Nawakwa

Nawakwa photoThe cabins had names like “Wren” and Whippoorwill.” They were mostly pretty shabby, with varnished knotty pine paneling and a picnic table in the kitchen for inelegant dining. Ringed around one of the region’s dozen or so connected lakes, most cabins came with a shared pier and a well-used rowboat. All of them came with mosquitos. Big, hungry, drone-like mosquitos.

My cheerful, corn-fed, Midwestern father always seemed to look forward to these trips, whistling as he loaded the car with sleeping bags and fishing rods. My stoic Nisei mother, meanwhile, tended to other essentials—cleaning supplies, toilet paper, shoyu and Minute Rice—most likely looking forward more to the return than to the trip itself.

The drive to the lake was an eternity of hot asphalt, sticky vinyl car upholstery, and the mighty convection of 100-degree exhaust-tinged Wisconsin air, blowing through four open windows. There were occasional stops for bathroom breaks or flat tires, or even the odd touristy cheese shop shaped like a giant wedge of Colby, but mostly it was sitting, sweating, counting cows, singing camp songs, reading just to the verge of car-sickness, then staring out the window until the wave of nausea receded. There were Mad Libs, endless Mad Libs (adverb, color, proper noun). And Interstate Auto Bingo, with those clear red sliding doors over the designated items (items that seemed retro even then): silo, fruit stand, billboard, haystack, water tower, public phone, pig.

Every couple of hours, Mom would hand back a few foil-wrapped triangles of faux-European processed cheese—the kind that had pretty pictures of contented cows grazing in alpine meadows printed on the labels. Oh, to be in the cool alpine air, wading through the blue squiggle of a river curving its way among the cheese wrapper’s wildflowers—or anywhere but here, in the un-air-conditioned Mercury Montego, sharing the back seat with my sister, brother (and ewok-like pekapoo), crossing each others’ imaginary boundaries and elbowing each other back across enemy lines.

Lac du Flambeau. How exotic it sounded. Translation: Lake of the Torches, named by French settlers after they observed the local Ojibwe practice of nighttime spear-fishing by torchlight. There was once a reservation nearby, but the only artifacts of Indian culture I remember seeing there were the cheap turquoise bracelets and beaded trinkets sold at the bait and tackle shop. We’d buy pints of night crawlers to take out on the lake, casting into the reeds for red-eyed rock bass, bony bluegills, crappies, walleyes and mud-colored catfish. There ought to be a word to describe the smell of soil-coated worms in a pint container—blind gray-pink wrigglers trying to escape my clumsy 11 year-old fingers as I squelched down my squeamishness and tried to grab one for my hook.

Occasionally, we’d take bait minnows (and cheese or salami) out into deeper waters and try for northern pikes or the rare muskellunge. Muskies, which can weigh up to 60 pounds, (more, if you believe the stories) are the Cadillacs of the pike family. The subject of as much lore and legend as Nessie herself, and nearly as elusive, they are a freshwater angler’s dream. We never came close to catching one, but our lucky lure was the bright yellow popper with the bite marks in it—a souvenir of the unseen almost-maybe-muskie that got away.

Our haul would become that night’s dinner, and it usually measured in ounces, not pounds. After un-hooking them, Dad would string our fish through the mouth and gills on a rope, and we’d dangle them in the water behind us to keep them alive until we docked.

Back at the cabin, it was heads off, scales off, guts out, for our unlucky captives. Then, a brief sizzle in a hot pan and onto our plates, accompanied by a drizzle of Kikkoman’s finest and the aforementioned Minute Rice, a substance so woeful it barely registered as food on my palate. Nighttime meant stargazing, reading in our bunks, and then falling asleep on mildew-scented mattresses while the mosquitos assaulted our arms and legs.

The next day and the day after were variations on this theme. Sometimes we fished from a canoe instead of a rowboat, just to shake things up a bit. The lakes were linked like beads on a necklace, and on unlucky fishing days, we’d paddle through the tight, reed-lined, watery links to reach the next lake over, and then the next. Maybe the fish would be biting over there. All the days featured the same soundtrack: the soulful calls and lilting whinnies of the common loon, echoing across the glassy water. Hearing it now, the sound is like a time machine, carrying me back—almost bodily—to those sun-dappled summer days.

The ride home, back to suburban “civilization,” always seemed to pass more quickly than the drive up. With no sense of anticipation to agitate us, we bickered less, slept more, sprawled out over one another’s invisible personal barriers. There were mosquito bites to scratch, leisurely stops for gas and soda, and a sense of done-ness, as if we were all collectively thinking, “There’s another one in the books.”

Eventually, as the landscape began to look familiar, a new anticipation would set in—for home, clean sheets, air conditioning and “regular” sticky rice, hot from Mom’s ancient rice cooker. No one would want fish for a while, that’s for sure. Before long, we’d be back to burgers and bicycles and the chlorine-saturated community pool. Pig…silo…water tower…home.

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