In memory of Donald A. Calder
A great bass fisherman, an even better fisher of men…
9/5/29 – 8/3/15
I quartered my streamer up-current and let it sink, dead drift, in the river braid. As it swept past me, I pulled it back in short strips interspersed with a pause – letting the olive marabou and the silly legs of the fly do an enticing water dance. Midway back the fly stopped abruptly and I swept-set the hook. My fly rod took a deep bend with the pull of a solid fish. Nothing exploded skyward on the set, so I knew this was not a smallmouth bass. Whatever this was just throbbed in the current, moving powerfully upriver, then twisting back with random but decidedly heavy surges that tested my drag. The fight continued a time; a tug of war followed by heavy sullen plodding. I started to think I had a big channel catfish on the line.
The fish continued the fight even at my feet, then finally emerged, turning away once more with the slap of its tail. I saw in that boil of river water, green and gold and white and began to wonder about this “catfish.” Then I brought to hand the biggest walleye of my fly fishing life…
I pulled him up carefully, respectful of his canines and sharp gill plates, and laid him where the river lapped the bank. Standing back with camera in hand, I marveled at his length, the green mottling of his back against golden-hued flanks and his ivory-white underbelly. His river camouflage was that of a warplane – coloring that made him invisible against the sky from below and perfectly invisible against the river bottom when seen from above.
After a quick picture I returned the walleye to the river. With one hand beneath his broad pectoral fins and the other grasping the narrow of his tail, I held him head-up into the current. His gills flared and as I felt the life come back to him, I loosened my grip at the base of his tail. With a strong sway of his head he pulled away and slipped back to the river, swimming slowly across the braid, melting into the bottom. And that is when I remembered Don and smiled to myself at the thought of his disdain for walleyes: “they fight like a bag of rocks”, I’d heard him say on more than a few occasions.
“All Americans believe that they are born fishermen. For a man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother-love or hating moonlight.”
John Steinbeck
It was in August of 2015 that I got a call from Bill – Don’s son and a best high school friend – that Don had passed away from cancer. And so I made my way down to northern New Jersey on a hot humid day to attend his memorial service and to give the family my personal condolences. The service was light-hearted, as I am sure Don would have wanted it. Afterwards, there was a reception at “The Legion”, a place Don frequented to have a beer with old warriors.
Now, some 6 years since Don forever hung up his spinning rod, I continue to fly fish and I think of Don. I target the smallmouth bass, my favorite gamefish – and Don’s favorite as well. But us anglers cannot always choose the fish that respond to our offerings. And on that recent foggy summer morning, a walleye took my fly, and Don came down to earth…
A part of my personal philosophy is that fishermen are born but never really die. Those that eventually slip the grips of gravity end up hanging around us, the water-bound, and watch the casts we make. We are reminded of these old fishermen in odd ways. When I am lucky enough on my home water, a nice smallmouth will launch skyward after taking my streamer and will invariably bring a smile to my face just as it did for Don. I pass an angler at the fishing access, enjoying a cold can of Budweiser after a hot day on the river, and I am again reminded of him, a tall lanky guy who sported a ball of a beer belly later in life, and who was rarely seen when land-borne without a Bud in hand. The wind whips up on the river and there he is again – Don just hated the wind, though as a spin fisherman, I never completely understood why – us fly fishers have a bit more of a valid objection. Pike remind me of him too – that peculiar smell of their slime has never left me ever since first landing one on a big Mepps spinner fished from Don’s boat. And of course there are stories from times I did not fish with him – the time Don used a large spring-device to keep a pike’s toothy yap open while removing a hook. After removing the hook, Don released the pike, forgetting that he needed to remove the spring!
Don was more than a fisherman who could tell stories. He could engage one so very well that once he caught you, it was rare you’d ever want to be released from his sense of humor and maybe too, his wisdom. For memories of fish and fishermen have always been magical in their ability to grow larger than life. The smallmouth Don caught and released will always be bigger than my own. This is a fisherman’s right, just as it is to pick and choose the stories that we leave behind. And, as with Don, a fisherman but always first a fisher of men, some of them scorn walleyes…
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