Days 100 - 104, August 28 to September 1, Lake Icaria, Iowa

You may recall that in early August I spent several days with one of my oldest friends, Buck Boehm, helping him improve his fly-fishing skills in Montana.  This week I’m in Iowa, where Buck resides, and we’ve been back at it together, trying to catch some fish.  In this case, largemouth bass rather than trout have been our targets.

I had hoped to fish more than I have while I’ve been in Iowa the past several days.  I graduated from Valley High School in West Des Moines and I have three degrees from Iowa State University in Ames.  I started my accounting career in Des Moines, working there for seven years before Trish and I moved to New York and eventually to Los Angeles and Bucks County, PA.  I had some of my earliest bass and bluegill fishing experiences, including experiences with a fly rod, while in graduate school at ISU.  So I have a major soft spot in my heart for Iowa.  As I’ve journeyed around the country, I’ve looked forward to revisiting Iowa and fishing here.  The problem has been that the best fishing opportunities here are on the lakes, and a boat is almost a necessity to exploit those opportunities.  On Monday I was able to borrow a kayak, but then a storm rolled in that night – rain and wind nixed my fishing plans for Tuesday.

But on Wednesday the sun came out and I drove from Walnut to Corning, Iowa, which is near beautiful and uncrowded (at least during midweek) Lake Icaria.  Driving through the rolling hills of southwest Iowa, I felt like I was moving through a modernized 3D version of a Grant Wood painting.  As in Wood’s art, there were stylized fields of tall corn and beans flowing up and down the hillsides, dotted with white farmhouses, red barns and gleaming silos.  The modern elements in the scenery included dozens of towering white windmills, courtesy of the 21^st century drive to develop clean energy.  I was strangely comforted by their presence and had no doubt that Grant Wood would have happily incorporated them in his paintings if they had existed then.  When the wind farms in the area were first proposed, I thought they would be eyesores, but in fact they are quite dramatic and seem as if they have been there for centuries, like the wooden windmills of Holland.  As I write this, back in my father-in-law’s home in Walnut, I can see from his picture window a trio of tapered blades spinning in a crisp south wind striking a distant tower.  It’s quite beautiful.

When I arrived in Corning at noon Wednesday, I surveyed the dining options in downtown and selected Kay’s Kafe as the place to meet Buck, who arrived soon after I did.  Among the local farmers who wandered in to have lunch with friends, we consumed some hardy farm-style cooking before heading for nearby Lake Icaria.  On the way out of town I noticed the building in the picture below:

That scene brought back a lot of memories.  The bank in the picture is one of dozens for which, early in my accounting career, I supervised the performance of “Director’s exams” and audits.  It’s strange now to think about how my colleagues and I spent our summers traveling around to little towns like Corning to work in these little banks.  On a typical day in such a place, we might work late for one or two evenings so we could get ahead of schedule and create short days later in the week.  On the short days we often played golf at a local course, and almost always we searched out the best little cafés, and sometimes lounges, in the area.  We had a lot of fun together, to be sure.  Many of the folks I worked with then remain my friends today.  None of us will forget the crazy things we did while on the road on those sweltering days in the heartland, surrounded by cornfields.  We could almost hear the corn growing as we lay in our beds, sweating out the hot nights in mom-and-pop motels.

When Buck and I left Corning, we soon found that the Lake Icaria campgrounds with electric hookups were fully occupied with RVs.   The vast majority of the RVs were void of people – their owners had set up these rigs to hold their places pending arrival of their families on Friday for the Labor Day weekend.  We decided to park Camelot in an empty non-electric campground, which afforded us considerable privacy, a nice breeze and excellent evening shade.  Once we established our campsite we went to the marina, rented a roomy aluminum jon boat and began exploring the lake.

The guy who ran the marina wasn’t particularly forthcoming with useful fishing advice, but I had come equipped with a map that I obtained on the internet showing the contours of the lake bottom and the location of underwater structure, including brush and rock piles.  I had a notion that bass could be found near the brush piles just offshore of sharp points, and that’s where we started.  Fortunately, I guessed correctly.  I’ve watched enough bass-fishing TV shows to know that shad patterns often work well for bass in the heat of the summer (the temperature was about 90 degrees when we started out), so I tied on one of those.  In short order I caught a fat largemouth.  Here he is:

 

If the expression on my excessively hirsute face appears to be somewhat pained, it may be because I just plopped my rump on an aluminum boat seat that had been absorbing the heat of the afternoon sun.  But that was of little consequence to me – I was just glad to have figured out how to catch bass after hearing nothing but “slow fishing” reports about Icaria and other western Iowa lakes.  The fishing definitely wasn’t slow by ordinary bass-fishing standards.  Within a couple of hours I caught three more bass of similar size to, or larger than, the one in the picture, and brought another one to the boat before it threw the hook.

Buck was trying other techniques, including live worms that he acquired in Adel that morning, but after a while he tied on a shad lure similar to mine.  Before long he found himself pumping on a big bass that he yanked out of deep brush.  As we were mutually rejoicing, Buck’s reel suddenly detached itself from his rod.  He had little choice but to drop the rod and reel in the bottom of the boat, grab the bare monofilament line and start hand-lining the fish, hillbilly style.  As I laughed heartily, Buck succeeded in bringing the big bass to the side of the boat.  Just when we thought the fish was his, it made a sudden leap, splashing Buck with green water, pulling the knot loose from the lure and finning away post haste into the depths from which it had come.  All we could do was laugh.  That’s fishing.

Buck and I capped off the evening at our campsite with a bottle of Spanish wine and a couple of ribeye steaks that we cooked to perfection over a campfire.  We talked into the wee hours, reminiscing about old times and old friends, discussing poetry and music and philosophy, and in general reinforcing the deep connection we’ve had with one another for almost 40 years.  It was another marvelous time on a glorious evening in Iowa, much like those we enjoyed decades ago.  The novelist Thomas Wolfe famously said that “you can’t go home again.”  But the fact is, you can.