The Fantastic True Story of Mrs Koppendrayer’s Spectacular Strawberry Jam
Spearing Suckers
Dear Mattie, Nathaniel and Jacob,
“Amen, brother Ben, shot a rooster, got a hen.” When he came home from Vietnam this priceless adage came with him. He expanded the world for me through his stories from the other side of the world. “Your ass is grass and I’m the lawnmower,” he would say, quoting some drill sergeant. At nine years old, I was the beneficiary of an education few were privileged to have. Roger had spent one year in South East Asia as a soldier, in a country as unlike Mille Lacs County as anywhere could possibly be. It was a sad time when Roger left for Vietnam but his return was life changing and my ass was never mowed.
When he left we knew enough about war and Vietnam to know that a happy homecoming was not guaranteed. In 1968, our telephone was by our front door in a room with knotty pine walls on all sides. One night it rang when your aunt Charlotte was there to answer. She was told he was on his way home. We nearly danced.
Jacket purchased in Southeast Asia and given to the author as a gift from his brother after the latter returned home from Vietnam.
He might still have the pictures and slides he showed us after he was home for awhile. My uncles and aunts gathered in our living room to see them. His standing as a war veteran enhanced his status as he spoke of enormous planes, B-52’s, the trucks he drove, Carl Burris, other people he met, turkey blood soup, and blazing hot weather. For a few months he lived with us again, sheltered by the same roof under which he was raised. My siblings and I were lighter when he returned; Our step had more spring.
One mile to the west, south of county road 13, Mike Mathison left for Vietnam not long after Roger came home. When his body returned in the summer of 1969, no one had a spring in their step. Mike never saw a happy homecoming or his 19th birthday. Nearly 50 years later while in DC with a group of my Civics students, I found his name on the Vietnam War Memorial. Staring at it with students nearly the same age as Mike when he was killed by small arms fire, I wanted to swear and spit. I kept my thoughts silent. I prayed instead. The average American GI in Vietnam was very young.
Roger’s absence was everywhere on our farm during his year at war. He was not with us when we ate supper around the table, the one we now keep in our farmhouse. Mealtime prayers reminded us one was missing. My dad asked God to bless our food, send rain, forgive our many sins and heal whoever because, as he phrased it, “Thou alone art the good and great physician”. He added requests for Roger’s protection nearly every night. If for a couple of weeks a letter from him was not in our mailbox, fear wedged into dad’s voice during prayer. My mother read the bible and we prayed again - a prayer of thanks for whatever version of meat and potatoes we had for supper.
For about two hours after supper we milked cows, fed them, and fed their calves. Midwestern dairy barns, with few exceptions, had two levels. Cows stood, held in place by stanchions that fit behind their large ears preventing them from pulling their heads out. The two rows of cows faced opposite directions; Each row had a concrete manger in front of the stanchions from which the cows ate. Behind them was a gutter for manure and urine. Above them was the haybarn - some called it a hay loft. Ours held several tons of baled hay, stored there to feed the cattle through winter. You can see what this looks like if you sneak a peek into Clarence Steeves’ old barn just off County road 13.
Sometime in 1967, the light bulb in our haybarn burned out. On winter nights, our haybarn was an 80 foot black chasm. While my siblings and dad milked cows below, it was my job to roll bales of hay I could barely lift, and push through two holes in the floor to the cows below. We called it, “throwing down hay.” The darkness of the huge space terrified me. Pulling on the twine strings of each bale I was scared senseless of the men in my mind who had crept up the night before and hid there, ready to break my neck or slit my throat to prevent me from exposing their hiding place.
The light socket holding the impotent lightbulb was attached to the underside of the barn roof about twenty five feet from the floor of the haybarn. A conveyor for moving hay bales from the west end of the haybarn to the east end, made of long, thin, round metal pipes, rested on the large cross planks of the rafters near the peak. None of us could do what Roger did. He could crawl across the barn on the conveyor to a point nearest the socket. Wedging his left foot under one of the metal pipes and stretching his torso and right arm several feet, he could reach the socket. When he returned from VietNam, the dead bulb was waiting for him, a visible symbol that we were waiting for him. His dad was waiting for him. His mother and his siblings were waiting for him. He unscrewed the old bulb, dropped it onto the soft bales below, and replaced it with a new one. The haybarn lit up.
It was about a year later that he took your uncle Kevin and me, late at night, well after dark, to what was then a remote area of the West Branch of the Rum river. On the north side of the 120 acres dad had bought from the Stolsens, not far from where it entered Fred Witte’s pasture, we looked for Suckers. It’s easy to remember it was springtime. One only spears sucker fish in the springtime.
In the diary my dad kept during World War II, he mentions spearing suckers. Several times. The entries are nearly all from 1940 to 1945 during the month of April in those years. South of the Foley Road and just across the road from his mother’s farm, the West Branch curves to the east and flows over short runs of shallow rapids, great for sucker fish. Sucker fish, like Carp and Red Horse, are commonly called rough fish because they are less desirable for eating than Walleye or Perch or pan fish like Crappie and BlueGill. Rough Fish, especially Suckers, eat whatever lies on the bottom of the river including fecal matter. Suckers have large oval-shaped mouths, well formed for slurping up whatever lies on the riverbed. Rough fish are tolerated; not sought after.
Peter was a member of one of my Canadian congregations and a lawyer. A medium sized man with above average intensity. Together for breakfast one morning, he borrowed from the low reputation of rough fish to entertain me while waiting for others to join us.. “Arlan,” he said, “what’s the difference between a lawyer and a carp?” As I looked up from my menu with a blank stare, he served the punchline. “One’s a scum-sucking bottom dweller, the other’s a fish.” His eyes were lit by the satisfaction of a self-assured soul enjoying self-deprecating humor. Canadians eat peameal bacon - a boneless pork loin rolled in cornmeal. I decided on it with eggs and french toast before I remembered a seminary professor who once remarked that the ability to poke fun at oneself might be a sign of maturity.
There was a small town barber who gave haircuts to the local Catholic Priest, the Baptist Church Pastor, and a Dutch Calvinist Minister all on the same day. He refused to accept payment from any of them because, as he said, “They were doing the Lord’s work”. The following morning while unlocking his barbershop to open for business, he found a bottle of wine with a thank you note attached from the Priest. Alongside that was a cherry pie, fresh baked by the Baptist pastor’s wife, and another thank you note. On the other side of the front door stood seven more Dutch Calvinist Pastors waiting for a haircut.
I accepted Peter’s offer to pay for my breakfast.
On April 20, 1943, dad wrote in his diary, “John, Albert, Wayne, Herman and I got 27 fish.” I’m pretty sure the fish were Suckers. Suckers run as soon as the ice is out; Red Horse a little later.
Spearing depends on knowing when the suckers are spawning or “running” as most said; likewise for other rough fish.
Dad’s brother, uncle Albert, was known to stand beside a creek or small river, pause and listen. “I can hear the fish in the water,” he told Roger. Uncle Albert lived near the West Branch of the Rum nearly all his life. His ears told him there were fish in the river; the trees showed him what species of fish he heard. “The Red Horse run when the plum trees are blossoming,” he would say. White blossoms on a small thicket of trees indicated a fish with a reddish-orange tail and fins was spawning. His generation in Mille lacs County knew that.
Oak trees on the river’s bank give them away too. Your uncle Leroy claimed the World War II generation said, “The Red Horse run when oak leaves are the size of squirrels ears.”
Roger carried the lantern as we walked against the very cold current. That spearing Suckers with artificial light has been illegal in Minnesota for a long time only intensified the experience of seeing their form in the clear springtime water against the river-bottom late at night, easily one of the most memorable experiences of my entire life.
When dad went spearing in the late 40’s, he occasionally took his oldest daughter, your aunt Fran. “I can remember throwing the lantern into the woods and running when a car stopped on the bridge. The neighbors sure got a kick out of it when we came out and found it was them and not the game warden.” Nearly 82 years old, her recall made it sound like it happened last week. “More than once we dipped our lantern into the river to put out the fire. The lantern immediately exploded. But we were never caught,” she said.
Moving upstream, Roger told us what to do if a game warden should show up as we walked a sandy-muddy riverbed about 30 feet wide next to a field lined by oaks an hour north of Minneapolis looking for a fish almost no one really wanted. Though barely nine years old but able to drive a tractor, I sensed I was being taught a skill for the fun of it and not because it was badly needed.. “If a Game Warden comes, drop the lamp in the river. Head for the brush, lay down and don't move. They will never find you if you don’t move. They see movement. Laying still in the dark you are really hard to find.” My younger brother instincts told me these insights were not learned from our farming, Dutch Calvinist dad, but in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in army basic training then refined on the other side of the planet.
Hanging on the wall of his garage, your uncle Richard has a spear he made in a high school welding class. Spear-making was removed from the high school curriculum when I taught. Four or five tines, needle-sharp at the tips, are held together as one assembly on a five foot long handle. There was a slight flare jutting out just before the metal tip to keep the flailing fish from slipping off the spear when lifted from the cold water. Roger told us to, “Put the tips of the spears about an inch into the water before you jam the spear through the sucker’s head. That way you can see better where to thrust the spear. You want to get it about a half inch behind its eyes.” It mostly worked. Kevin speared two fish that night, both of them through their heads. I speared only one, and about an inch in front of the tail, far from its eyes, the tips of the spear through the fish and two inches into the riverbottom. Roger helped me by sticking his hands into the cold water he grabbed the fish to keep it from wiggling off the spear. “Ok, lift the spear,” he said. He held onto the fish as I lifted it from the river. Before that it never occurred to me I would actually get one. My sense of accomplishment was higher than the Foshay Tower.
On a spring night in 1969, just before the Plum trees blossomed, where the West Branch of the Rum River flowed alongside my dad’s field and entered into Fred Witte’s pasture, an important part of my soul was shaped while walking against the cold river current. The oak leaves were not yet the size of squirrels ears when my Vietnam veteran brother held a lantern so he could help his younger brothers spot scum sucking bottom dwellers and spear them. Life does not get better than that and it doesn’t have to.