terms that can bring back the bone-chilling dawns, trolling while the outboard vibrated my dental fillings and my brain loose: terms like lead-core line and Davis spinner and laker, and one that seems innocent enough but still socks me every time: shiner bucket.
         My father was enamored with terms, too, but for him the terms were walleye and rainbow and big-laker (one word). The accepted way of catching walleyes and rainbows and big-lakers was by trolling, so we trolled. Now, I want you to understand that I've got nothing against trolling or people who troll, but when you're a seven-year-old kid, it's just not the sort of thing to keep your attention for very long. Eventually, one or the other of my brothers and I would end up punching each other. My father would shut off the motor and would say, "All right, youze kids don't wanna fish no more, pick up an oar—the both of youze—now start oaring."
          You can't get very far away from an angry father in a 12 foot boat, and dad could use his fishing rod like a buggy whip to get your attention. So we'd oar.
          Dad would get out his casting rod and work the shoreline while we sullenly rowed, certain that we were abused children. Once I recall he hooked one while I was doing galley slave duty. He was using a yellow plug called a Van Spook that was a little smaller than a three cell flashlight. We nearly tipped the boat over trying to see what had taken his lure, but when the fish showed himself I felt like the guys in the cartoons when the whale surfaces under their boat. This was something big.
          When dad finally netted the thing and brought it aboard, it turned out to be a monster of a three-foot pickerel. They're usually sleazy sort of fish, hanging out in the weeds and lily pads, but this one was caught in deep water off a rocky ledge. I was barely three feet long myself then, so it seemed all the bigger—a prehistoric looking thing, with more teeth than my whole family, including the dogs. I couldn't find a place in the boat far enough away from that fish.
          It was several more years before I let myself trail my hand in the water again as we trolled. I kept imagining that mouthful of teeth just below the surface. In the more boring moments, I stuck to fooling around with the minnows in the shiner bucket. Or, I'd investigate my father's tackle box.
         Compared to Dad's old green metal "fishin' box", the plastic affairs they sell today are cheap imitations. It was as big as a steamer trunk, (Well, maybe a medium sized two-suiter) and had not only two triple rows of accordion-hinged drawers, but was as full of nooks and crannies as any roll-top desk. It held a fascinating array of tackle, tools, and genuine junk in which someone more erudite than I might have read a history of the fisherman who was my father. There were some lures that must have been one-of-a-kind items. Dad had a silver spoon in there with three red plastic jewels set into it. It was bigger than most of the fish we caught. He had rubber frogs and old jars with pork rinds and there was a nifty hair bass bug that looked like a mouse. He never let me use it. (I've got it in my tackle box now, and my kids are as fascinated by it as I was.)
          But it wasn't just fishing stuff in there. There were things like odd-shaped pliers and patch kits and I remember he kept a big magnet for some reason I never fully understood. Old pieces of newspaper from before I was born lined the drawers and compartments. Rummaging around in there was like digging through some interesting person's attic.
          "Hey, Dad—Did you ever catch anything on this?"
          "Naw. That's a lure Bobby Pumpquist left in the boat one time. Put it back before you hook yourself on it."
          "Last time I asked you, you said you caught a muskey on it once at Lake Champlain when you were with Kid Louie."
          "That was last time. Now put it back."

          Quabbin was a wonderful place to be a kid, especially a kid from the suburbs who had more than just a passing interest in the outdoor stories in Boys' Life. When the state wanted to reintroduce wild turkeys, Quabbin, an honest-to-goodness wilderness area, was the logical place they chose to start. There were nearly always deer to be seen, and the ever-fascinating poetry of barn swallows in flight. There were herons in the shallows and mergansers with their young and families of Canada geese and turtles when the sun chased the chill off the water. And eagles. Being a certifiable wilderness, there were and still are several pairs of bald eagles at Quabbin. Not many, but everyone that goes there is sure they see them. Of course, nobody ever sees a red tailed hawk or a vulture at Quabbin. If it soars, it has to be an eagle.
         The place itself is an endless source of amazement: There are coves and inlets and passes that lead to other coves and inlets, and several open bodies of water who's dimensions are measured in miles. There are old roads that run into the water and then back out again, and in some places where the pavement hasn't given out below, a boater can follow the road's clear path into the middle of a weed bed. Stone walls cling to hillsides in what were once pastures but have since been flooded over. Follow a wall where it goes into the water, and if you look over in the right place you can see it below the boat, ten feet down. There are rock ledges that were once sheer hillside cliffs, and deep water where rivers flowed in valleys not so long ago.
         A few years back, using a topo map that only showed the water surface and none of the flooded terrain, we navigated to the deepest spot using the map markings for the present day town boundaries. The boundaries are the old river courses. My father was a non-believer until he saw an extra 30 feet of dry anchor line go over. The two lakers I pulled up that day remain the biggest fish I've ever caught in fresh water.
        When I was a kid, the biggest size outboard allowed on Quabbin was 10 horsepower. As a result, there was a constant market for old motor cowlings that said Johnson 9-1/2 or Evinrude 10 on them. People would somehow fit these old covers over the big motors that were needed if they were to get where they wanted to be on the big water without spending all morning getting there. Dad had a 5-1/2, but boats would fly by us doing 40 knots, planeing along and hardly leaving any wake, and everyone wondered how they managed to go that fast with that old beat-up Merc. The fact that the motor had eight spark plug wires sticking out of it never seemed to matter, 'cause it said 10 horsepower plain as day right on the side.
          Dad had a bunch of fishing buddies back then; Joe Metnick and Herb Beeler and Uncle Hank and Girard Ford, but the most memorable was a man who worked in the shop with Dad named Walt Stewart. He had several grown-up children of his own, and in retrospect, he had an inordinate amount of patience with his fishing partner's sons. After many investigations, I concluded that his tackle box wasn't equal to my Dad's, but it finished a close second: In there, among other things, he had a small folding gaff.
          At times, against the chill, my Dad and Mr. Stewart would bring along a jug—nothing serious, just something to keep the fluids flowing. On the particular early spring day I recall, the evaporation rate must have been fairly high, because even a little kid like me could see how quickly the level in the bottle of Southern Comfort was receding. And, looking back, it was cold: the mists hung low and thick, and the surface of the water was like oil.
          Mr. Stewart was changing lures, tying on a Flatfish of a size designed to catch medium sized tuna. (In an article like this, a writer can only mention a lure by name if he has something good to say about it, so let me state here that I've always thought Flatfish really looked good, even though I've never actually known anyone who has caught anything on one. But every tackle box has several. I especially like the ones that have two pairs of treble hooks on little extension wires. I guess someone must have thought that a second fish might want to hit that lure while a first was being reeled in, and all those extra hooks might come in handy.)
          After adjusting his glasses several times, Mr. Stewart finished tying the elaborate knot and set the big Flatfish on the boat seat next to him while he reeled in the slack in his line and cast out toward the ledge we were following. He assured me that the special knot was needed for the lunker he was about to catch. I guess he thought it was about time he tried out his gaff after all those years of carrying it in his box.
          Then I noticed that the Flatfish was still on the boat seat and called Mr. Stewart's attention to that minor fact with all the subtlety you'd expect from any 9-year-old boy.
          After a moment's consideration, he threw the Southern Comfort bottle toward the shoreline, closed his tackle box and sat with crossed arms for the remainder of the morning while my father unsuccessfully tried to stifle his laughter.

I almost caught a big rainbow there one time. From the time I was 10 up until I was 13 or so, my father went through his walleye period. The state was releasing thousands of walleyes in Quabbin in an attempt to establish that species there, and my dad read everything he could find about them and bought special rigs for them and fished almost exclusively for them. To the best of my knowledge the total number of walleyes he caught at Quabbin was zero.
          On this particular day, after another fruitless morning of trolling for walleyes, Dad was bottom fishing for walleyes in a deep cove. I was bored silly, and put on a bobber and a glob of night crawlers. The odds of catching a monster trout on such a less-than-subtle rig are about the same as getting hit by a meteorite on Groundhog Day, but it happened. As luck would have it, I still had a twenty pound test leader on the end of my trolling rig, having been too unconcerned to change it off, so I was able to horse that lunker right up next to the boat in about as much time as it takes to tell about it. If I had played the fish and allowed him to tire himself out, Dad might have been able to net him, but try telling that to an 11-year-old kid who can already see his picture on the outdoor page of the Springfield Union holding a fish so big that his arms are sagging.
          How big?
          Well, how big a fish would it take to impress you? Would you believe me if I said that on four or five tries, Dad couldn't get him into the big long-handled boat net? I didn't think so. The trout was fighting so hard that he would slam the net away each time Dad went to scoop him up, and he was too big to fit in sideways. After a few seconds the line parted.
          End of fish story.
          But to this day, whenever I tell someone about that incident I feel like the guy who really did leave his wallet in his other pants. Fishermen have a reputation for stretching the truth, but in this case only the exaggerations are true.

When I started writing about Quabbin, I vowed I'd stay away from statistics on how big the place is and how many fish are caught there and the like. Nobody cares, anyway. But there are some stats that I can't keep out of the story: From 1951 to the present, the total number of things lost in the water and the surrounding bushes at Quabbin by people who's last name is the same as mine comes to:

·        724 lures and spinners,
·        207 hook-line-and-sinker rigs,
·        1441 yards of assorted fishing line,
·        18 bottles/cans of beverage placed in water for cooling & believed to have been stolen by mischievous fish,
·        8 pairs of sun glasses,
·        One entire rod & reel (see below list of "really big ones hooked but not landed")
·        Two sneakers. (Actually, it was just one. The other one was thrown in as a reply to my brother's question of, "Well, dummy, what are you going to do now with just one sneaker?")
During the same time period, we collectively drowned
·        2008 nightcrawlers
·        339 garden variety worms (Obviously, nightcrawlers were always the 'bait of preference'.)
·        981 shiners martyred, (311 unused shiners were released on their own personal recognizance)
While getting a grand total of:
·        4322 nibbles
·        297 fish hooked but not landed
·        362 "really big ones" hooked but not landed (includes all of the above 297 plus 65 inanimate and unyielding objects hooked on the bottom while trolling)
·        141 pounds of aquatic vegetation, and
·        three turtles

I like to take my daughters to Quabbin. They seem to see the same things there that I look for, maybe because fishing is something we do incidental to a day on the water. We bring binoculars and a picnic lunch and suntan lotion as well as our fishing rigs. Both daughters can cast a mean bass plug now, but, like me, they haven't lost touch with the idea that since we're just fooling around, an eight inch bluegill is as much fun as a three pound bass. Fish only arrange themselves on a totem pole of descending importance in the eyes of serious fishermen, or those who'd like to be serious fishermen.
          It wasn't so long ago that I had my hands full keeping their hooks baited while they caught pumpkinseeds.
          "Daddy, my bobber sunk."
          "You've got a fish on. Reel in."
          She'd crank the handle on the all-plastic Zebco rig until the little bluegill was eyeball-to-eye with the end of the rod.
          "What do I do now, Daddy?"
          Fishing's fun. But the turtles are as much a part of Quabbin for them as the fish are, and the swallows and kingfishers and the deer that stand and look curiously out at the boat. And, of course, the eagles.
         But they see, too, that Quabbin represents a world that doesn't know or care about their world of teenage fashions and diet Pepsi and MTV. And I hope they know which of the two is the more important.

There are countless other impoundments around the country, places where other fathers take their children to catch fish and marvel at a wilderness where the waters are unlittered by non-returnable bottles and Styrofoam cups and the vistas contain only the hills and the sky.
For a non-fishing fisherman, going to a place like Quabbin becomes a manifestation of a primordial urge. It's the same urge that causes him to hang prints of Francis Golden's watercolors in his office and to turn down the heat in his home and build a log fire on the hearth.
It's sometimes difficult for him to remember that man and his doings make up an artificial world, and that underneath the asphalt and concrete the real world is still there, sustaining and growing and renewing itself. And that he, too, for all his arrogance and worldliness, is just another of nature's many children. Quabbin is there, because sometimes a man has to go see for himself.

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This site was last updated 09/20/06