An Hind

My friend Sparrow with a beautiful Maumee walleye.

The headwaters of the Maumee gather in Indiana and converge at Fort Wayne, where the river proper begins. It meanders northeast through upper Ohio makes its way to Toledo, where it empties into Lake Erie. Every year the Maumee sustains one of the largest walleye migrations in the country; these fish make their way from the lake into the river beginning in March, and through April thousands of anglers converge on the cities of Maumee and Perrysburg to try and catch some walleyes on their way to the spawning areas upriver.

I first fished the Maumee last spring, making a few trips here and there in my quest to catch my first walleye. I finally did catch a walleye last April, and this year I decided to go more frequently. It was a disappointing year for steelhead on my home river, the Clinton, and the Maumee was my only real option for catching big fish this time of year. I also had another goal: to learn the river techniques and locations well enough to guide my brother when he visited at the end of March. AJ is one of the best fishermen I know, but he had never caught a walleye. We had one day to spend fishing during his visit, and I wanted to be prepared to catch some fish.

Over my dozen or so trips the last two years I’ve seen literally thousands of fishermen on this river, and every one of them fishes the same way: they drift floating jigs with plastic worms. This method—drift fishing—is the one I prefer most for any type of fishing, and it’s my go-to technique for steelhead and salmon. Over the last decade float-based approaches have become more common for salmonoid species. Those techniques vary widely, but consist of the bait attached to a floating device, so that the fishing is from the top-down. It’s a sight-based technique and can be very effective. Fly fishermen targeting steelhead almost always use an “indicator”—a float—as do centerpinners. By contrast, drift fishing is done by feel. The fisherman casts slightly upriver and allows the presentation to drift naturally downriver with the current. A weight attached several feet above the lure bounces on the bottom of the river, touching rocks, snags, and fish. The art of drift fishing is to sense the often-subtle bite of a fish and to set the hook immediately. For me, there’s nothing more exciting than drift fishing and setting the hook in the fish’s mouth.

I use the word “fisherman” advisedly here. In spite of its maternal-sounding name, I have seen very few women fishing the Maumee, unlike, say, the Betsie River, where I fished for salmon in the fall. Whereas the Betsie has a substantial presence of women anglers, the Maumee is by far the most diverse fishery I have ever seen. This is grounds on the fishing message boards for a lot of thinly-veiled racism, tied closely to linguistic superiority. On these boards the anxieties of twenty-first century America—class, race, “values”—present themselves as they do on, I’m sure, any internet discussion-based communities. The persistent message of most posters is that the Maumee is a “zoo,” a place where drunken fishermen engage in fistfights and buffoonery.

My experience on this river has been the opposite. There are a lot of people fishing the river on any given day during the run. And almost without exception I’ve had positive interactions with all of them. Fishing this close to other people you’re bound to get your line tangled in someone else’s pretty frequently. But it usually doesn’t take long to get untangled, and the calls of “clear!” can be heard at regular intervals as one angler tosses the disentangled lure of another back into the water to be reeled up.

AJ and I woke up at 5:00 am and drove to the river, stopping at Dunkin’ Donuts on the way. The Maumee is a big river; it has the largest watershed of any river flowing into the Great Lakes. Its average discharge is roughly equivalent to the Rogue River in Oregon. But unlike the Rogue, the Maumee is in a population-dense area: it’s only a few miles from Toledo, one hour from Detroit, and two hours from Cleveland. As a result, it’s crowded. And while I normally like to fish in areas with as little pressure as possible, I really don’t mind fishing with others here. It’s in liminal spaces like these that people encounter the environment in ways they might not otherwise. Even though both sides of the river are lined with highways and towns, it’s a natural space. Bluegrass Island, which has become my favorite place to fish, sustains a population of deer (I counted 18 on one of my trips), nesting Canada Geese, herons, egrets, hawks, vultures, snakes, and other critters. The river is also full of fish, and not just walleye. Sheephead, white bass, buffalo (a kind of carp), suckers, quillback carpsuckers, and other fish make up a majority of the catch. Last year I caught a 7-pound channel cat on the river in May. Last week I watched a prolonged struggle between a snake and a frog. I didn’t stick around to see if the frog eventually escaped, but my guess is the snake eventually won this battle, even if this frog was a little bigger than it bargained for.

Nature red in tooth and claw.

Fishing with my brothers is something I don’t take for granted. We grew up fishing the McKenzie River together. We would walk or bike down Thurston Road and through a field of absurdly aggressive cattle to a place on the river where we could stand waist deep and catch trout. Then we would swim. We would fish Salt Creek and Salmon Creek and the South Fork of the McKenzie: my Dad, Ty, AJ, and me. And my Mom would sit on the bank reading a book. Now that I live in Michigan I feel estranged from that history. I fish alone more often than not, less successfully than my brothers in Oregon, but it makes me feel better to be on a river. So when AJ came, it didn’t really matter if we caught a lot of fish or not.

In the end, we did catch a lot of fish, including six walleye. Of those six, AJ caught five, and I caught one. As I said, he is a better fisherman than me. We fished from sunup to sundown, shoulder to shoulder with the Maumee locals, and AJ outfished them all. “Fish on,” he said. And then a few minutes later, “fish on,” again. And again.

AJ with two of his walleye.

I’ve been back to the Maumee several times since AJ left. Twice my friend Sparrow met me on the river, driving from Cleveland. But mostly I’ve fished alone. I’ve gotten better at catching walleye, and I enjoy talking to strangers on the river and standing in the water. Last week I took a break from fishing and sat in the woods of Bluegrass Island, when a herd of deer walked by me. One walked up to me, barely an arm’s length away, and watched me take its picture for a minute or so.

An hind!

But this river is also a sadness for me, because it isn’t one of the cold rivers of Oregon, one of the rivers of the Coast Range or the Cascades, crystal clear, swift and strong. And I can’t call my dad, or my brothers, and have them meet me there. But I still love the drift, the contours of the river rocks felt through the weight, across fifty feet of monofilament, to the cork handle of my fishing rod. To fish like this is to experience the world differently, to feel it through my own right hand. And it is a kind of consolation:

Bottom of the river.

Bottom of the river.

Bottom of the river.

(fish)

Girls Like Giants is a collaborative blog that focuses on media and popular culture, with an eye toward women’s perspectives. It’s very smart and a lot of fun. Check out Melissa Sexton’s post on M.I.A., Nicki Minaj, and cultural appropriation.

On this day in 1821 John Keats died. Wilfred Owen, another poet who died too soon, observed February 23^rd as a day to remember Keats, and so here at An Hind I take a moment to reflect on one of my favorite poets.

Long sick and desirous of death, Keats spent his last tubercular breath in a small room next to the Spanish Steps in Rome. “The family disease” was what Keats called tuberculosis; he had watched his mother and brothers die of it, and had taken pains to obtain a bottle of opium as a measure to end his own life should the pain become too extreme. In the end, his suffering was terrible. His friends would not give him his opium, and so he died in agony, on a Friday, far from home. He was twenty-five years old.

Twenty five! What Keats left us, then, is essentially his juvenilia. What other poet wrote more notable work in his or her early twenties? And while much of the extant poetry reads like the poetry of youth—derivative, earnest, immature—even the weakest poems hint at the beauty of the best of the odes. What if Keats had lived longer, long enough to write the works of his maturity? What if we had the poetry of his thirties, or of his late middle age, or the late, diminished work of a poet past his great powers but still resonant of a long and thoughtful life?

In a sense, we do have Keats’ mature work, for he was long obsessed with the fact of his own untimely death. In “Ode to a Nightingale,” he makes the terms explicit: “Darkling I listen; and, for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death, /Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme, / To take into the air my quiet breath; /Now more than ever seems it rich to die.”

Keats’ acute awareness that he would die, and soon, lends the poems the kind of maturity usually achieved by those who confront mortality in their declining years. It is a mark of Keats’ unique poetic gifts that he found the artistic means to express these meditations as such a young poet. But today let’s celebrate another ode, Keats’ “Ode to Autumn,” which is, as far as I know, the most beautiful poem written in English. Others readers have also found this poem to be superlative in some sense or another; “perfect” or “nearly perfect” are the usual adjectives. These terms are, on the first or second reading of the poem, surprising. As a poetic genre, the ode was already old fashioned in the nineteenth century. Horace teased out the form’s potentialities in Augustan Rome—his odes are satiric, funny, serious, political, hauntingly beautiful. Keats’ range is smaller; he tends to focus on the hauntingly beautiful. But when he gets it right, he does so with an awareness of the language that catches the reader short. Here is the first stanza of “Ode to Autumn”:

     SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
          Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
     Conspiring with him how to load and bless 
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
     To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
          And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 
     To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
          With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 
          And still more, later flowers for the bees,
     Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Read it out loud! The use of sound here is unparalleled; like an autumnal cornucopia, the poem presents dozens of unique sounds, and arranges them in a stunningly complex pattern. The sound patterns are both rich and subtle. Unlike, say, one of Poe’s experiments with sound, the sound-likenesses here are never overpowering, never tinny, never overwrought. The enjambment (“to load and bless/With fruit the vines…”; “and plump the hazel shells/With a sweet kernel”) deemphasizes the end-rhymes, assuring that the poem moves along, the syntax working with the formal requirements in a delicate harmony. And just when the mouth’s phantom memory begins to forget one of the poem’s sounds, it appears again like a ghost of something past, or an old friend. Track, for instance, the vowel sound of “round,” in the middle of the fourth line. It is foreshadowed by “how” in the preceding line and then disappears until line nine, where it inhabits “flowers.” It will appear again in the second stanza (as “sound!”), as will the flowers—this time as an end rhyme:

          Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
     Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
          Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
     Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
          Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
  Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
     And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
          Steady thy laden head across a brook;
          Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
  Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

 “Hours by hours”—Keats alters the idiomatic “hour by hour” to draw out the oozings of the cider press, the languid watching of a long fall day (I owe this observation to Rosanna Warren). The poem slows down just as Fall draws out a long afternoon into a moment that seems to last indefinitely. This is, perhaps, the kind of happy accident a poet discovers when responding to the challenge of a closed form—in this case, rhymed iambic pentameter, and the challenge of finding a rhyme for “flowers.”

Again, the movement of this poem’s syntax, in combination with its abundant and complex sound resonances, make it a joy to speak aloud. But what of the subject matter? Not only is it an old and tired form, but unlike “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” or “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode to Autumn” does not explicitly take up the “Great” questions of the Passing of Time, or Art, or Death. It is a much quieter poem. It personifies a season and extols her virtues in an overtly old fashioned way. But even here, in this autumnal Arcadia, one may sense Keats’ abiding obsession, and unlike “Ode to a Nightingale,” perhaps something of acceptance. In the final stanza, the poem turns explicitly to music, and it adds its own music to the sounds of the animals at evening (evening: “while barred clouds bloom the soft dying day/and touch the stubble plains with rosy hue” [!]), and the poem itself becomes the formal expression of that music: 

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
  While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
     And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
  Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
          Among the river sallows, borne aloft
     Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
     The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
     And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

In his elegy for Keats, Adonais, Shelley chose the metaphor of the fruiting vine to describe Keats’ shortened life: 

The loveliest and the last,
The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew
Died on the promise of the fruit.

But the promise of fruit to which Keats looked—and which he believed, fervently and desperately believed, he had not achieved—is fulfilled in “Ode to Autumn,” a poem that makes us believe warm days will never cease even as we feel the chill of winter in the soft-dying day, and hear it in the mourning choir of evening insects. Here is the promise of fruit, and the fruit itself: we see that word three times in the first six lines: 

                 SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
          Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
     Conspiring with him how to load and bless 
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
     To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
          And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core…

And so Keats, who died in the Spring of his life, nonetheless left us with this quiet poem in praise of Autumn, of maturity, of fruitfulness. And it is one of my favorites.