The Old Lund on Dad’s Reef

The opener

The Minnesota walleye opener falls on the second Saturday in May. Up here it is close to a holiday.

Bait shops open at midnight, cabins fill up, and the landings are lined with trucks and trailers before the sun is up.

I drove out to the public landing at five that morning anyway. I didn’t have a boat to put in.

I just couldn’t sleep through my first opener without Dad, so I parked down by the water and stood there with a thermos.

At five thirty I heard the hundred-and-fifty fire up. I know that motor the way you know a voice.

Dad’s boat came off the trailer slick and easy, and Dwayne was at the wheel in his old green rain jacket.

He didn’t see me. Or he did and pretended he didn’t.

He idled out past the no-wake buoys, put the hull on plane and ran north up the lake, straight toward the point.

Toward Dad’s reef. The spot Dad never wrote down. The spot Dwayne knew because he had sat in that boat beside his brother more Saturdays than I could count.

I didn’t wave. I stood there until the sound of the motor faded behind the point, and then I got in my truck and drove to Dad’s place, because I didn’t know where else to go.

Grandpa’s Lund

Behind the empty space where Dad’s boat used to be, under a canvas tarp gone stiff and green with age, sat my grandfather’s old boat.

Grandpa Oscar Nyberg bought a sixteen-foot Lund aluminum boat new in the early seventies.

He fished it until his last summer, in 1988, and then Dad pulled it into the shed and covered it, and it never moved again.

Dad kept saying he’d fix it up for me someday.

Then he’d say, “Why? You’ve got a seat in the good boat.” And he’d grin, and that would be the end of that conversation for another year.

I pulled the tarp off that morning, with the sun just coming over the trees.

Mice had been in the seats. There were dents along both sides of the hull where Grandpa had kissed every dock on the lake.

Clamped on the back was a twenty-five horse tiller motor, older than me. The paint had gone chalky, but the cowling was still on tight, and the pull cord moved.

I stood there with my hands on the gunwale and thought about the club, and about the word Dwayne kept using.

Alone. A woman alone. I had never been afraid to be alone on that lake. Dad taught me not to be.

The spring tournament was two weeks after the opener, on the fourth Saturday in May. One-person boats were allowed.

Dad and I had read those rules a hundred times. A boat, a crew, a life vest worn whenever the big motor was running.

It didn’t say how big the boat had to be.