The Old Lund on Dad’s Reef

“A woman’s got no business running a rig like that alone, Kari,” my uncle said, and I could hear his truck idling behind his voice. “Roy would want it used right.”

I was standing in Dad’s driveway with the phone pressed to my ear and the shed door hanging open in front of me.

The cold came off the lake in long gray gusts, and the oak leaves skittered across the gravel.

The trailer tracks ran out of the shed, across the yard and onto the road.

Where Dad’s walleye boat had sat every winter of my life, there was a dry rectangle of concrete and a coffee can full of old jig heads.

“You took it,” I said. “Without asking me. Without even calling.”

“I’m calling now,” Dwayne said. “It’s in my pole barn, out of the weather. It’ll get fished. That’s more than it’d get sitting here while you work your hours in town.”

It had been one month since the funeral. Thirty-one days, if anyone was counting, and I was.

I had come out that Saturday to drain the water lines in Dad’s house before the first hard freeze.

I didn’t yell. I have never been a yeller, and Dad wasn’t either.

He used to say a loud voice on the water scared the fish and a loud voice on land scared off the truth.

“Dad left that boat to me,” I said. “You were there when they read it. You heard the same words I did.”

“I heard them,” Dwayne said. “I also know my brother. He’d never want you out on that big water alone in a nineteen-foot rig with a hundred and fifty horse on the back. Somebody’d be fishing you out of the rocks.”

Then he said he had to go, and he went.

I stood there a long time with the phone in my hand, looking at that dry patch of floor and listening to the wind work through the pines.

The boat and the man

My name is Kari Nyberg. I am thirty-four years old, and I work as a physical therapy assistant at the clinic in Grand Rapids, helping people learn to climb stairs again after a new knee or a bad fall.

My father was Roy Nyberg. He worked thirty-six years at the paper mill, same as his brother, and he died last October at sixty-three, the week after we pulled his dock out for the winter.

His heart quit while he was splitting wood behind the house.

The neighbor found him on the chopping block with the maul still in his hands, sitting down, like he had only stopped to catch his breath.

Mom passed when I was twelve. After that it was the two of us, and the two of us spent most of our good hours on the water, from ice-out in April until the ice came back in November.

The boat was a nineteen-foot fiberglass walleye rig, deep and dry, with a hundred-and-fifty on the transom and a little nine-point-nine kicker for trolling.

Dad bought it used the year I turned fourteen, and he paid it off in four years.

He named every one of its quirks. The livewell pump that needed a slap. The bilge switch you had to wiggle.

The rod locker that only latched if you lifted the lid a quarter inch first.

We fished it together for twenty years. Spring opener, summer evenings, fall tournaments, and every Sunday afternoon in between when the wind laid down.

I learned to back a trailer in that boat before I learned to drive on the highway.

Dad had a rock reef out on the big lake that he found the summer I was sixteen.

It sits off a point on the north end, a long finger of broken rock that comes up out of twenty-five feet to eight.

He never wrote it down anywhere. He made me learn the shoreline marks by eye: the tall dead pine lined up with the green cabin, the notch in the far ridge over the end of the boat ramp.

“Anybody can fish a spot off a screen,” he’d say. “You learn it with your eyes, it’s yours for good.”