Big Water

Our trip back to South Dakota this summer brought back memories of a long ago summer when I fished from the shore for northerns and caught enough of them that I was a hooked fisherman. Hooked enough that I bought a Fish-‘N’-Float outfit in Chicago that would allow me to fish out on the big water instead of just from shore. By “big water” I mean the Oahe Reservoir, one of the bodies of water created by the dammed Missouri River. And I don’t mean “damned,” although that muddy river that gave my hometown its name, Mobridge, was often damned whenever the winter ice would break up and then the old Mo would flood the land along its banks. Or damned whenever one of our young citizens close to swim in it and go down never to be seen again. When I was a boy, I used to fish the river with throwlines from the shore, but never to swim in it, catching a wild variety of fish, most of which were inedible—carp, sturgeon, eel, suckers, shiners, something we called golden-eyed herring, catfish, bullheads. And after the river was dammed at Pierre, a hundred miles to the south of Mobridge, we had a body of water with over two thousand miles of desolate, uninhabited shoreline. I used my Fish-‘N’-Float outfit, a truck innertube inside a canvas sleeve with a seat in the middle, several times when we returned to Mobridge for summer visits, always hoping to latch onto a northern big enough to tow me around, never having such a thing happen. In fact, I never satisfied that old hunger to fish the reservoir, always assuming there would be a time to do it, never doing it. And now that I’m an old unsatisfied fisherman, I think I’d like to buy another Fish-‘N’-Float and try it again, dipping my old, fragile legs into that mysterious water, casting out and reeling in, hoping with each cast that I’d find that big old northern I’ve always dreamed about.