Daily Excerpt: The Musings of a Carolina Yankee (Amidon) - Eagle Lake Fishing Trip
excerpt from The Musings of a Carolina Yankee by Wally Amidon
Eagle Lake Fishing Trip
In the course of a man’s life, there comes a time to think
back to simpler times and things that made you a little happier as the years
rolled by. One of these snippets involved my father-in-law, Louis Saucier.
The story begins in Eagle Lake, Maine, where Louis was born
and grew up. Part of the family journeyed back to the homeland with him from
our home in New Hampshire to visit his relatives and to do a little fishing.
At this time, Eagle Lake was still a small town, made up
mostly of small houses and camps. It was a place that appeared to be in lost in
time. The inhabitants neither realized about this nor particularly cared about
it. Most of them were family in some way or related to others who were related
to someone in the town. I would venture to say that this was where the term, close-knit family, came from.
I had never before been to Eagle Lake, nor had I met this
side of the family. It was fun from the get-go. When we arrived, people came
out of the house, speaking Canadian French in rapid bursts. I tried to figure
out what they were saying since I had taken French in high school but to no
avail. They had their own dialect. I knew it would be a fruitless effort when I
heard the New Hampshire side of the family reply to the Eagle Lake side of the
family in a French language that had English words mixed into the sentences
since the French vocabulary had escaped the speakers since they moved south and
began losing their rich, deep-woods culture. I listened as my father-in-law and
his brothers grew hoarse, yelling at one another in the Canadian French and
American French dialects. Later, I found out they were not yelling but just
talking naturally as time working around heavy machinery had taken its toll on
their hearing. This was an exercise in listening, to say the least.
After a lunch consisting of potatoes and meat that Louis’s
sister, Marie, told us was not “store meat,” the men began to plot the fishing
trip. I didn’t use the word plan as
it really wouldn’t fit in this story. Plot
was more like it as those involved in the trip itinerary were haggling on which
place would be best to fill the fishing creels that next morning. After about
an hour, they had settled on where we were going to go. I knew half of the
story only because of the few English words I heard and knitted them into what
I thought were sentences they may have been saying. Everyone there could be
speak good English, but they were reliving the “old days” before they had to
learn the city-people language.
Being there that first day, I realized why my father-in-law
was who he really was. I was in his “country,” where the air was fresh and
clean, the water crystal clear, and the people innocent and friendly. People
made you feel as if you were one of them and would even smile at dumb jokes
told to them that they did not really understand or did not really think were
funny. I say all of the above to get the person reading this to be able to
understand the rest of the story.
We woke the following morning to the smell of breakfast
being prepared by “Ma Tante Marie,” as she was affectionately called by the
rest of the family. For the English-speaking reader, this translates to “My
Aunt Marie.” We all sat around the table, and she loaded down with enough food
to feed a crew of lumberjacks. There were things on that table that I had never
seen or tasted before, but it was all good—and I am still alive to write this.
Breakfast being finished, we loaded whoever could fit into
my Jeep. The rest followed in an old pickup truck. Just before we left, I saw
Louis catch a cricket and put it into his shirt pocket. I didn’t ask him about
the cricket as I knew he would tell me later. We fished some of the streams
closer to town and did well, but my father-in-law said we would do better at
this place he knew deep in the woods. He told me the name of the place, but I
will never be able to pronounce the name, let alone figure out how to spell it.
We were traveling a dirt road that seemed to have no end.
We would stop at little tributaries that most people would
walk or drive by without giving them a second thought. Louis, though, would tap
my shoulder and say, “Stop here!” Then, he would get out of the Jeep, take his
fishing line (he didn’t take a pole), and soon come walking back with a branch
full of trout. There were so many fish in the waters up there in the woods that
they rarely grew more than six inches in length, and Louis was piling up the
numbers.
As we were driving down the road, we rounded a corner, and
he told me to stop and for everyone to be quiet. He told me to stop and for
everyone to be quiet. I watched him as he got out of the Jeep, walked quietly
down the road to a spot about 50 yards away, and then suddenly stopped. He
reached into his pocket, took out the cricket, and attached it to the hook on
the fish line he was carrying. He slowly lowered the bait to the road. As I
watched, I asked myself what he was doing dropping that cricket onto the ground
with a fish line. Suddenly, I saw him jerk the line and pull a huge brook trout
out of the middle of the road. I drove up to him and saw that he had dropped
his line into a hole in a culvert which crossed the road. The fish he caught
was magnificent. It had bright spots and a bright red belly and was bent like a
ripe banana. It was close to 11 inches long—a real trophy. Louis held it up for
all of us to see. He had his trophy and was beaming from ear to ear.
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As we were heading back down that lonely, logging road that
evening, I looked over at my father-in-law. He had his bag of fish that he had
caught throughout the day, and the trophy was on top as if he wanted to look
down occasionally and make sure it was still there. His fishing rod was coiled
and on the floorboard of the Jeep. He drifted off into a light sleep as we
traveled along. I wondered what he might be dreaming about. Was it a dream of
years ago when he wandered this wilderness as a boy, carefree, catching fish in
the cold, clear streams, chasing deer through the dense, dark forests, and
leading a similar type of life? Or was it something that somebody who wasn’t
born there couldn’t quite understand. The one thing I could really bet on and
win was that he was dreaming in the language of his boyhood in the deep woods
of Maine.
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