Earl G. Vines
(Jan. 1889 – Oct. 1958)
Fishing the river one beautiful September day
Before his grandfather’s 70th birthday,
The boy asked him, “Grandpa, what is the purpose of life?”
“There are four,” his grandfather said.
“To love, to live, to love to live, and to live to love.”
He was standing up in the back of the rowboat throwing the Jitterbug toward the shore. The boy was rowing. It was a cold, cloudy, windless day in July, and the surface was gray and flat calm. They were close to Blueberry Point on the edge of the drop-off. Their cabin was just down the cove, behind the tall pine which served as a landmark. This was Otsego Lake in upper Michigan but still in the Lower Peninsula, but in the pines and the birches and the maples. As a boy, and even today, this was his lake, his cabin.
“Grandpa, be careful standing up like that,” the boy said. “You should sit down and cast.”
“I’m alright,” he said. “I can cast farther and see the bass rise easier.” And with that, he stepped back into the minnow bucket and went over the back of the boat. It happened fast. The boy ran to the back and looked over the edge and into the hole his grandfather had left. The boy watched him vanish into the clear depths of the lake. The hole filled in, and the surface flattened again. Everything went quiet except for a few wheeling gulls. Leaning over the transom, seeing only his own reflection, the boy remembered his grandfather telling him once that he didn’t trust water and wasn’t a risk taker in water because he couldn’t swim. The water had sucked him under like a giant whirlpool. The boy thought he was gone. Then the surface exploded. The depths spit his grandfather back out, and he popped up like a red and white bobber, sputtering and blowing. His rod was still clenched in his hand and his cigar between his teeth. On his head still perched his red leather hunting cap. He threw the rod in the boat and the cigar in the water and climbed back over the edge. Soaked, he said nothing and cast from the same exact spot in the boat, directly in front of the minnow bucket.
His grandfather was his mother’s father. He was a big man, but not huge by today’s standards, about 6 ft. and 200 pounds, semi-balding, with very brown, leathery, outdoor skin. With his job as a sewer surveyor for the city of Columbus, Ohio, and his passion for the outdoors, especially fishing, he got a lot of sun. He had diabetes but he cheated with an occasional Payday and 7 oz. Pepsi in a bottle. He was very strong and gave an air of quiet confidence. Perhaps because his job took him into sewers with rotten water and because of his inability to swim, the boy didn’t believe his grandfather had a love affair with water, but he needed it to sustain him.
The River is the Mohican River, about two hours from Columbus, toward Northeast Ohio and Cleveland. The fishing trips were usually on Saturday, but rarely Sunday, because his grandfather always had to take his grandmother to church, to which he, too, was reasonably devoted. The boy believed that his grandfather believed it complemented his primary religion. If they did go fishing on Sunday, it would be to the upper reaches of the Olentangy River, just north of Columbus. Sometimes Columbus cousins would go along, but they were not really fishermen, and they would get bored in about 5 minutes and wander off. Two male cousins from Chicago loved to fish and they go along when they were in town.
When they went to the Mohican, the boy stayed Friday nights at his grandparents’ home. It was always still dark when they got up on Saturday morning. The grandmother would get up to make breakfast, but she would rarely say anything unless someone asked her a question. They always had eggs sunny side up, bacon and Wonder bread to for sopping up the yolk and bacon grease. Once she threw a frying pan at him. She missed by a mile from very close range, so her poor aim was more than likely intentional. It was tense that morning in the kitchen. One time she went fishing to the Mohican with them but stayed in the car because of all the poison ivy and insects. By noon she was lying on the front seat swatting mosquitoes and flies and saying she was ready to go home after lunch. She always packed the same lunch of bologna and cheese sandwiches on Wonder bread, along with carrots, celery, an apple and two chocolate chip cookies all wrapped in wax paper. The Grandfather wasn’t happy about leaving the river before dark.
Around dawn they left the house, and usually stopped to pick up Brownie. Brownie lived in a small house in the country, directly on their route to the river. The Grandfather fished a lot with Brownie and sometimes Whitey. Brown and White were their last names. Brownie was about the same height as the grandfather, but gaunter and deafer. Whitey was shorter, pudgier, and quieter than either of them. Usually, Whitey drove over to the house before they left, but Brownie didn’t drive. He claimed it was because his eyesight and hearing were bad. Once on the river, he said he couldn’t hear above the soft ripple of the rapids, but he could when we yelled at him for lunch, or when we wanted to move to a different hole. Strangely, when it was time to leave at dusk, he couldn’t hear us. He obviously shut off his monstrous hearing aids or used his selective hearing. His eyesight was good enough to fill his pipe and see fish in the water twenty feet away or the number of buzzards perched on dead trees 200 yards away.
His hands rested limp by his sides, with the knuckles lightly touching the vinyl plastic covering of the gray back seat of the jet black ’55 Ford Fairlane. It was very early on a Saturday in June, and shafts of Ohio sunlight were beginning to slice through the beech trees and onto Highway 32. Sleep kept pulling at the boy’s eyelids, and for brief moments he could see a smallmouth take the bait and head for the riffles. The tobacco effluent that enveloped the heads of Grandpa and Brownie and collecting on the ceiling, made it impossible to see much of anything outside. The Dutch Masters cigar, tightly clenched between the grandfather’s teeth, was soggy and mashed and long dead, but smoke kept boiling from Brownie’s pipe. Their early discussions could be intense, from Eisenhower and Stevenson to fishing weather conditions and the best holes. Brownie’s hearing aid stared at me from behind his left ear, a robotic reminder of how little he heard once on the river. In the 1950s, people could have heated political arguments that didn’t end in a gunfight. The grandfather and Brownie went to their graves as best friends. If Whitey came along, he sat in the back with the boy. He never contributed much to their arguments or said much at all. He usually just stared out the window, maybe dreaming about getting that huge channel catfish hiding under the log he could never land.
As they approached the Mohican, they first crossed the Walhonding River after passing through the little town of Coshocton. The Mohican is a tributary of the Walhonding. By the time they drove through Coshocton, the car would go silent because just past town began the first of three crucial rituals. As we creeped onto the Walhonding bridge, the three men would open their windows and crane their necks in both directions checking the river color. The first time they did this, the boy thought they were straining to see fish through the murky brown water. If it were swollen and muddy, that was a bad sign, and they drove the remaining distance to the first hole in silence. It meant that it had rained recently, and the fish wouldn’t see the live bait as easily, and we couldn’t see it or them.
Several miles past the bridge was a field of corn between the road and the Walhounding, and on the distant edge of the corn field was an immense dead cottonwood tree. If turkey vultures lined the naked branches, the mood in the Ford seemed to lift and quiet conversation would resume. Whenever the boy asked what the buzzards had to do with fishing, he never got a satisfactory answer. If they were lined up along the branches, it meant good times were ahead, and if they weren’t, it meant they might as well go home, but they never did.
The final ritual appeared to have even less bearing on fishing success or failure than the buzzards did. Close to the first hole and adjacent to the Mohican, was a NO TRESPASSING sign posted on a tree. The men always slowed down but never stopped and just stared at the sign for a few seconds. Nothing was ever said other than maybe a grunt or two, and then they would quietly move on. The grandfather told the boy that once an old farmer had given them an embarrassing tongue lashing when they crossed his land to fish and sent them packing up the river. Perhaps those few seconds of rolling silence were reflective moments of their atonement and momentary guilt for trespassing. Brownie had been a farmer.
The day was getting warmer fast, and the insects were coming alive. Mosquitoes, horse flies and regular flies. Except for an occasional flicker pecking on a dead cottonwood or kingfisher screaming at the chubs in the shallows and the buzzing insects, it was quiet. The softly gurgling rapids didn’t intrude. They rarely saw others fishing.
The grandfather was sitting on a log on the riverbank putting on his waders and the boy was sitting next to him, fixing his rod and reel with a bobber, some lead weights, and a hook. He didn’t have waders like his grandfather, but he did have an old pair of Converses. Waders could be dangerous if you fell in the current with them on. The water was not cold, but it didn’t make much difference because the boy had promised every adult in his life that he wouldn’t wade into water over his knees. Smells of fish and mud and earthworms invaded his nostrils, getting him in the mood. Morning coolness lifted off the surface of the river, waking him up.
“You fish this eddy in front of us,” his grandfather said. “and use a hellie. Are you going to have a problem with the hellie?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” the boy answered, but he was lying. He knew better but didn’t want to admit it. Hellies were hellgrammites which were Dobson Fly larvae. They had huge pincers on their heads and were evil-looking and could be painful if they latched onto your finger. “Why do you like hellgrammites and not soft craws?” he asked the old man.
“Because I like to see you get bit, and their bite is more painful than a soft craw,” he said. The boy knew he was kidding. “I don’t know, just do. Maybe because they hide under the rocks and don’t come out as often as craws, so they are the steak and craws are the hotdog. They are tastier.” He said all this as he put a hellie on my hook.He didn’t believe him at the time about the tasty business because he didn’t think fish tasted food but just gulped it straight down. As a biologist, I know better now. With smallmouth bass, or “smallies,” that’s why you wait awhile before you set the hook. They’re checking the prey out, tasting it in their mouth before swallowing. At the same time, they are moving from the shallows into the current. “Hellies are not risk-takers and stay under the rocks most of the time. Craws are more obvious, flitting around all over the place and easy for the smallies to catch.” That sounded like bologna, too, but I kept my mouth shut. Again. He wrote the Bible of Fishing.
“Are you a risk-taker, Grandpa?” he asked.
“Only when I hunt, then I’m on terra firma. Never, ever, when I fish. I don’t trust water, especially if it’s muddy,” he said.
Friday, October 3, 1958, was a typical, beautiful Ohio fall day.
The boy was pulled out of class by somebody official to tell me that my parents were waiting in the car. Dad was driving his green and white ‘56 Oldsmobile 88 with the hot engine. Staring out the window, his mother said nothing. He thought she was crying but he couldn’t see her face. His father just said, “Get in, son. We’re going home.” On the way home, they told the boy what had happened. When they got home his three sisters, all younger, were there with his Grandma and his mother’s younger sister who lived in Columbus. The third sister, lived in Chicago. Those two were sitting beside each other holding hands, and the small sisters were sitting on the sofa swinging their patented leather shoes, looking bored.
“Damn that man,” the Grandma said, in tears. “Damn Earl. He had three months to his 70th birthday and retirement. Damn him to Hell. He hated his job, he hated his boss, but he loved his boys. They were all young and had a full life ahead of them. But no, he had to sacrifice his to save one of them and he failed. We had so many plans and now we have none.” Grandma was a tiny bespeckled woman with salt and pepper hair. Twenty-four years after Grandpa, at 86, she quietly died in a rest home in a small town outside Columbus. She never regained her happiness or her fiery disposition.
The headlines of The Columbus Dispatch read on October 4, 2 Men Perish in Sewer Water.
When they pulled his body up through the manhole, his hand was frozen in a clinch like a gray claw, as if it was still gripping the arm of Eldon Smith. Grandpa’s red plaid shirt was soaked and clinging to his chest and round abdomen. His once deeply tanned complexion was gray, and he still had the butt of a cigar clenched between his teeth. Eldon had come up first, and they already had him in a black body bag behind the ambulance. They put the old man in a bag and laid him beside Eldon on the hard-packed earth. Then they both were lifted into the ambulance, and the ambulance slowly drove across the dirt to the new cul-de-sac and turned right and was gone.
“Did Earl have anything in his mouth?” Cheney asked. Cheney was the boss and division chief with the city. He had a reputation for not being particularly nice. Every time the boy ever saw him, he was wearing a starched white shirt and black tie and smoking a cigarette.
“You mean besides his ever-present cigar?” Lou said. Lou was a surviving crew member of Grandpa’s crew.
“Not a joke,” Cheney said, “Like algae or mud.”
“I didn’t look,” Lou said. “Probably. He was face-down in that shitty water.”
“Earl hated sewer water because it was usually muddy and loaded with shit and smelled like an un-wiped asshole,” Cheney said. “Most of my employees got used to it, but not Earl. He was not the easiest employee I had, but he was a good surveyor. I don’t think he liked me much. Earl could be a belligerent son-of-a-bitch.”
Lou kept watching his boss waiting for him to say whether he liked Earl, but he shut up after that. It sounded like he thought Earl was a pain in the ass, which Lou knew he could be. Cheney kept dragging on his cigarette, ashes falling on his tie and potbelly, not looking at it until it burned his yellow fingers and he flipped it away. He wore a new black jacket with a City of Columbus emblem in gold over the left pocket.
“What happened, Lou?” Cheney asked, dragging on his Lucky.
“Eldon went down first and was sloshing around in the shit water like he was looking for something,” Lou said.
“Did he have a rope on?” Cheney asked.
“No, he didn’t,” Lou said. “He went down the ladder fast, probably to get it over with. That water stunk real bad.”
“What happened then?” Cheney asked.
“I started down when Eldon flopped over into the water, but Earl shoved me aside, hard, and said it was his job to go after Eldon, that he was the boss.”
“Did Earl have a rope on,” Cheney asked, with emphasis on the word, Earl.
“Nope. And we yelled at him and lowered two from the top. Earl didn’t put one on, and he didn’t tie one around Eldon, either. Then he lifted Eldon on his shoulder and started up the ladder. About halfway, he fell backward with Eldon’s head under him into the water. Their heads were both under. Phil yelled, there’s sewer gas down there, and I’m going down. I said nope, not without a rope you’re not. We couldn’t find the ropes for a few minutes, and Phil went down with one rope tied around him and one loose. We watched and we were scared as hell. He came back up and said, ‘I held my breath as long as I could, but it wasn’t long enough. I turned them both over, but neither were breathing. Earl and Eldon were both turning gray.’ I’m not sure why Phil went down because he knew he couldn’t carry either of them up the ladder. He’s too damned small and I have a bad ticker.”
“His grandson is going to be devastated,” Cheney mumbled.
“What did you say? His son? I thought he had all girls,” Lou said.
“GRANDson,” said Cheney. “Grandson. He came to work with Earl all the time when he had a day off from school, and I think even on days he didn’t have off. Hooky.”
After the two dead men had left in the ambulance, Cheney and Lou and Phil walked toward their Chevy Carryall city vehicle and followed the ambulance. There was, in addition to the tragic untimeliness of Grandpa’s death, a twist of irony to it. A man who probably spent a third of his life in fast rivers and deep lakes drowned in a stagnant foot of water.
That beautiful October day was, and probably still is the worst day of his life. He’d never lost anyone he loved more than the old man. His mother was his oldest daughter and when she died at 91 in 2010, he thought he’d lost him all over again. Fifty-two years later, and her hands were his hands, her laugh was his laugh, and her sun-browned skin was his skin.
The boy’s middle sister was helping their Grandma at her old sink at 441 Brevoort Rd. peeling potatoes with her after the old man had been gone a few years.
“Set an extra place at the table,” the Grandma said.
“Who for Grams?” the girl asked.
“Earl, of course,” she said. “He’s going to show up one of these days.”
Even though he hadn’t heard that story until very recently, as the years have passed since 1958, the boy had a recurring dream every few years, and he wakes up sad, sometimes crying, even as an old man. In that dream, he is in their kitchen on 441, with his Grandma, and the back door opens and in walks the old man.
“Hello, Earl,” Grandma says. “Where have you been? It’s been a long time and you look the same. You really didn’t drown, did you?”
“No, Mary,” he said. “I didn’t.”
“Well, then,” she said. “Where have you been? Were you with another woman?”
“I don’t know, Mary. I don’t think so.” He was carrying his spinning rod and bait bucket. “Maybe fishing on the Mohican.”
Postscript
This story is largely autobiographical. The only consistently fictional aspect is the dialog. Grandpa’s black Ford Fairlane eventually came into my hands in high school after Grandma failed to pass her driver’s test twice. She couldn’t quite master letting the steering wheel fly back after rounding a corner and she smacked into a couple of trees. After the grandfather died, Grandma never regained her happiness. The boy’s love for that Ford never wavered through college until he traded it in on a new ’65 Mustang. When I walked away from the salesman and slid into the driver’s seat of the Mustang, I thought I could smell that unrelenting, less-than-subtle smell of cheap cigars over the plastic smell of a new car.
Before getting rid of the Fairlane, I returned to the Mohican once some years later with Cousin Mike and we did everything according to tradition. We left at dawn, stopped on the bridge, squinted knowingly up and down the Walhonding, checked for the buzzards, but the dead tree was gone, and paid our respects to the rotten NO TRESP sign. The mosquitoes and poison ivy were still present, but the fish weren’t, at least not edible ones. I learned later that a pulp mill had gone in upstream, punishing the Mohican for its cleanliness and generosity for so many years.
Many years later, I was trying to replace a hub cab for an old Corolla we had, and I spotted a black ’55 Ford Fairlane with the back doors ripped off and the front roof crushed but not bad enough that I couldn’t slide into the back seat. Beer bottles littered the floor, cigarette butts everywhere. Strands of hair and blood were imbedded in the windshield. For an instant, I could see the back of two balding heads appearing and disappearing in a fog of blue smoke, with sunlight knifing through the occasional hole in the smoke.
I will never go back to the river. As far as I’m concerned, Grandpa was the Last Mohican.
