The Bait Shop That Opened at Four

The Shop and the Lake

My father bought this shop in 1971 off a man named Aldous Prewick, with money from the sale of eighty acres of corn ground he never forgave himself for selling. The shop sits where County Road 9 meets the lake. Still Fork has about nine hundred people, one blinking light, a Lutheran church, a Methodist church, and a Lions Club hall with a Friday fish fry.

We also have more boat trailers than people.

My son Trevonne was nine the summer he started on the counter, down at four in the morning to ice the minnows before the walleye men came. He could make change faster than I could.

He could net one minnow out of three hundred without touching a second. By twelve he had built a leader-line rack out of a pallet and two coffee cans, and I still use it because it beats the one we bought.

He tied his first blood knot on our front steps with Roscoe holding the line and cussing a blue streak, the way Roscoe does when he is proud.

Trevonne loved the lake. I want to be plain about that, because the whole story hangs on it. He did not love the counter the way I did. He loved the water.

At fifteen he started taking retired couples from Ohio around Tamarack in our old johnboat, showing them where the smallmouth lay up under the lily pads. One woman from Toledo sent a card that said Your boy could find a fish in a bathtub.

Junia kept that card on the refrigerator for eighteen years.

The Charter Boat

In November of 1983, three years before Trevonne was born, my cousin Lowell Kregel took two brothers from Flint out on Lake Huron in a thirty-foot charter boat he had mortgaged his house to buy. The forecast was marginal. Lowell had a payment due.

The men had driven four hours and paid in advance. He told them it would be fine. A squall came down out of the north that nobody had called, and the boat went over two miles out.

Lowell lived. He hung on to the hull for six hours in a life jacket the Coast Guard later said should have been replaced a season before. The brothers did not live. Hank Lindgren was thirty-one and Pete Lindgren was thirty-four.

I was twenty-two. I stood on the harbor dock with two hundred other people while the Coast Guard brought them in.

What I should have taken from that night was plain. Lowell cut a corner on a life jacket and went out in weather he did not trust because he was in debt. That is a lesson about money and pride and saying no to a customer.

What I took was this: a man who chases a dream out onto the water is dangerous to everyone who steps into the boat with him. A dreamer does not drown alone.

I decided it that night, so hard and so young that I never checked it again. More than forty years.