Not long ago, as I was watching Beat Bobby Flay, the two competing chefs had to cook walleye. Quicker than you can say “Marcel Proust,” the mere mention of walleye took me back nearly 60 years, to the summer of 1968.
(And just to be clear, Proust wasn’t a famous fisherman. He was an early twentieth-century French writer, and in his masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea transported the narrator back to his youth.)
So, the mention of walleye on a cooking show sent me back to 1968 and a fishing trip with my father the summer before I started the sixth grade. Back then, my father worked for Peabody Coal Company, and Peabody had access to a fishing lodge on an island in Rainy Lake, which straddles the border between Minnesota and Canada.
I can remember the timing with some precision because the fishing trip coincided with the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Abbie Hoffman was out protesting as I was catching fish.
While this trip was my first angling experience, my father was an old hand with a rod and reel. He spent some of his childhood on the Jersey shore. When he was about ten years old — the same age I was in 1968 — he was written up in the local newspaper for catching a 75-pound tuna. He cut his teeth fishing in the ocean, but I think he was pretty excited to try freshwater fishing. I know I was excited to go on an adventure with my father.
The trip from Columbus to Rainy Lake required four airline flights on successively smaller planes. Columbus to Chicago to Duluth to Hibbing to International Falls. International Falls had a terminal roughly the size of a three-car garage, and its walls were covered with glamour shots of people posing with fish they had caught. As we drove from the airport to the dock to catch our boat to the lodge, we passed by the cultural highlight of International Falls: Bronko Nagurski’s gas station.
Out on the lake, assisted by local guides, we trolled for walleye and northern pike. Our main target was walleye, which were fat and delicious. The northern pike put up a better fight, but were so bony that we threw them back. Oddly, the best fight I ever got was from a freshwater clam. Go figure.
Every night, after a day on the water, we’d head back to the lodge and feast on the walleye we had harvested that day. They were a treat to eat, but try as we might, we couldn’t consume all of our catch. Happily, the folks at the lodge were able to flash freeze our fresh fish, which gave all of us the chance to take walleye home. Everyone but my father jumped at the chance to fill a carry-on bag with frozen fish. My father was a wise man.
As my father and I were flying home, one of our planes was delayed in Hibbing, due to a burned-out tail light. The newsstand in the terminal was not all that well stocked, but I did manage to find a great little book about the Hell’s Angels. Anyway, it turns out that we were not the only ones in our merry band to encounter flight delays. A couple of days after we got home, my father learned that every single one of our fishing buddies was delayed, which caused them to deposit thawing fish in airport trash cans all across the upper Midwest. I still chuckle at the thought of it.
On the last leg of our journey home, we got a bonus: we sat right across the aisle from Bob Hope, who was heading to Columbus to be the grandstand headliner for the last day of the Ohio State Fair. On our final approach to the airport, we flew right over the fairgrounds which were awash in twinkling neon.
The appearance of walleye on a television cooking show brought back a flood of happy memories that remain vivid nearly 60 years later. More than anything, my walleye memories make me hope that I have helped our daughter make her own happy memories, waiting to be triggered decades from now by some random thing that crosses her path. My money is on the haggis, but that’s a story for another column.