Reminiscing

I have a lot of friends, which is mostly a function of my age. You can accumulate a lot of them in seven-plus (okay, almost eight) decades. Among them are Jim and Loah Clement from Mandan, North Dakota. I’ve known them since we were all three learning to walk. We grew up together in Hettinger, in southwest North Dakota. We all moved to Mandan, across the river from the state capital, about the same time, in the 1970s.

The other day I got a handwritten letter in the mail from Loah. It said this:

Hi, Jim,

Jim had this in a file—I’m not sure when you gave it to him.

Our 4 kids were here last week and we shared it with them. Also at that time I made an extra copy to send to you.

It’s wonderful in so many ways, not only to appreciate James, but also the nostalgia of youth, friends, small towns, your dad and mine.

We gave a copy to Jim’s sisters Ceil Anne and Linda, as well.

We’re glad you know our son John. He learns from our generation . . . and his Grandpa James’s.

Thanks again –

Loah and Jim.

With the note she sent me a copy of a 5-page typewritten reminiscence I wrote more than 30 years ago, probably for some publication–blogs hadn’t been invented yet. Nor had the Internet.

Loah and Jim have been married for a long, long time, probably more than 50 years. I’m not sure if they were high school sweethearts or if their romance started in college.

Loah’s dad, Joe Manning, with help from my dad, Whitey Fuglie, built the Hettinger golf course on some of Joe’s farm land around 1960, and Joe and his wife Hazel operated it for many years, until the Hettinger Park Board bought it from them.

Jim’s dad, Jimmy Clement, was a lawyer in Hettinger, and the Clements and Fuglies were friends and neighbors, as you will read in this article. Jim started Mandan Veterinary Clinic many years ago and took care of a lot of my hunting dogs. And we played volleyball together for quite a few years when we were younger, on a team sponsored by the Mandan NEWS, a gig that was mostly an excuse to get friends together for a few beers at the Mirror Bar on Thursday nights after the games. Jim and Loah’s son John is a carpenter and an all-around handyman who is doing some work on our house for us.

The article brought back good memories for me, so I thought I’d share it with you, since blogs have now been invented. Here’s what I wrote.

MEMORIES OF HETTINGER

I’ll never get used to spending the night in a motel room in Hettinger. After all, it’s my hometown. As long as I can remember, there’s been a Fuglie house in Hettinger. Four different ones, in fact, that my family lived in over a span of more than 40 years, including one with a barn.

That was the Johns House, named for a pioneer doctor who had built it and later rented it to my father. It had four lots: One for the house, one with a barn, one that served as a softball diamond and the great side yard, full of ancient American Elms, one large enough for the tree house that held most of the neighborhood boys—no girls allowed—when Kool-Aid time followed the softball game or the ante-over game around the barn.

The softball field was in back of our house, and home plate was right beside the driveway, just far enough from the house to keep errant foul balls from doing any damage. At the other end of the field, back behind second base, lived the Clements. Center field was actually the street separating our yards. Big kids weren’t allowed to play in the ball games at our house, because there was a real danger that a home run would bust out the Clements’ front window.  By the time I was old enough to hit it barely onto the street, still far short of the Clements’ front window, we moved. I think that was the end of the softball and ante games. Eventually the barn was torn down and, to our chagrin, one of the older Mattis boys built a house on the softball field.

But in the late summer of 1992, there was no Fuglie house in Hettinger. My mother had sold her house and moved to Bismarck to be near her grandchildren. And I, in Hettinger on business, was staying in a motel. It was a beautiful, warm summer night, one on which the hot August wind had whimpered into a refreshingly cool evening breeze 45 minutes before sunset, just like it’s supposed to. I debated partaking in conversation with the locals on a barstool at the Pastime against sunset over Mirror Lake, and decided the locals would still be there after dark, so I set out to walk around the lake, something I hadn’t done in probably 30 years.

I crossed the railroad tracks and wandered into Mirror Lake Park and then headed west to see the improvements that had been made in the years since I last walked this path. The path led to a suspension bridge over the west end of Hiddenwood Creek, the result of a railroad dam build early in the century a mile east of what is now North Dakota Highway 8.

The bridge works; I’m not sure how it survives. In my day, it would have been vandalized every Halloween and fixed the following spring, I’m certain. After crossing the bridge, I continued along a path that eventually led to the road on the south side of the lake, the road that heads east to the dam and the spillway.

Halfway down the road, just below what used to be Tank place (before Floyd Chalcraft built his house on the hill and they renamed the whole area the “Milwaukee Addition,” an act I thought at the time was pretty presumptuous for a town the size of Hettinger), three young men I didn’t know lazily drank Budweiser from a red cooler and watched their bobbers float in what couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4 feet of water. I didn’t stop, nor did I notice any action on the bobbers. The young men seemed to be there more for the relaxation than the fishing, I thought as I walked by.

But at the spillway, a different story. As I crossed the spillway and headed back north toward town, I could see, silhouetted by the setting sun, two anglers of a different sort. Fly fishermen. I paused. I knew there were a few fly fishermen in Hettinger, or used to be, my father among them. A few things about these fellows were readily apparent.

Perhaps 150 yards separated them, yet they seemed oblivious to each other—and to me. One, I discerned, was old Charlie Carter. I didn’t know him all that well, so I paused to watch the other. As he turned sideways toward the orange ball of the setting sun, I recognized the slight stoop in the shoulders (although, as I think about it, and I don’t think it was my imagination, he seemed to stand just a little straighter wearing waders in three feet of water than he had last time I saw him standing in his office wearing that brown suit) of the old man who had probably helped my parents a half dozen times with small legal problems and whose front window we had protected by keeping the big kids off the softball field, Jimmy Clement.

I knew Jimmy well enough to visit if he was a mind to, so I stopped and watched for a minute, then two, then five, then ten and more.

It was the perfect time of the day for bluegills on a dry fly. Back and forth, back and forth, with just the slightest flick of the wrist, the right arm seemed almost part of the long slender rod and forty feet or so of line that moved in the easy fluid motion of fifty years of practice. Pause as the line (braided, I think, with a clear monofilament leader) caressed the water; pause, twitch, pause, twitch, pause, twitch as the left hand pulled the line slowly back, until, at 10 feet, with no fish rising to take the fly, the slow, rhythmic motion of the right arm began again.

It was the only movement on the entire lake. His leges, encased in rubber waders in nearly three feet of water, didn’t move. His head, as a golfer’s head on a backswing, held deathly still. His torso, turning ever so slightly from side to side every second or third cast, and his arms, were the only movement.

I don’t remember today if he caught a fish. If he did, he surely deposited it through the slit in the top of the ancient leather and straw creel that hung under his left arm.

In ten minutes and more, his eyes never left the water. This was his world, and this was the way it should be on a summer night in August in Hettinger, North Dakota. I thought about calling out to him, some 30 feet from shore, for a visit. I decided against it. There was no reason to, really. I’d have had to ask how the fishing was, and we both knew that it didn’t matter if he caught a fish or ten, and other than the fact that there was no wind blowing on a perfect summer night, and my mother is doing just fine in Bismarck, and he still goes to the office most days for a while, and I still play on his son’s volleyball team, there really wasn’t much for us to talk about that would have been as important as what he was doing right then.

And so I walked on, marveling that things really don’t change much in 40 years. Except for the years when the lake silted in during the sixties and seventies, the bluegills and crappies and sunfish in Mirror Lake had provided thousands of evenings like that for Jimmy and my dad and dozens (but probably not hundreds) of other true fly fishermen. And if there was ever one thing my dad didn’t like on an evening like that, it was to be interrupted.