The End of the Dock

End of the Dock

The lake had a way of drawing her. Her body drifted always towards the dock's edge. Be careful, her mama warned. She tried hard to walk in the middle. Veering off the way she often did troubled her and made her altogether leery about the dock. She shuffled her bare feet and got slivers which needed to be removed with a needle. She set her sights on each post, one after the other, walking only just that far, then sitting down. Over the edge on the surface of the water gas from the outboard motors made rainbows. She refocused her eyes to see deeper. Minnows darting through reeds. Floating moss. Green algae floating in the rust colored water. Sunlight piercing the current but not to the bottom. Maybe there was no bottom.

If she could get to the end she could sit there and fish with the short rod and reel her dad gave her. If she could get there without falling off the edge. It was better if the boats were in and tied up. It was better if someone held her hand, but she almost always was alone.

Older she became and finally did stand at the end of the dock with the rod and reel Daddy rigged and she fished.  Seldom did she fish from a boat.  This was a business, this fishing.  Everyone in her family was too busy seeing to it that the resort guests caught their limit of walleye to be thinking about entertaining a little girl.

Captain George, my dad

 Besides, the few times Daddy did take her out, she begged him not to go near the reed beds. She had seen the muskie, bigger than her own body, brought in by proud fishermen from Chicago or Houston.  They said they caught them at the edge of the reeds.  She imagined the fish gliding whale-like in the depths.  She imagined one of them taking her line.  Then what?  Pulling her out of the boat, for sure.  No, she would stick to fishing for walleyes, thank you, far from the reeds, off the islands where the lake bottom was hard clay under rippled sand.

Chucky L's dad took the two children fishing one afternoon and, much to Mary Jane's dismay, turned the small outboard motor boat towards the reeds on the Canadian side. The L family came to Klimek's Lodge each summer from Iowa, and had become family friends.  Young Chuck and Mary Jane were born the same year and their mothers pretended a liaison between the children before they could walk.  Most of my life I kept a tiny silver and turquoise ring Chucky gave Mary Jane the summer they were two years old.  I don't remember the incident but Mama kept photographs to document the event.  When my niece, Krista, was two years old I passed the ring on to her.

Chucky's dad acted strange all day.  Chucky might have been a pushy kid, six years old, maybe.  "the lake's too rough..." mumbled his dad.  "Can't go yet.  Maybe it'll calm down later this afternoon."  Still Chucky pushed. Mary Jane might have helped in her way, though my guess is that by that time she was hanging back from a probable initial enthusiasm.  Grumbling, Chucky's dad grabbed up his gear and hustled them towards the dock.  Suddenly Mary Jane completely understood that she didn't want to go.  Something was wrong with him.  Now I know that he was drunk.  His words slurred.  He dropped things.  After all that pushing, though, she understood that she no longer had a choice. 

The boat slapped the waves. She held onto the wooden bench seat.  She didn't dare say don't go near the reeds.  When he slowed the motor to trolling speed she did say softly, "Isn't this the Canadian reed bed?" 

"What the hell's the difference," he snapped back.  "There's not a game warden in sight."  He said he'd troll and we should put our lines in the water.  The boat bounced like a cork. Mary Jane dropped her line.  There might be a muskie down there.  Please, I don't want to catch it!  Chucky and his dad dropped their lines.  The motor sputtered and stopped.  "It's reeds," Mary Jane echoed information gleaned from her own dad.  It was her fishing line, tangled in the prop.  Mr. L leaned over the motor, swearing, trying to free the line.  He hadn't reeled in.  The reeds got closer and closer as the current took the boat towards them.  "Get the oar and push us out of these goddam things," he grouched.  The children tried, but they were only six years old.  The reeds rose tall and green all around the boat.  "God DAMN!  Can't you kids do anything right?"

His rod and reel jumped up and down beside his foot. She stared at it.  Nobody else was paying attention. She looked out to where the reeds thinned.  A huge fish broke the surface of the lake in a magnificent leap and just at that moment his rod and reel arched out of the boat and disappeared into the water. Mary Jane yelled, "A fish!"

"Damn! that was my best equipment.  God damn you kids, why in hell did I bring you out here anyhow?"

She sat shivering.  The waves tossed the little boat.  The wind felt cold and was getting stronger.  Chucky's dad couldn't fix the motor.  It was her fault.  She couldn't see anything but reeds and the boat had probably drifted into Canada.

My memory leaves me there, in the reed bed, and doesn't kick in again until the moment we arrive at the dock.  The water must have been low that year.  It was a long way from the boat up to the dock.  Chucky's dad lifted Mary Jane up to be taken by a dock hand and set safely on the wooden planks.  Then Chucky.  Lastly, the gear.  He let go before the dock hand had a good hold on the remaining rods.  Splash!  And gone.  Rainbow colors from the gasoline swirled in the water where they fell.

Coming in from the lake

  

Relics

Alyce came home to Lake of the Woods the summer of 1933. She needed to rest. George was waiting. He and his sister, Edith, both worked at Klimek's Lodge, and in later years Edith talked about her role back then of making sure Alyce actually did rest. My mother didn't tell stories of rest. She told stories of the gaggle of young adults who worked for her mother, "Ma Klimek." Mary Jane's uncles, aunts and cousins -- Lores, Klimeks, Delaneys, Youngs, Highs, Russ's, all at one time or another came under the iron hand of Elizabeth Friesinger Klimek.

All of it happened before Mary Jane came to be, and she would remember it in much the same was that she remembered the tales of Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. Her mother's romantic streak gave glitter to even the suffering times. It was the Great Depression. You'd never have known it from the description of life on the Lake. Prohibition would end that summer, but the stories predated that time while also merging with it. In the child's mind her mother had, once upon a time,  occupied parallel worlds. There was a world of illness and the sanatorium, and a world of parties, bootlegged whiskey and beer, dances at the old Wigwam Hall just walking distance from the Lodge where big bands came up from Fargo and Grand Forks on tour. She and George waltzed. Her Charleston wowed the fellows. She laughed to the Foxtrot. She wrote, "It was swell!"

"Their" songs were "The Waltz You Saved for Me," and "Goodnight Sweetheart." Of course they were! For most of the time those songs were popular the young lovers were separated. Ever in dreams, while I'm away, dear, I'll hear that melody. Of course. Goodnight Sweetheart...though I'm not beside you...sleep will banish sorrow. Mary Jane as a child thought these songs were lullabies. She fell asleep each night to strains of loss. Whisper goodbye...whisper goodbye...whisper, Goodbye.

Alyce and George.
Honeymoon Cabin at the Northwest Angle

Alyce returned, maybe she rested--maybe she didn't, and they married on September 3, 1934.

Mary Jane found her mother's brown wedding dress in the attic. She must have been about eight. Brown? Yes, brown. And the story of the wedding in the priest's rectory came out. "I could smell the potatoes burning in the kitchen," she laughed. The priest was poor and liked his solitude. A bit of a hermit, maybe. He wouldn't have a housekeeper. His name was Worm. George, never baptized but raised Lutheran by his pious mother, Annie, could not be married in the Catholic Church, and Father Worm took that law literally. "I didn't care about the brown dress. I didn't care about the dingy rectory. I had your father, Mary Jane, and that was all I cared about that day and ever afterwards."

The girl created a fairy tale of them and their honeymoon cabin on Lake of the Woods, their canoe trips to the islands, the granite rock they carried back with them. It was built into the great stone fireplace in the historical center in Bemidji. She touched it once, as one would touch a relic--the stones in Jerusalem where Jesus walked, or one of the bluestones that form and ancient holy place of Stonehenge.

It's the black granite in the center