A River Ran Through It

At some point you can just tell time by the sun. It takes time being somewhere long enough to do so. It was 4 PM off Point Comfort Rd. And Scotty Wade and I went to that aluminum fishing boat, oars dipping low into the River’s water. Absent of pretense, of absolution, the kind of afternoon where not much is ever said. We rowed to his secret fishing hole and caught walleye after walleye that day. Filleted them on a rocky shoal.

I took them home to my father-in-law, Mike, his favorite fish, filets that he would feast on all summer long. At the time, I did not appreciate the meaning it would all later have. Now in its absence. In time. Time being all things equal, or more important yet, the great equalizer.

Years later, Mike would be lowered into his grave at Point Vivian, his younger and only son shoveling dirt and stone, a scene you would never forget, no matter how hard you tried, covering the loss of his father’s life.

Mike and Scotty have both passed into that primordial place. The walleye being the continuity between them, though they would never meet.

This is not meant to be a sad story. It’s not. It’s meant to be a sliver of my life and a remembrance between them. In fact, the River is a calming, joyous place, with the sun rising between all days.

It’s not the last fish I ever caught either. I would take my young boys fishing off the gazebo on Idle Isle. Same time. Different days. The sun setting evenly on what would become the horizon.

In other times, we would splash in the pool. Or River dip. The current pulling us gently in the direction it always pulls, just as reliably and steadily, as the sun’s rays reflecting upon the skin of our backs. We would chase squirrels for sport or rake pine needles from quiet nooks on the Island, and gently sweep them into the River below, which earlier had bathed us. Nurtured us.

On a similar note, I must admit that I once loved a center-console Pursuit, which I owned on the River, her rumbling outboard Mercury engine and the smell of 2-stroke oil filling the air. And the freedom she provided, to circle Boldt Castle, to travel downriver along its meditative rifts, giving me the age-old responsibility of avoiding its shoals.

Admittedly though, I once hit a shoal attempting to help a family stranded on a boat with their small child. Sucked into danger by the Siren’s songs filling the air, the same Siren’s songs that live near all shoals, sometimes warding us off from great danger, and other times, pulling us into harm’s grasp.

Me in tears, a grown man, having just lost a newly renovated inboard picnic boat with her rebuilt Chrysler engine, the ETSetera, on her maiden voyage, a name with letters playfully tilting directly and purposefully toward the first letters of my three children’s names.

When I finally returned to the Island, told my tale, saddened by my loss, Mike simply said, “Not bad after thirty years of being on the River, you finally hit a shoal. Welcome. Welcome to being of the River. A rite of passage,” he explained. Even though he knew it didn’t feel that way. It instead felt like a failure, like I had let someone or something down. My hands were in my face.

He then shared that in the 70’s, just off Iowa Eden Island – his proverbial arm now around my shoulder – that he hit a shoal with his woody Chris Craft, the VooDoo. His beloved VooDoo, which he owned well into his old age, until like him, her bones finally caved into the current and the weather and the steady wear-down of the seasons. And he sank it. And like me, was no doubt replaying the event over and over and over in his mind’s eye as he treaded water – the strayed path, the what ifs, but now finally being of the River, asking, “What should I have done differently?

But, the River is forgiving. It spares us grief in its answers, in its quiet way. Nature again reminding us we are only human. Reminding us to look at the horizon, the setting sun, the stars and moon peeking through. The moon, a counter to the sun, its delicate balance of light, presence, and power, shepherding us on to other, better days.

I don’t know where it all begins or where it all ends. That balance of light and sky, or our foibles, or where memory is in that fleeting instant, or worse, in that nagging constant.

I’ll try to end with something as concrete as I can. I’m here. My bare feet are planted squarely on a dock adjacent to a boathouse weathered by the wind, white paint chips flaking off, beneath a green, sturdy, steel metal roof that has fended off years of rain, snow, and sleet. The slight breeze at my face, my fingers quietly disappearing into the water as I bend to hold it. The dogs prancing about, oblivious to all that once was. Or were they?

I don’t know where this all takes us. But as I looked up, gazed, surveyed my surroundings, I at once felt the wood at my feet, the silky water in my hand, and suddenly, remembered where I was once so young, so young.

By Mark E. Russell, Idle Isle

Mark Russell is a graduate of St. Lawrence University and the Western New England School of Law, and has applied legal precision and narrative clarity to every venture he’s led, from early startups to global agencies and now to CatalystXL, the software-as-a-service company he founded to simplify how organizations communicate and operate. Russell has written for multiple publications — among them Detroit’s TBD Magazine — and contributed to Mastering Communication at Work along with two chapters in the New York Times bestseller, Spend Shift. He lives in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, with his wife, Amy Saunders Russell, their three River Rat children — Emma, Sam, and Trey — and their miniature schnauzer, Stella. The Russells divide their time between their home overlooking Lake St. Clair and their summer island retreat, Idle Isle, on the St. Lawrence River.