Floaters and Sinkers

Friends, (this is another exploration essay about my dad and me)

Yeah, that title's a poop reference. Embrace the reference, let the adolescence wash over you in a baptism of Mountain Dew. Think of all the conversations you've had about floaters and sinkers in your life, how many times you've wondered, what exactly makes it float, versus coiled and sunk like an underwater cobra of yesterday's meals. Chances are you'll land on your favorite poop story, everyone has one. Nostradamustache has one about scatting into a broken toliet at the Rainbow foods in Duluth and him imagining how he ruined the day of some poor stockboy. His friend Grace has one about a log she found floating in a public restroom the size of a burrito that she thought could have killed a person because its circumference. I have several poop stories. One of them won't translate to written text (that's the Cole story everybody, and no, that's not what's coming up here). Another one is about my friend Roy crapping down both pants legs as he ran to the bathroom and couldn't get his pants off fast enough. All Roy said when he walked out was, "Well...didn't make it." Then Roy had to drive the 20 minutes back home, with crapped in pants, to get fresh trousers.

But the poop story for me, the one that trumps all, involves my dad and a fishing trip.

We went fishing constantly when I was younger. It felt like every Saturday for a few years running we'd be on Coffeen Lake fishing for crappie and bass. We only used two kinds of bait, either rubber worms or minnows. I preferred minnows, and got fairly good at threading the barbed hook through the minnows gills then out through it's mouth to where the minnows would manage to stay alive for a few casts. Dad used rubber worms, and he was fussy in his rubber worm choice. They had to be purple or this spectacled orange-brown color called pumpkinseed. Other colors, scents, lures never worked as well for him. So we each had our weapon of choice. We would ride out in his boat, a little aluminum Bass Tracker with a 25 horse engine, sometimes early enough where the lake still had fog roiling off the top of it, and hit familar spots in the lake. Points, fallen trees, edges of moss, edges of grass, and a rocky railroad tressel that bissected Coffeen Lake were the only places we fished. The rest of the lake might has well have been dead, because at those points, edges and along that tressel, that's where the bass lie, right where the the dropoff is into deeper water. You just flick that rubber worm up near the bank, and reel it in slow, and if you lure one to bite, it'll tease you a bit, so you'll have to play with it, reel in a little more, let it flirt, but once it tugs hard...you got'im. Whip that rod back, set that hook, and fight it into the boat.

Crappie's different. They lie up in the branches and thicket of submerged trees, sheltering themselves from those middle-lake monsters we never toyed with. With Crappie, you have to be gentlewith a regular rod and reel, or use a cane pole, and when the crappie take the bait (typically minnows) you just lift them out of the water. No fight, no muss. Not to say there's no flirtation like with the bass because lift the hook too soon, you lose them. Too late, they swallow the hook. Too hard, you rip their paper-thin mouths. Too soft, it'll suck your minnow right off the hook. You have to do it just so and you could have a live well full of them, and man do they fry up good.

That is what we did, every Saturday, for years. It got to a point where we fell into perfect sync prepping the boat for our trips out, early in the morning. It's hard to recall exactly what I did right now, but I know if tomorrow my dad and I went fishing, I would fall into that routine like instinct. I remember a conversation my dad had with one of his friends once about our fishing trips, and his friend said, "Yeah, it's good now, but he'll find girls and all this'll end." My dad just nodded and I said, "That's not true. I like this too much." How much did I like it? My senior year, well past the time when girls should have been forefront in my mind, I had the word "Fishing"carved into one side of my class ring with a bass jumping out of a water. I was in it deep.

Another routine we had, was my dad's pre-launch bathroom break. Like a compulsive dog needing to mark his territory, he'd piss on his truck tires or into the trees near where we parked, or if we had to lauch from the fancier boat dock in Coffeen, he's use the outhouse. It was a legitmate outhouse where you could see the mound of shit that had congealed in the pit dug underneath, hear that wet slap your contribution (solid or liquid) and on hot July days, it smelled every bit as bad as you can imagine. Thankfully, we rarely used that boat dock, preferring to launch from the dirt and mud ramp on the other side of the lake. Also, during the trip, he'd have to piss at least once, so we'd pull into a cove and I'd keep watch as he pissed off the front of the boat into the lake. Then, when we left, invariably, another stop to pee. Somtimes though, he'd head off into the woods a piece to shit, since squatting in the gravel parking lot would be awful.

I always hated going to the bathroom while fishing. I can't say I fully understand why, but I didn't like peeing in public, especially shitting in public. It's something I prefer not to do today unless it's urgent enough to cause an accident. So if I had to pee, or god forbid, poop while on a trip, I usually toughed it out until I could get home. Sometimes I was able to, sometimes not. One time in particular, I could not, and it was the worst of all deeds.

I had been holding onto the urge for some time, doing my best to surpress, and get that satisying stomach gurgle of a job withheld, but this time...nothing was going to work. My dad noticed, and pulled the boat into a cove and demanded that I get out and take care of business. Where he pulled the boat over, there was a dirt point, but in order to get further inland for some sembalance of privacy, I would have had to scale this small rooty cliff that the water had eroded from the banks years ago. I was not agile, especially in that moment of need, so I had to make due without a bush or tree or any kind of prop. I had never done something like that before, and I haven't done it since. I was ill-prepared for this, let alone my own psychosis about relieving myself in public restrooms. But, what could I do? Dad literally had yelled at me, so not going wasn't an option. He was my lookout, and I'll spare you the details, but while I crouched and released, my prevailing concerns were for it not to splatter onto my socks, or fall back onto the pile. Fishing lost some appeal that day.

The real bathroom story isn't one of my own embarassment, but my dad's. This came years later than my horribleness, and not at Coffeen. We had heard that a lake further north, a place called Little Lake Nelly, had the state's largest bass in it, so we had to check it out. The lake was substantially different than Coffeen. Little Lake Nelly was surrounded on all sides by trees, and it felt somewhat like a suburban lake, while Coffeen was a cooling source for a power plant. But, fish are fish, and they congregrate in only a few places: points, edges of moss, edges of grass, and fell trees.

He trolled our way into a cove and we fished, but nothing was coming. He cast and recast without so much as a nibble, and I was drowning minnows with my attempts. Then he looks at me and tells me has "to go." It's an urgent "to go" as well, so it was going to happen in that cove. He guided the boat towards the shore, but there was too much brush and too thick with moss to get actually get the boat ashore without getting our propeller's tangled in the muck. So, Dad asked me to keep watch and I say okay, but before I turn, I notice him unbuttoning his jeans,

"What are you doing?" I said,

"I gotta shit," he said, undoing his pants.

I said, "But how are you going going to do that?"

"Just watch for people, goddamn," he said.

I swivled in my chair to watch for people, and after awhile, I peeked over my shoulder to see if he was finished, but he wasnted. He was sitting on the edge of his side of the boat, bare ass hanging off the side, nearly touching the water, and holding onto his seat and the rail of the boat, hoping not to fall back into his mess. I looked back into the open lake and felt embarassed. I couldn't believe he would shit in a lake, especially like that. It was so foolish and desperate, and I wanted to leave immediately to escape this shame. He finished, and we half-heartedly finished fishing that day, and inside I was fuming he would do such a thing.

When we got home, I told mom all about how dad shit in the lake, and she laughed. But I wonder now if that sort of embarassed anger was what Dad felt when he yelled at me to shit when I had to on that point. What's more embarassing, the act shitting or denying yourself that function of the body?

---end for now. I could puzzle over this for a while longer, but it's late.

VIVA EL MUSTACHE!