Same Place, Different Times

His voice sounded like the sound of an Australian didgeridoo, which is a simple wooden tube that emanates a low-pitched drone when played. At least that's how it sounded from the comfort of my cabin bunk, as I listened to the conversation he often had with my father in the evening hours over tea and cookies. It wouldn't be long before I drifted off, missing much of Emory Jone's interesting discourse on the history of Cornucopia, fishing on Lake Superior, and the commercial fishing industry on the Great Lakes.

Often those stories were told in the middle of winter, while the fire in the franklin stove crackled and the cross country ski's and snow shoes shed their moisture and fogged the windows.

"You have to be careful out on the ice. Many times it happened to us while we were fishing that we'd suddenly find ourselves on an island. The ice we sat on would break off and drift away from shore, the water widening as we watched. That's why we always had to drag a heavy ice boat with us when we went out. An ice boat was just an open fishing boat with sled runners on the bottom. We'd pull it like a sled over the ice, but when the ice turned to water that we needed to cross to get back to shore, we'd all climb in and row back. A few times we had to row a long way, hours into the night. Ice would form on the oars and boat, making them even heavier than they usually are. Sometimes you wondered if it was worth the few fish you'd catch on the hook. It wasn't like fishing in the open water with our fishing tug. No engines or nets or anything like that. The long trip home could be after a full day of sitting over an open hole, behind a canvas tarp used to block the wind in sub-zero temperatures. We could get mighty cold after a day like that."

It was hard to relate to that kind of life, working six to twelve hours a day on the water or ice, followed by several hours in the fish house clearing nets and cleaning fish. Seven days a week, without the help of even the simplest of navigation instruments, totally self reliant if anything happened to the equipment or men out on the lake. The hardships were unimaginable to an impressionable youngster curled in his warm sleeping bag.

As I looked up at my grandson laying on that same bunk, I thought of the contrasts. He looked down as his father and I talked about the challenges of getting some employees to show up for work. Earlier in the day, he had been given permission to play games on the family iPad for no more than thirty minutes, a restriction employed to ward off an over-dependence on screen enabled entertainment. That was his reward for completing a long hike through the woods in deep snow. Now HE was working to keep his eyes open, not wanting the day to end.

With endless stories of suffering and emotional stress induced by natural and man-made disasters or human oppression, I think of that contrast. It's a completely different scale. We're so fortunate that any challenge of nature is often self-inflicted by the choices we make, rather than a factor of daily life. I just hope my grandchildren can somehow gain the same perspective on change I did listening to old fishing tales by the fire.