When I was in college I had a rod and reel but otherwise considered the fishing opener in the manner of a kid watching a train pass by destined for a better place. This was in Morris, in west-central Minnesota, not a walleye hotbed. To top things off, I drove a '57 Buick with a Dynaflow transmission that engaged sometimes long minutes after being shifted into "drive." SUVs hadn't yet been inflicted upon the motoring public, but this was my best shot in that direction.
One year, on opening day, three friends and I decided to fish from shore a lake with rumored walleye credentials. We split the cost of a dozen worms and a bucket of minnows and arrived at our destination amid threatening rain, a downer in literary terms. For a few hours a couple of us cast into the suspect lake using baited small jigs hanging beneath bobbers. Our other technique involved the same setup, minus bobbers. In well-worn angling terminology, the action was "slow." Still we were outdoorsmen, an important accreditation to us, notwithstanding our multiple backlashes.
Except for two bullheads, we caught no fish.
Having nothing else to do, and having long since learned that time passed glacially in Morris, we took a circuitous route back to town. With a curb weight of 4,100 pounds and a 122-inch wheelbase, the Buick, once up and running, was a real floater, a consummate platform, and the countryside, with its plowed-black fields, trees just then leafing out and mallards pairing in dank wetlands, rolled along through the sedan's windows like a picture show that meant something, though in true academic fashion, we never did figure out what.
Meandering slothfully, we eventually passed the Pomme de Terre River and a dam there that was a known weekend hangout for the kegger-happy among our UMM brothers and sisters, especially those who by then had lost all hope of making the dean's list or any other list, save perhaps most wanted.
This was when we saw three boys, each perhaps 12 years old, strolling along the two-lane blacktop carrying multiple hefty stringers of walleyes, northerns and bass.
"Let's beat 'em up!" one of my friends cracked.
Sporting option that this suggestion was, I chose instead to back off the Buick's foot feed as we approached the anglers from behind, rumbling soon cool as cucumbers to a smooth stop alongside the heavily laden fishermen.
"Guess they were biting, huh boys?"
"You could say that," the bigger boy said.
"He just did say that." This was my friend who made the crack about beating the boys up.
"Huh?" the bigger boy said.
"Forget him," I said. "We were fishing, too. Caught a couple. But nothing like that. Guess we should have fished the river. What did you catch 'em on?"
For a long while the boys looked only at each other and alternately at their feet, unsure whether to divulge their angling confidences.
Finally the bigger boy shrugged.
"Caught 'em," he said, "using a 40-foot minnow seine."
