Secret Love
by Perry Palin

My mother and her mother were friends, and I knew Dana and her older brother and younger brother and sisters when we were still in elementary school, knew them better than the eight country miles between our homes would ordinarily allow.  My mother would visit her mother, and my sisters and I would be brought along to play.  Dana and I were closest in age.  She was one year younger.  There was teasing by the others, suggesting a romantic interest between us, but I weathered this fairly well for an elementary school boy.

Later, in high school, there was a kind of a romantic interest between us.  It was a small school.  Everyone knew everyone else.  Still, groups formed, and there were barriers between the groups.  The Shore kids hung together.  They were the social elite of our little school.  We country kids were lacking in certain social graces, and while some of us might have been nice kids, we were, after all, country kids.  I once had a girlfriend from the Shore, but it didn’t last.  She tired, I think, of having to explain away my country address, and in the end I lost out to an older man with a newer car.  After my mourning period, during which I resolved to have nothing more to do with girls, I found that Dana did not mind my rural address and lack of style, and a little at a time we grew close.  Dana and I were both country kids.

Dana was quiet and undemanding, and she was good to me.  My limited experience with girls had not prepared me for someone who would agree with most of what I said, and defer to my wishes on where we would go and what we would do with our time, and I liked her very much.  We went to school parties and movies and out to eat, and I suppose we gave the impression of being a couple, though Dana never pressed me to make a specific commitment.  When her friends urged me to take her to the prom, and I did not want to go, Dana did not complain.  And I liked her very much.

Dana had brown hair and clear, fair skin and brown eyes, and she was slender and moved with a quiet strong grace.  Dana was Finnish, like me.  She was a cheerleader for our school, and I played center on the basketball team, and when she hugged me, after a game, or at other times, her body was warm and she smelled clean and fresh and my chin rested very nicely on the top of her head.  But I’ve gotten way ahead of myself.

The country we lived in had trout fishing.  The trout were brookies, mostly, though there were some brown trout in the lower reaches of streams, and there was steelhead fishing in the spring.  I preferred the brookies.  I fished with my father when I was small, and then went off alone a few times when I was nine years old.  I fished for brook trout.  I fished with worms, and as I grew older I used spinners and then flies.  I fished close to home, but as I grew older I rode my bicycle further to fish new brook trout streams.  By the age of thirteen I was camping alone on these streams, hiding my bicycle in the woods and walking a mile or more to small streams for wild, wild brook trout.  I loved brook trout.  I loved being in the places where brook trout lived, secret places, in the feeder streams miles away and hundreds of feet in elevation above the Lake Superior shore.  I loved the taste of wild blueberries and the excitement of moose tracks as big as dinner plates still muddy at the edge of the stream, and the smells of damp earth and old wood and balsam pitch and the sight of an eagle soaring silently overhead.  I loved brook trout.  I knew that brookies could be over fished, so the streams and the specific stretches I fished were kept quiet.

I trusted no one in these important matters.  Sometimes my father suggested streams and stretches to me, but by the time I was fourteen, my knowledge of the near countryside exceeded his, and he stopped trying to advise me.  I loved brook trout, and I loved to fish for them, and I learned where they lived and how to catch them.  And when I was sixteen I got my fishing car.

It was a blue ’53 Ford Mainline, two door.  Pretty old and pretty rusty, but affordable.  A first fishing car literally pushes back the horizons, and I studied the streams within forty miles of home.  That old car carried me to many streams I couldn’t fish before, and it changed my neighborhood campaigns as well.  The old Ford made full day trips into half days, saved energy for fishing, and made it possible to fish early morning or late evening and still sleep in my bed at home.

A favorite place.  I would park the Ford on an asphalt county road near a culvert carrying a small, fast brook.  There was little risk in this.  The stream was fast here, the gradient too steep for pools, and the trout lived neither immediately above nor just below the road.  Most people that fished here caught nothing and wouldn’t return.  With no traffic to catch me, I would hurry an eighth of a mile south on the road, then leave the road behind, turning east to follow a logging trail cut through the woods, through paper birch and aspen and balsam fir, past fresh green ferns and wild strawberries.  I would cross the brook and continue east another quarter mile to a larger stream, then fish it down to its confluence with the brook, then up the brook to the logging trail.  The circuit could be done in three hours, a fine, favorite, evening place.

I fished this place once in late June, starting at six in the evening.  The larger stream held brookies and a few browns, and I caught them on a wet Coachman swung in the current.  At seven-thirty, I reached the confluence and started up the brook, stalking the small darkening pools from the banks.  The water was slower here, and in a few hundred yards of stream, there lived a beautiful race of brook trout, fine and fat and almost black from living under logs and leaves and alder roots.  I clipped the wings of the Coachman short, one third the body length, to make an impromptu nymph pattern, and let it dead drift downstream into the dark places.  I caught the trout, too many almost to believe, and I kept three twelve inchers, monsters in this little brook, secret, beautiful monsters.  I stayed late.  I didn’t want to leave.  Birds began to take their roosts for the night.  The mosquitoes stung my face where the sweat had washed the repellant away.  Finally I climbed out of the stream, hurried up to the logging trail, hiked out to the road and to the car.  The sun was well below the trees.

The car faced south, toward home.  I went around to the passenger side, unlocked and opened the door, and sat on the front seat while I took off my hip waders.  I threw one boot into the back seat, then the other.  The mosquitoes found me again and started a new campaign.

I stood up, and as I reached in to place my rod on top of my waders, she said “Hi.  Catch anything?”  I bolted upright in surprise, bumping my head inside the doorframe.  I reached for the creel on the ground near my feet, and slid it into the car on the floor in back.

“Hi, Dana.  Gee, that hurts.”  I rubbed my head, feeling carefully for blood.  ”You surprised me.”  She had been waiting for me, sitting in the woods on the east side of the road.  The mosquitoes must have been killing her.

“Did you catch anything?”

I sat down to pull on my shoes and then stood again.  “Well, not very many.”  Why was she out here?  It was almost dark.  She lived only a half mile away.  She must have ridden by with her family, seen the car, and walked back to wait.

“Can I see them?  My brothers have fished here before, but they’ve never caught any.”  How long had she been waiting?  She leaned against the side of the car.  It was too dark to see her clearly. 

A car topped the hill to the north, then came down and passed us, going fast on the asphalt, with the high beams on.  “I only got a couple of little ones.  It’s too dark to see.  And the bugs are really bad.”  What did she want?  She leaned against the car.

A second car came down the road toward us from the north.  It passed, then the driver braked to a quick stop, threw the car into reverse, and backed up to the Ford.  Paul and Daryl, Shore kids and basketball teammates, driving Daryl’s dad’s Buick.  Paul leaned out of the passenger window and asked, “Catch anything tonight?”  Then they saw Dana and laughed.

“No.  What are you guys doing out here?”

“On our way home.  We borrowed a boat and fished walleyes at Birch Lake.”

“You catch any?”  I didn’t want them to get out of the car.

“Yeah, we did okay.”  They both laughed again.  They knew I was trying to get rid of them, but they guessed the wrong reason.  “See you later.  Let’s fish trout together next week,” Daryl said.

“Maybe.  I’ll call you if I can,” I told him.  Daryl shifted the car into drive and pulled away, picking up speed rapidly.

Dana stood in front of me.  I threw my hat into the back seat and tried carefully to comb my hair with my hand, avoiding the growing bump.  She had waited for me, and she wanted me to hold her.  We hadn’t been out together since school closed.  It was June.  The fish had been biting.

“Well, then, get in, and I’ll give you a ride home.”

Dana’s face fell, and I pretended not to notice as I walked around to the driver’s side.  She reached over and unlocked my door.  I needed a new muffler, and I turned around in the road and went the half mile to Dana’s house without trying to talk over the roar of the fishing car.

In the driveway, I turned off the engine but didn’t get out.  It was fully dark by now.  “I’ll call you, okay?”  Her little brother was out on the lawn.

“Okay.  I’d like you to,” she said.  She got out.  I started the engine again, waved to Dana through the windshield, and backed as quietly as I could out of the drive.

At home the cats fought among themselves over the heads and the entrails of the three brook trout.  I slept late the next morning.  And I didn’t call Dana for a long time.