Joe McKeever, shock-haired and sardonic, looked us over as we started from camp.
“I wrote you,” he said, “that the ice broke up late. But you hardheads would come anyway. Serves you right. You won’t get anything.”
It was the morning of June 7, 1954 – admittedly early for Ontario’s lake country – and we were going out for walleyes in the teeth of McKeever’s ridicule. But we were accustomed to his ridicule and returned it in kind.
“As soon as we show your guides where the fishing places are, we’ll get ’em,” said Doc.
“We ought to charge McKeever a fee for educating his guides every summer,” jeered Moore.
“Yes,” agreed Gyp. “We always have to feed his camp. He ought to be paying us, instead of the other way around.”
McKeever gave us his customary glance of derision.
“If I let you four go out alone beyond that portage, we’d never find you again,” he said witheringly, “and that’s such a good idea I’ve just got a notion to do it.”
Now this was a gratuitous slur, since we all are old hands at the Lake of the Woods and its smaller sister, Shoal Lake. But we took no offense, any more than he took offense at our gibes. And though a stranger listening might have imagined us bitter enemies, actually the five of us are closest friends.
Shore Lunch by Lee Stroncek.
McKeever, owner and boss of Portage Bay Camp, situated at the narrow peninsula between the Lake of the Woods and Shoal Lake, knows everything about fish and game and people, and is the kind of human porcupine that invents a special new insult for each of his favorite guests every morning. That, in fact, is the one way of knowing how you progress in his esteem. So long as he speaks to you with studied politeness, you are just one of the transients at camp. But if, some morning, he greets you with a barbed blackguardism, you know that you’re in – the camp boss has admitted you to his acknowledged restricted circle of intimates.
The four of us – Doc, Moore, Gyp and myself – have been on insulting terms with McKeever for years, and we consider Portage Bay the finest fishing camp in the entire Lake of the Woods country, though no price could induce us to admit it to him.
“What’s the radio weather forecast?” I asked.
It is not in McKeever to give an answer directly or without a few gibes. “Blizzards. Tornadoes. Hurricanes,” he jeered. “What difference does it make to you? You’re not going to catch any fish.”
But Aileen, Joe’s wife, a slim, pretty and sunny Irish lass, was on the path. “Winnipeg says fifteen-mile winds and scattered showers,” she called smilingly.
We thanked her and started across the Portage to Shoal Lake, where our two boats and motors waited. It was a favorable forecast. Nobody minds a healthy chop on the water, or a little rain. The fish bite rather better than worse for it. Yet none of us knew, least of all McKeever, that he was that day ominously much closer to the truth than either Aileen or the Winnipeg radio weatherman.
Leading the way across the Portage – and fighting mosquitoes furiously as usual – went Moore. His full name is Clayton C. Moore, and he is a humorous, slow-talking Kentuckian, who owns the Golden Maxim thoroughbred racing stables at Louisville, has one of the honored boxes at Churchill Downs, and makes fishing his life avocation.
He was followed along the execrable crooked path through the woods by his boat partner, Gyp Blair, also of Louisville, a genial, smiling man, who runs a sporting-goods business, is celebrated for being able to snore in four parts at once – bass, tenor, alto and coloratura soprano – and has never had an enemy in the world.
My own boat partner was Dr. J. Robert Tolle, a wiry, sunburned cowman with a trim mustache and bowlegs, who calmly chucked a lucrative medical practice in a swank section of Los Angeles a few years ago in order to enjoy life owning and running a cattle ranch in the Siskiyou Mountains of Oregon, with a little hunting and fishing on the side.
As for myself, bringing up the rear of this little procession, I am rotund, on the wrong side of 50, and making a living writing books at my home in Los Angeles. The four of us travel more than 13,000 man-miles each year, just to spend two weeks together in the magical Canadian lake country. And we fish – unashamedly and by preference – for walleyes, usually.
Now we are aware that Sportsmen (with the capital S) affect to look with contempt upon the walleye as a sporting fish, although why this is we do not understand. We comb the sporting journals each month for accounts of the walleyes as a fishing target, but all we ever see are short references to it, heavily fraught with contumely, by those Sportsmen who fish for muskellunge, bass and the like – at least in the published accounts of their deeds of derring-do.
Yet the walleye is a noble fish, a soul-satisfying fish when he comes into the boat, with enough fight if he has size to satisfy any honest angler, and unsurpassed in the pan afterward. As for the Sportsman, I have observed that when he comes to our camp ostentatiously seeking the wily muskellunge, after casting for a couple of days with vainglorious boastings at reefs and islands with little result, he will often sneak out furtively the third morning and relax with the rabble – such as ourselves – in the comfortable and happy pursuit of the rewarding walleye.
Doc, Moore, Gyp and I do not claim to be Sportsmen. That is, not in the romantic conception of the word. We observe the rules of sportsmanship as it is given to us in our poor light to do so. We are not fish hogs, and we use artificial lures, and we do not crowd close to another boat if we happen to see it is having good luck. But we are mere humble citizens, and we troll by preference, and though we gaze with awe upon the Sportsman, we would not trade places with him, for we are too comfortable and happy. Furthermore, we hug to ourselves the belief that we know more about the walleye, which is our specialty, than he does; and usually, when he turns to our fish after failing with his, we manage to bring in the heavier stringers to prove it.
That morning we had decided to fish the extreme northwest part of Shoal Lake, a dozen miles from camp, since in that area streams enter from which the walleyes might be returning after spawning. As we raced across the water, Doc, who was in the bow of our boat, leaned back to me.
“Feel that warm and cold air?” he asked.
I nodded. It was as if we passed through alternate bands of heated and chilled atmosphere, something I had not before experienced. Had we known it, that was an augury of the awesome thing to come.
Beyond Cash Island, with its rocky promontories and pine-clad slopes, we began to troll. I should say here that our remarks to McKeever about “educating his guides” were persiflage. We had two of the best. The guide who ran the boat in which Doc and I fished was Ken Penasse, and performing a similar service for Moore and Gyp was Jimmie Mandamin – full-blooded Ojibwa Indians both, knowing the lake intimately, and expert boatmen and woodsmen.
Penasse throttled down the new Johnson 10-horse motor, which my lovely wife had given me for a Christmas present, to a sweet, purring steadiness through the water – the slow lure is best for walleyes as the fast one is good for northern pike and muskellunge – and our lines went out.
Suddenly Doc let out a yell – a cowboy whoop, shrill and joyful – and it meant fish. Net in hand, Penasse stood up in the boat, looking down into the clear water as Doc fought his fish.
“Walleye!” he announced.
A few dashes by the well-hooked fish, the net dipped, and up came the beautiful, gleaming thing, flashing golden lights, and into the boat.
Doc stood up and yowled his sheer delight for Moore and Gyp to hear. We saw their lines come in and their boat turned toward the reef we were fishing, for walleyes run in schools and the first strike might mean more.
I will not describe the fishing that followed. It was gorgeous. Beautiful fish after fish, we caught them. Each time we chortled at how we could confound McKeever when we displayed our catch that night.
About ten o’clock there was big excitement in the other boat, and a huge fish, hooked by Moore, was netted. A little later Gyp got its mate. Then, just before noon, after a hot battle, Doc landed a mighty fish.
Both boats went to a little island and we disembarked for lunch and to look over the catch. Already we had almost our limits, many in the six- and seven-pound class. Those three biggest ones weighed around ten pounds apiece by my pocket scales – lordly fish, with dark backs and beautiful golden sides, very much worth rejoicing over.
We did rejoice as we ate lunch – bacon, sliced onions, baked beans, coffee, bread and butter and wonderful slabs of golden-brown fried fish – and listened to Moore tell one of his inimitable stories. Yet I remember an odd thing about that luncheon camp. Usually on the lake the air is full of bird song, loons calling across the water, song sparrows and warblers spattering out brilliant arias, wild cries from gulls, and so on. But this nooning the birds were strangely silent.
Once Penasse glanced anxiously at the horizon. “Might blow,” he said.
It did not look it. The sky was almost cloudless.
Our boats returned to the reef to get the few fish to complete our limits, but whereas before lunch the walleyes hit viciously, not a strike did we get after lunch. It was as if the whole show had ended on a silent noonday signal. Penasse shook his head.
Now clouds began scudding across the sky. In an hour businesslike waves were building up. Still no strikes.
“We better get out of here,” Penasse said suddenly and seriously.
Doc and I began to reel in, and in that instant I got the heavy strike I had been awaiting.
“Good boy!” yelled Doc, who always roots for his fishing partner.
The fish hung back like a bulldog, shaking his head and arching the rod, but not breaking water. I felt the boat begin to pitch crazily. Moore and Gyp were under full speed for a distant island. Penasse, sitting erect at our tiller, was gazing out toward the open lake, every attitude advertising haste to be gone.
I glanced back and saw that which made my heart jump. The day had grown suddenly dark and a squall was sweeping toward us. I could see the approaching ominous white line of foam under the blast of wind, and the rain black behind it.
No time now to play my fish. We were right under a sheer cliff of jagged rock, up which the breaking waves already were dashing madly as if to climb it, and the squall was bearing down on us with race-horse speed. Desperately I “horsed” in my fish, actually hoping that the line or leader would break. Still Penasse held the boat against the oncoming waves by increasing the motor speed.
I bought the fish to the side, reached down in the water for a good hold on the line, and heaved it in by main force. Awkward, but necessary. The squall was upon us.
To my surprise the fish was not a walleye. It was a northern pike and not even a very large one. Somehow it had snared itself with the leader after being hooked, which accounted for its hard pull and its actions so resembling a deep-fighting walleye.
As the pike, thrashing and spattering, hit the bottom of the boat, the squall struck us with a screaming wind. Frothing white, the churning waves roared around us as if to engulf us.
Suddenly we were hoisted on the crest of a huge billow and carried backward. The blinding spate of rain almost obscured the deadly rock-toothed cliff and the furious smother of water and foam at its base, but I peered in fascination through the lacing downpour at the disaster toward which we were being hurled.
Not 30 feet from the cliff, the motor, which Penasse had given its fullest wide-open throttle, at last took hold. The boat seemed to catch itself, held its own, gradually fought its way across the back of the wave and down into the trough beyond. Another wave flung buckets of water into the boat, but we gained headway and clawed off the rocks.
On the shore, dimmed by level sheets of rain, trees heaved and bent in the gale. I saw a 40-foot jackpine snap off short. Then another went. Spray beat stingingly in our faces. But Penasse, with wonderful boatmanship, evaded one racing comber after another, and ran behind a small cape that offered shelter in its lee.
There we caught our breath and, though we were wet through, donned our rain garments. The squall roared past. Briefly the sun shone, though the waves still hurled angrily on the shore.
“We better go,” said Penasse presently.
We were on the windward shore, and we could not stay where we were if the storm grew worse. If we were to run for shelter it must be between squalls. Even as he spoke, the sky darkened again with heavier clouds, and the three quarters of a mile of billowing lake between us and the little archipelago of islands that was our first safety looked menacing.
It became infinitely more so. Hardly halfway across were we, when the air filled with the rush of a mighty wind. So viciously did it strike that spray, hitting my cheek, felt like the slap of a hand. Instantly the waves rose ragingly. It was worse than I had imagined; worse, I believe, than even Penasse had imagined.
“Ho, ho, ho!” I heard him say.
It is one of his few expressions, and can mean amusement, or satisfaction, or awareness of a crisis, or even awe.
I saw what he meant. So great already were the billows that our 14-foot boat, when it was in the troughs between them, seemed cut off from the world, hedged in by mountainous waters. But now a series of fearsomely gigantic combers was roaring toward us – seas mightier than any before.
Huge waves come in series – threes, fives or even sevens, so I have been told. I do not know how many there were in this series, but they were immense.
We rose on the first, cutting the crest cleanly with the thrust of the motor but getting a sheet of water over the side, and slid down its foaming watery hill to the trough. The second broke on our bow, hurling water blindingly over us, but again we coasted dizzily over into the trough beyond.
The third sea was the greatest. We did not rise rapidly enough and the angle of the boat was not right for it. I saw the huge wave tower over us, white fanged and malignant, and the sharp nose of the boat seemed about to plunge into it midway below the crest. I said to myself that it would breach us from stem to stern; and an aluminum boat, filled to the gunwales by such a wave while carrying three men, a motor and other heavy gear, would founder instantly.
In the moment before the wave broke, although intellectually I accepted the imminence of death – for no swimmer could live in such a storm – I found, and felt some satisfaction in it, that I was not particularly frightened.
I glanced at Doc, on the thwart ahead. His hawk face turned in profile to me. It was alert – intensely alert – and watchful. But I do not believe it is in him to be afraid. He was only profoundly interested.
Then Penasse, that genius in boat-handling, made his move. He met the crest of the wave not head on, but at a last-second angle. So cunningly timed and aimed was the angle that it did a hairline thing – somehow, at the last possible instant, it offered the bulge of the side of the final toppling crest, yet did not turn sufficiently broadside to be overwhelmed, either by the billow or by the now unbelievable wind that screamed over us.
We shipped water – barrels of it, it seemed. But in some manner we staggered over the crest without foundering, and while we bailed madly, Doc and I, Penasse brought the boat into the lee of the island toward which we had been fighting our way.
Already there, in a tiny cove, were Moore, Gyp and Mandamin, bailing also, their rubber coats gleaming wet. They had experienced a very rough time, too, but being ahead of us had missed the worst of the second squall.
“Good job,” I said to Penasse.
He gave a wintry grin.
The wind, already far beyond gale force, did not decrease this time as it had done before. Instead it rose to a still mightier drumming sound – hurricane fury. Like matchsticks trees began to crack on the island behind which we huddled for shelter in our tossing boats. Three tall poplars snapped off and fell in the water quite close to us as we stared at the white waves roaring past on either side of our little island.
“Look at that!” cried Moore suddenly.
I glanced up and saw the hurricane wind take 40 feet right out of the top of a 60-foot pine on the ridge above. Weighing tons, it did not fall – it sailed through the air like a tumbleweed, directly toward us. For one breathless instant the great trunk with its threshing branches seemed to loom over us. Then, with a foaming crash, it plunged into our little cove, just beside our boats. Had it struck fairly it would have obliterated all of us. The miss was by a few feet only – but it still was a miss, and we were alive.
We looked at each other. Clearly we could not remain where we were. Trees continued to rive and crash, and the only safe place from them on that island was the bare, exposed windward side. Beaching and securing our boats as best we could, we began to struggle up the steep hill to the crest, leaning against the wind at impossible angles and clawing for every foot of the way.
About us trees toppled deafeningly, a confusion of imminent danger. One great birch almost got Moore and Gyp; but the Kentuckians, cool and alert even in this immense hurly-burly, watched it, judged the direction of its crashing fall, and stepped aside just in time to evade it. Mandamin barely escaped a cedar that was uprooted and blown flat. A particularly fierce blast caught Doc and hurled him several feet to the ground. Now Doc is an athletic man, weighing 160 pounds, and no light breeze could fell him.
He scrambled up, unhurt, and a moment later we reached the exposed top of the rocky cliff, which overhung the churning lake to the windward. There we lay flat, hugging the earth, forced by the impossibility of finding any shelter to gaze at the incredibly awesome spectacle of this, the greatest storm the lake ever experienced.
I have known Shoal Lake many years. Its moods are varied, but it is a notably friendly lake, a lake of a thousand charms and beauties. Now I watched that lake go stark, raving mad.
Shielding our faces with our rubber-clad arms, for the spray, blown across the top of our 30-foot cliff, stung until it brought tears to the eyes, we beheld our familiar body of pleasant waters become a white anarchy of surging foam. Watery mountains, furious with froth, charged at breakneck speed and hurled their thousands of tons of weight on the shores with a sound like many thunders. As high as the tops of tall pines spray flew, and over and over we, lying on our cliff, were drenched by waves that broke against it and threw their spume skyward.
And still the awesome wind increased, and yet increased, until out of my life’s experience I could not have believed such violence possible. Now we saw it actually blow huge billows flat. In great blasts it would come, causing the insane waters to smoke in driven windrows as it cut the tops off those enormous waves and converted them into hurtling spume and mist that cut off all visibility.
Sometimes rain beat upon us, driven level and sharp as sleet. And once, strangely, the sun shone pallidly and fitfully through a momentary break in the clouds.
That produced another sensation. The sun, gleaming on the madness of the hurricane-driven spindrift, created in it a huge, misshapen spectrum of colors, adding, with its ghastly crooked travesty of the serene beauty of the true rainbow, the last touch of crazed ferocity to the scene.
Breakers, wind and crashing trees together made a tumult so vast that we, even though we lay close to each other, had to shout when we spoke to one another.
Then, all at once, I felt the island move under me.
I said so. The others stared as if they thought my reason had left me. But a moment later they felt it too. It moved again.
This transcended all natural laws. No wind, however mighty, should move a rocky five-acre island. On the backs of our necks we felt the hair rise.
But very quickly the natural cause revealed itself. To our lee was a great pine. Many of its larger branches had been stripped from it, but though the stout trunk was curved in a rigid arc by the hurricane, it thus far had resisted the fury of the wind. That pine, now, was being literally torn up by its roots. And its roots extended out 20 or 30 feet – beneath the very ground on which we lay!
Just in time we rolled and scrambled to safety as a giant blast sent the pine roaring over, its root system lifting starkly 20 feet or more in the air, taking with its tons of stone and grass, including the very spot of earth on which we had been lying a minute before.
That seemed to be the climax.
It became, after that, a simple matter of endurance. The weather bureau later recorded that the wind blew more than 100 miles an hour – a super-hurricane, for hurricane force is rated at 75 miles – and continued with unabated fury for six hours, with only slightly less heavy winds 12 hours longer. Throughout those endless hours we clung to the ground, beaten, chilled to the bone, enduring the ceaseless pounding of that storm.
Damage in untold millions of dollars was wreaked that day on forests, crops and property. Some islands in the lake were completely denuded of trees. At least three men, two Indians and a white man, were lost and drowned in different places on the lake. The only miracle was that the number was so small.
We, on our battered island, at least lived it out. Not that night did we get back to Portage Bay. Beaten and drenched and clinging like lizards to our wet rocks, we abided the tempest until it had abated enough to risk running our boats around the lee of the island archipelago, so that finally we reached Helldiver Bay very late in the day. Thence we portaged three-quarters of a mile – in spite of trees still crashing about us – to Machin’s Camp, where Barbara Machin, chatelaine of that wilderness hostelry, two of whose own buildings had been smashed by falling pines, gave us a true northland welcome, fed us sumptuously and sheltered us for the night.
Next day, though the seas still were perilous, we made our way back to Portage Bay about noon. Our magnificent fish, of course, were spoiled and had to be jettisoned. This we regretted as, haggard and weary, we staggered into camp and encountered McKeever.
If there was a faint gleam of joy in his eye when he saw us safe, nothing else in his manner showed it.
“I don’t see any walleyes,” was all he said.
How could we reply to this sardonicism? It is, as I have intimated, hard to deal with McKeever, especially if you are a friend of his.
Note: “The Day the Lake Went Mad” is a chapter from Paul Wellman’s Portage Bay, published by Doubleday & Company, Inc. in 1957. It’s reproduced here courtesy of Joyce Wellman.