North with Doc: Doc Gets Blocked

Halfway through our week of fly-in fishing with Knobby’s out of Sioux Lookout, Doc sat in the pointy end of the boat and confronted me with a personal problem that I had seldom, if ever, experienced.

“It just won’t work,” Doc said. “No matter what I do, nothing happens.”

“Have you tried, um, stimulants?”

“Like what?”

“Something to get you in the mood,” I said.

“You mean pills?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Go for a walk. Read a book. Watch a movie. Take your mind off the task at hand, and see what happens.”

“Easy for you to say,” Doc said. “You write for a living.”

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“I feel so inadequate,” Doc said.

“Maybe that’s because you are.”

Doc tossed his boat cushion at me. I ducked, swung the tiller, and did a one-eighty to retrieve it from the tea-colored waters of one of the most gorgeous lakes we’d ever fished.

While the cushion dripped dry, I idled along a shoreline with the tops of fresh green reeds poking five inches out of four feet of warming water. We trolled spoons. Mine was a Five of Diamonds. Doc went with a Professor #3.

When Doc could converse without cursing, he said, “What is it called when the words won’t come?”

“Writer’s block,” I said. “It can be a result of fear that you are not good enough, you have an unreasonable deadline, or maybe you don’t feel inspired.”

“I have all of the above,” Doc said.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?”

And he did. For way too many years Doc had regaled the citizens of his small Iowa town with his Northwest Ontario fishing prowess. He had gained quite a reputation with the elbow benders down at the Rendezvous, and some over-served patrons even suggested a reality TV show starring Doc and featuring his five fishing companions. 

His sheer volume of epic tales eventually reached the ears of a high school English teacher who asked Doc to provide her senior class with a stirring account of his decades of pounding the water to a froth in search of walleyes and pike. She would use it as an example of expository writing. Doc told me he accepted the assignment with what the teacher said was grace and aplomb, although he had to look up “aplomb” because he thought it was either a fancy hairdo or some kind of fruit grown in the south of France. 

Paper and pen in hand, because the only apps on his iPad were email and solitaire, Doc was poised to record the saga. Yet, no words emerged. The dreaded writer’s block had come to call. And for a dentist, which was Doc’s chosen profession, that was like beginning a root canal, drilling into the pulp chamber, and having no clue what to do next. Ewww.

I had practiced my writing craft since I was knee-high to a hubcap. Cranking out hundreds of thousands of words to advertise stuff to various audiences for over 50 years was sometimes a struggle, but I never met a brick wall. I have heard that those who write fiction may come up against such a thing, but writer’s block is not allowed when deadlines and dollars are involved, so I did each job on time and on budget, and moved on to another.

I idled the engine while Doc reeled in a yard-long pike. A quick twist of needle-nose pliers, and the beauty was back in the drink.

On a slow troll again, I said, “So let me get this straight. You agreed to write an account of what happens up here?”

“That’s about it.”

“How long have you worked on it?”

“A good two weeks.”

“Okay, during those 14 days, how much time would you estimate you actually spent thinking about it?”

“A half hour?”

“Really gave it your all, huh?”

“The only writing I have ever done is prescriptions for toothache pain,” Doc said.

“And that probably looks like gibberish to anyone but a pharmacist.”

“Pretty much.”

We scored a pike two-fer, sent both happily home, and I said, “Since it’s your assignment, I won’t write it for you, Doc, but would you allow me to at least get you started?”

“Any help would be huge,” Doc said.

“Okay, let’s begin at the beginning,” I said. “When you were a little kid, how did most of your story books begin?”

Doc thought a second, then said, “Once upon a time?”

“There you go.”

“What?”

“Take off from there.”

“Like how?”

“Once upon a time, close to 40 years ago, a bunch of guys, six of us who loved to fish, got together to discuss an ad we saw in an outdoor magazine.”

“We did?”

“Think, Doc. Don’t you remember?”

“Give me a sec,” Doc said.

I gave him several.

“Okay. It’s coming back to me,” Doc said. He continued slowly, “You all came to my place, and we looked at this ad that had a picture of a float plane, and the headline was something like, ‘If you’ve only dreamed of a fly-in fishing trip, we can make your dream come true.’”

“What happened next?”

I could tell Doc was warming to the subject. “Well, someone said he had a friend who went to a fly-in lake in Northwest Ontario. Said it was the trip of a lifetime.”

“What else?”

“Someone said it would probably cost a fortune.”

“That was me.”

“But someone else said, ‘Why don’t we find out?’”

“And?”

“We did,” Doc said. “Turns out it wasn’t that much at all.”

“And?”

“We decided to give it a shot,” Doc said.

“So we just went?”

“Not quite,” Doc said. “First we had to clear it with our wives.”

“Or girlfriends at the time?”

“A couple of you were still single, yes,” Doc said.

“And, wonder of wonders, the ladies gave us the green light?”

“With a few conditions,” Doc said. “Like, my wife said I could go if she could do the same kind of getaway with her friends.”

“Fair enough. Right?”

“Right,” Doc said. “We booked Knobby’s the first week of June.”

“Where did we go on that inaugural trip?”

Doc closed his eyes, and said, “Below Slate Falls on Bamaji. Knobby had leased ancient bear and moose hunter cabins in the Ojibway village for his early fishing parties.” Doc’s eyes opened wide and he smiled at the recovered memory from so long ago. “We had driven across the border at International Falls, up through Kenora to Sioux Lookout. That was way before they built the diagonal highway to Dryden. The fly-in was amazing.”

“Tell me about the plane.”

Doc was getting excited. He said, “I think the first year Knobby flew us into the Bush in a de Havilland Otter. Incredibly noisy. And it was a rough ride.”

“Air sick bags?”

“Used plastic bread wrappers.”

“And ear plugs?”

“It was a few trips later before we packed those.”

“Were there other planes?”

Doc said, “Over the years Knobby also had a Twin Beech, a de Havilland Beaver, and used smaller Cessnas for mid-week check flights.”

“Today the main transport is a big Cessna turboprop.”

“Night and day compared to way back when.”

“Now you’re rolling,” I said. “What was the scenery like?”

“Oh, man,” Doc said. “From the air? Trees, trees, and more trees. Then dozens and dozens of lakes connected by rivers. As low as we flew, we even saw moose a couple times.”

While Doc held his rod butt between his knees, he lit up a cigar as big as a Nathan’s bun-size hot dog.

Trying to dodge the stomach-churning smoke cloud, I caught the mother of all snags: a reed root. It took a while to back the boat, then I guided an oar blade down the tight line, soaking my shirt to the armpit, until I felt the treble to push it free.

On the troll again, Doc said, “We had never, ever caught so many fish.”

“What kind?”

“Pike. What we Iowans called northerns back then. And walleyes by the dozens. It would be years before we’d be back fishing that same lake, and discover lake trout lived there, too. Down deep.”

I steered the little Lund a bit further out from the reeds. A few minutes later, I hooked a walleye that was perfect eating size. I put it on my snap stringer with two others, and dangled it over the side.

“Was it all about fishing?” I said.

“That was the driver, of course,” Doc said, “but after long, wonderful days on the water, we ate fresh-caught fish, and played poker late every night in flickering light from overhead Coleman lanterns. More than one of us banged our heads into those hissing monsters.”

“Primitive?”

“Was it ever. No electricity. No indoor plumbing. No refrigeration.”

“And you paid good money to do that?”

“It was so much fun,” Doc said. “We’d freeze bathing in the lake, cook on Coleman stoves, and the pilot told us where to find an ice house way back in the woods near a sawmill run by the Ojibways. We pulled huge blocks of crystal clear lake ice from the piles of sawdust.”

“By the time we got back to the cabin to fill our coolers, half the ice in the boat would be melted,” I said.

“Warm beer was the least of our worries,” Doc laughed. “The mosquitoes swarmed the two-holers like Aunt Lucy and her friends at a casino buffet.”

“And if the cabin windows had screens at all, they were so full of holes that mice could crawl through.”

“Which they did,” Doc said. “We had several loaves of bread and packages of cookies gnawed to pieces before we learned to put them out of reach.”

Doc reeled in and I did the same. I put the stringered fish in the boat, cranked up the little outboard, and 20 minutes later met up with the rest of the boys at a familiar rock-domed island we’d discovered decades before.

“How you boys doing?” the banker said.

“Lots of pike,” Doc said.

“Only need a few more walleyes for dinner,” I said.

“Gotcha covered,” the kid said, tossing a thumb at his boat. I could see several dorsal fins weaving just below the surface.

“Hey, Doc,” the attorney said, “what are you so smiley about?”

“Oh, just thinking about all the excellent times we’ve had up here.”

“It’s changed so much since the first trip,” the attorney said. “It’s like VIP all the way now.”

“Remember when we saw a boat go by with a moose in it?” the policeman said.

“How about running the rapids in two minutes, then taking two hours to portage back up?” I said.

“Who could forget the time Doc used a Bic razor blade to cut the hook out of your finger?” the attorney said.

“Using gin for an anesthetic,” I said.

“A plague of army worms.”

“Scraping ice off the boat seats.”

“Navigating a path through rocks the size of ‘58 Buicks.”

“A wolverine in the outhouse.”

“Getting soaked to the skin in two-dollar rain suits.”

“Bill the Raven knocking on the cabin door.”

“Mister Big escaping from a busted stringer.”

“And stacks of albums full of photos that were so identical we couldn’t tell what year it was or what lake we fished.”

Not a man spoke for a good two minutes. The breeze wafted through the trees. Mama mallards chuckled as they guided their broods through the shallows. A grouse thumped its love song. The water lapped ceaselessly against the rocky shore as it had done since glaciers had retreated to form the lake some 11,000 years ago.

Then a splash. Maybe a bald eagle collecting a meal for a fledgling eaglet. Or a beaver rebuilding its lodge after a stunningly cold winter. Or a pike’s tail sweeping the surface while chasing its prey. Or a caribou that had given birth on an island and was swimming with its calf to the mainland.

“Someone should write about this,” the policeman said.

“Nobody would believe half of it,” the kid said. “You guys’ve been doing this forever, and have enough stories to make a best seller.”

“The minute I get back,” Doc said, “while it’s still fresh in my mind, I’m going to write down some of the stuff that’s happened to us.”

“So,” the attorney said. “Suddenly you’re a writer?”

“My best buddy here showed me how,” Doc said, giving my shoulder a squeeze. And then, totally out of character for my fictional character, he said, “Thanks, Greg.”

And I said, “Thanks, Doc.”

---

This is the 200th North with Doc, a milestone achievement by columnist Greg Knowles, who’s been writing about Doc and the group’s Far North fishing adventures for In-Fisherman publications since 1989, the first handful of episodes appearing in Walleye In-Sider magazine. Knowles lives in Green Valley, Arizona. A 5-­volume set of the first 20 years of North with Doc is available in e-reader form at amazon.com.

---