All the Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswomen's Notebook

BORDER WATER

THE RAINY IS A GREAT, wide, slow-moving river that runs from east to west, through forests and farms, at the top of Minnesota, separating the state from Canada. Because it is a border water, you can fish the river in early April, after the ice has gone out, a full month before you can fish inland waters.

Craig and I are on our way to the Rainy to fish for spring walleyes. It’s hard to imagine, he says as we drive along the Minnesota side of the river, looking across at the brown grass and the farms on the opposite bank, that just over there is another country. On both sides of the river there are brown grass and trees and red barns and silver silos. It looks the same. Over there, Ontario, rust-colored grass and trees. Over here, Minnesota, rust-colored grass and trees. It is hard to imagine. But it is a different country, a place boys rowed across to in rickety boats to avoid being sent to Vietnam. It is beautiful and open and wild along the river. Behind the trees on the Canadian side there is a railroad track, and occasionally a freight train roars by, speeding as trains do only in the country.

We have purchased Canadian fishing licenses so that we can fish both sides of the river. We have also purchased three dozen minnows and salted them down. You can use Minnesota minnows on the Canadian side as long as they are dead. If you want to use live minnows on the Canadian side, you must buy them in Canada. But you can’t cross the border checkpoint at International Falls or Baudette with live minnows, so if you want to legally fish with live minnows on the Canadian side, you must launch your boat in Canada, which means you must patronize the Canadian resorts, of which there are none on this stretch of the Rainy.

As Craig drives, I read the fishing regulations. I turn to the fish consumption advisory. It says that on the Rainy River between International Falls and Lake of the Woods no one should eat more than one fish meal per month of any size of any species caught there, especially if you are pregnant or plan to be, ever, or are nursing, or plan to, ever, or if you are less than ten years old. For years the Boise Cascade paper mill at International Falls has dumped dioxin, mercury and other poisons into the river. The large fish in the river taste slightly metallic. Two decades earlier, the river was a slime pit of stinking paper pulp, great pods of which would burp open on the water and emit putrid gas. Now at least, old-timers say, the visible pollution is gone, the water is clear and there are fish here again.

Why are we coming here if all we’re doing is poisoning ourselves? I ask Craig. But I know why, of course. We are going to be out on the first open water of the season and we are going to fish. That means sitting still and thinking and maybe reading if I get bored, talking quietly about important things, watching the sky, seeing an eagle fly over, a few mallards whiz upriver, the brown grass on the bank, the current bringing big sticks past.

Craig says, Why doesn’t someone sue Boise Cascade’s ass? I don’t know how they can get away with polluting like that.

This is a trip Craig and I have taken for four years in a row. These traditional things are important, he says. It’s important to have a history of experience together.

His eyes are on the road, and I watch his profile: a sharp forehead and nose, cheeks, eyes, and lips framed by a closely trimmed gray-black beard, and a sloppy, sweat-stained gray Stetson. He looks very young to me, and slightly naive; like a Boy Scout still. I agree with him about the importance of ritual. We fish rainbow trout in the fall at Benjamin Lake for two weekends. We walk the logging trails around Blackduck for grouse. Then there is the season for ducks and geese near Thief Lake. Then we hunt deer in the woods of northern Minnesota to fill our freezer for the winter. When it snows we ski, and when the lakes freeze we fish through the ice for crappies. In the spring comes the Rainy River, then walking in the woods for morel mushrooms, then summer walleye fishing on big, smooth lakes. Our year together is spent in these ways. It is what we do.

But I am uneasy about the trip to the Rainy this time. For one thing, it is always difficult, physically demanding. To load and unload a boat, walk up and down the steep, slippery hill from the river to camp in heavy boots, all is wearing on my body. I get tired. I worry that I am becoming soft and weak. The weather is always unpredictable. One year as Craig and I bobbed in the current, jerking our minnow-baited jigs up and down, snow fell and ice chunks floated past us. Another year it was so warm we fished in shirt sleeves. This year the weather is in the middle, sunny and cold. But still there is the physical work of it. Hauling. Endless hauling.

But I know my unease has less to do with this, and more to do with the first year we came here. The fishing was so good that year that the river was a solid mass of boats, gunnel to gunnel, bow touching bow, stern to bow, stern to stern. It was sunny, and everyone was having a wonderful time, lifting huge fish from the muddy water, smiling, laughing, weighing the fish, some putting the big ones back, but others keeping stringers of seven-pound fish, whole stringers of fish that would not even taste good, fish that would taste like metal.

At the boat ramp, men milled around, laughing and smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and pop. They were drunken, overloaded, dangerous. The wives and girlfriends of the fishermen stood with poodles on leashes, holding children by the hand, taking pictures of the great catches of fish. The fish-cleaning house was packed, and there was a line outside. The garbage cans in the fish house were overflowing with guts and the orange eggs of the huge spawning female walleyes. Fish heads with shining black eyes flowed out onto the ground. Flies buzzed around.

I was as giddy as all the rest with our success. Every cast brought in another huge green and gold fish, tugging at my line, twisting and spinning in the water, curved gracefully in the landing net, all muscle. We didn’t keep them all, only the small ones. And we only kept our limit: twelve.

We camp this year, as always, at Franz Jevne State Park on the river. It is not much of a park; a few dirt pullouts and two outhouses. The roads are winding and muddy, and the park is dark. Our small camp is in the middle of tall evergreens. I feel vaguely gloomy. Surrounded. It is dim and cool, early evening, and the men around us in other camps are lighting lanterns, starting campfires, firing up cooking stoves. I smell fish and onions and wood smoke. I see shadows moving behind the canvas walls of tents. I hear muffled, rough voices. I am the only woman here.

In the women’s outhouse I sit down to pee and look at the wall in front of me. There is a crude drawing in thick black marker of a woman’s vulva, a hairless mound, lips open wide, folds of flesh deep inside. The rest of the body is absent. There is no head, no face, no eyes, no mouth, no arms or legs. Just this one piece, open and dripping, as if it were cut off with a cleaver and set apart. I imagine it wrapped up in white butcher paper, the kind we’ll use to wrap the walleyes we catch here. I want to fill your pussy with a load of hot come, the writing above this picture says. Cold air is blowing up from the pit below me, hitting my warm skin. My muscles shrink. On another wall is an erect penis, huge and hairless, drawn in the same black marker. The head on the penis looks to me strangely like the head of a walleye with its gills spread wide. There is no body attached to the penis either, just a straight vertical line from which the organ springs. I want to fuck your wet pussy. Let’s meet. is scrawled next to it.

I am suddenly terrified and sickened. I hear a threat: I want to rape you; I want to dissect you. I can’t pee anymore. The muscles of my stomach and thighs have pulled into themselves protectively, huddling. Between my legs now feels like a faraway cold world, not a part of me. I yank up my long underwear and wool pants, getting shirt-tails tucked into the wrong places, and leave with my zipper still down, happy to be outside. As I walk back to our camp I look over my shoulder and left and right into the woods. I wonder if it was that man, or that one, or that one, who wrote this violence on the wall. I am out of breath and still afraid when I tell Craig all of this. I tell him it makes me want to run and it freezes me in place. My voice is wavering. He tells me it is in the men’s outhouse, too: a picture of another naked, dripping vulva and the words, This is my girlfriend’s pussy. I ask Craig, How would you feel if in the men’s john a woman had written ‘I want to cut your dick off’ or ‘This is my boyfriend’s cock’? I want to know if this would scare him, too. He says, I’d watch out.

We are anchored in the current, our jigs bouncing on the bottom of the river. The river is wide and powerful and brown. It smells like cold steel. Craig wonders aloud why in all this water the poison and its smell do not dissipate. We are not catching many fish, but some. Crowded around us are men in boats. This is a good spot, on the Canadian side of the river, and the boats push together here. There are no other women on the water. Only men with other men. Some are drinking Diet Coke and munching on crackers as they wait for fish to bite. Others are swigging beer, cracking jokes, laughing. Cigar and cigarette smoke wafts up into the air. I feel as if Craig and I are being watched. Craig feels this too. A man and a woman in a boat. We watch ourselves being watched. He says, All these guys are out here to get away from their wives.

One of Craig’s newspaper colleagues asked him once, in a voice that pleaded with Craig to come clean, to tell the truth, to join the club, Do you really enjoy fishing with your wife? Every time Craig remembers this he laughs. He repeats it sometimes when we are making love in the tall grass beside a trout stream, or when we are stretched out naked together under the covers in our van. He leans over now and asks, smiling, Do you really think I can have any fun fishing with my wife?

We are dressed in heavy wool pants and sweaters and big felt-lined boots. Craig asks me, when I am dressed like this, if I think anyone can tell I am a woman. The sweater and down jacket hide my breasts. My long blonde hair is under a hat, my face is buried in wool, no one can see my earrings. What would be the thing that would make them know I was not a man among men? What is the line I would have to cross for them to know for sure that I was different from them?

Only when I speak, I say. Or maybe when you lean over in the boat and kiss me. Then maybe they would think I was a woman. But I wouldn’t necessarily have to be.

Until recently it never occurred to me to wonder why I was the only woman I knew who walked in the woods with a shotgun looking for grouse, or sat in a duck blind or a goose blind, or crouched up in a tree with a rifle waiting for deer, or went fishing on the Rainy River. It never occurred to me to wonder because I never felt alone, before now.

I used to hate being a woman. When I was very young, I believed I was a boy. I raced boxcars made from orange crates, played football with the neighbor boys and let them experiment with my body, the parts of which seemed uninteresting to me and not valuable. I was with them, watching myself in the light in their eyes, looking at me. I was flattered in high school when someone said to me, I like you. You’re just like a guy. The words I liked best to hear were: rangy, tough, smart, cynical. My father made jokes about women’s libbers burning bras. I laughed too. Throughout college I never knew what it was like to touch a woman, to kiss a woman, to have a woman as a friend. All my friends were men. I am thirty years old now, and I feel alone. I am not a man. Knowing this is like an earthquake. Just now all the lies are starting to unfold. I don’t blend in as well or as easily as I used to. I refuse to stay on either side of the line.

In the boat next to ours is a quiet man with a fixed smile who has been catching all the fish. He is over a drop-off, his jig sinking exactly twenty-one feet. That is where the fish are. I ask him where he is from, my voice echoing across the water. He says he is from Warren, Minnesota. I ask him if he knows the boy I read about in the newspaper who got kicked out of West Point and was suing for his right to go back. The boy was his town’s pride: a track star, a member of the choir, an honor student, handsome, full of promise. At West Point, too, he was full of promise. With his beautiful voice, he sang solo at the White House for the President. Then, on a tip from one of the boy’s high school chums, the military started digging around in his past. Before they found out what he knew they would, he came forward and told them the truth. I’m gay, sir, he told his commanding officer.

The man from Warren pushes his baseball cap back on his head and squints at the sun. He says to me, across the water, I knew that boy really well. He was a model for the community. A model for all the younger kids. He is shaking his head. It’s hard to figure out, he says. Just so darned hard to figure out why he’d go and do such a thing and ruin his future like that.

I hope he wins his case against West Point, I say. There is more I ache to add. I want to yell across to him, What’s to figure out? He loves men. But I say no more and turn away, ashamed of my silence. As I turn away, the man from Warren is still shaking his head. It’s just so hard to figure out.

Craig and I came to the Rainy partly to meet and fish with some old friends of mine, Kevin and Brad, whom I met while reporting for the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota. Kevin and Brad have brought their friend John with them. John is the fishing columnist for the paper and also a professor of English. He is originally from Mississippi.

Around the campfire at night, Kevin tells us about his latest assignment. He is organizing a special section on wolves. The people of Roseau, Minnesota, believe they have a wolf problem and want the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to get rid of some of the animals.

John is slouched by the fire with his feet straight out, taking long drinks from a bottle of root beer schnapps. Brad and Craig are standing, their hands in their pockets, looking down at the flames and coals. Kevin puts a wad of chewing tobacco behind his lower lip. I squat by the fire, hunched over a mug of tea. John passes me the bottle of schnapps and I hesitate, but I am so curious to taste it. I take a small sip and make a face.

Kevin says, Farmers think the wolf pack is purposely underestimated.

Craig asks, You mean the government is lying about how many wolves there are so the farmers don’t get upset?

It’s more than the wolf they want to kill, I say. It’s what the wolf represents.

What’s that? Brad says.

Lust, I say. They laugh.

They want control, Craig says. They want control over nature. That’s what management is all about. It’s for us, not the animals. Just like with this river. Craig waves his hand toward the dark water.

It stinks, Brad says.

Literally, Kevin says.

Buffalo shit, John says.

We all look at him and wait.

Do ya’ll know how much the rivers were polluted by buffalo shit? Millions of buffalo shitting in the rivers back before the white man came and after? He’s not laughing.

Why, our screwing up the earth and killing animals, it’s as natural as buffalo shit, he says. We’re part of nature too, hell. If you fuck around with nature—try to clean up the river, protect the wolves—you’ll upset the whole balance of time and evolution. Just leave things be.

There is a long, uncomfortable silence. Then Craig says, The world has had millions of years to get used to buffalo shit. But no matter how much buffalo dung there is in a river, it still will never be as bad as dioxin.

The next day, Sunday, is the day we leave. Craig and I fish from early morning until noon. When it comes time to load the boat and return to St. Paul, one of us has to get out onshore and drive the car to the boat landing. And one of us has to take the boat by water. I want to go by water, to go fast and have the spray fly up around me and the front of the boat rise out of the river.

Craig says, You take the boat. This is what I want to do, but I am afraid.

Really? I ask him. Really, I can drive it down? I expect not to be trusted.

What about rocks? I ask.

Watch out for them, he says, very casually. He has no second thoughts. He does not understand my timidity.

Once, in the spring, a friend and I sat on the steps of Lind Hall at the University of Minnesota and watched a group of boys playing on their skateboards, jumping high in the air, knees pulled up, big, orange high-tops hovering off the ground, their skateboards flipping under them, over and over. Then the boys would land safely. Then, there they would go again, taking a running leap onto a cement bench, turning on top of it and coming off again, graceful and noisy. My friend said, Guys are brought up to think they can do everything.

I think of this as I pull away from the shore, waving at Craig. I think of my brothers, Austin and Edward, who climb cliffs and fly airplanes. Many women, I think, grow up believing they can’t do anything. One of the tasks I believe I never will be able to do is backing the trailer into the water to load or launch the boat. I have tried and nearly every time have ruined something: cranked the trailer around to dangerous angles, smashed a taillight, backed off the edge of the boat ramp, put the van in reverse instead of forward and driven it into the water to the top of the wheel wells. I know that I can learn to do this physical, mechanical task. What I regret is that I do not simply assume I can do it. I wish I could charge into it without reserve, full of confidence, free of doubt. Like a man might.

I have learned from Craig that it is not only my gender that dictates my insecurity. When we put the boat in at the Rainy River, Craig is always nervous. He believes he is being watched and judged. But, unlike me, he is protected from ridicule. When we bought the van it came with a bumper sticker, left there by its previous owner. It says Vietnam Veterans of America. Craig believes this sticker gives him certain privileges and encourages respect in parking lots and at boat ramps. It prevents laughter. I often think he wishes he had earned this bumper sticker rather than bought it. He was training to be a Navy pilot when the war ended and he was sent home. Sometimes when he meets a man his age and picks up a hint or a clue, he asks them, shyly, Were you in Nam? Sometimes they say yes and ask him if he was, and he says, almost apologetically, No. Almost.

I drive the boat down the river, watching out for rocks. I must not hit any rocks. If I hit rocks, I will have failed. I see rocks ahead, but also a spot that looks deep. I go for what I think is the deepest water. Spray comes over the bow and sides. I am bobbing along, zooming, my hair flying out behind