The Making Of A Master Baiter.

 By

Kurt Dehmer

 My name is Rusty A. Buttons and I think the following story contains a lesson. While I’m not exactly sure what that lesson is, or even if it was worth learning, it has to be in there somewhere. I mean in a situation that plays its self out like one of those “It Happened To Me,” comic strips that they used to have in Outdoor Life, there has to be some sort of lesson. Doesn’t there?

It was a cool misty evening in late September. I had just turned twenty-three, and was desperately thumbing through the pile of mail on the back table near the crew-room door. The whole room had that far-from-comfort odor of Pine Sol, grease, and brazed salmon with white wine sauce. However, my focus was on the mail, and another type of sauce that happened to be the best-kept guiding secret in Alaska.

I held on to a twilighting hope that one of the girls I had been chasing back home in June had remembered my sorry ass. They hadn’t, I puffed a defeated breath through my lips sounding like a worn out Evinrude and opened the ancient, humming, puke green Fridgeidaire. Inside rested half a dozen Zip-Lock bags of salmon roe that had been bound for pea gravel redds only hours before. I emptied the contents of one bag directly into the giant glass pitcher of an industrial grade blender. Six skeins blobbed precariously, and Jell-O like on the blender blades awaiting their transformation. I snugged the lid on the pitcher, hit the switch, and in a grating buzz and whir the eggs were rendered into a pornographic-pink protein shake that would have made the folks at Met Rx gasp in horror. I emptied this sludge into a squirty style water bottle, and repeated the process three more times, filling brim full four identical bottles. I placed these bottles back in the fridge and sighed in the heavy, fatigued way that only tired fishing guides can. The piss warm shower I had recently taken failed to loosen the poorly tied nail knot in my spine, I grabbed the economy sized Ibuprofen bottle from off the top of the fridge, popped the cap off, and shook the last three capsules into my palm. These I washed down with two cupfuls of scorched battery acid that had been filtered through a soiled jock strap. This dank liquid had the color, and fleeting aroma of coffee. I topped this nutritional menagerie off with a tremendous pinch of Beechnut chewing tobacco. With this medicinal cocktail throbbing through me I checked the mail one more time. I could have missed the letter I was hoping to get from Hanna. Hanna was somewhat of a romance prospect back in the real world. When I left home in early June she had been in the running for Miss Rodeo Butte, she must have won, leaving her little or no time to respond to my letters. Upon second inspection, the mail pile was as pathetic and forlorn as it had been the first time through.

   Leaving the crew-room I could hear the raucous banter of my clients echoing from the guest dining room. “Sunsabitches,” I thought and let the kitchen door slam with a hollow boom. I shot a long amber stream of tobacco spit into the drooping face of one of hundreds of potted daisies that had been flown up from Seattle earlier that spring.  I looked out across the only grass lawn in Sanity and sucked in a long cool lung full of moist Alaskan air. Maybe it was those half-frozen and dying flowers, or the late afternoon slant of the light, but I had a moment. For a split second I teetered on the edge of a kind of self-acceptance and resignation what can only be described as a Redneck Zen. Smacking a cluster of no-see-ums off the back of my neck, I let it pass.  “Sunsabitches,” I thought again and trudged back to the hovel where I slept.

            I was in the final weeks of my fourth season with Big Windy Lodge. BWL, as the crew so affectionately acronymed the place, was one of the oldest lodges in Alaska. She was also the only self-proclaimed; five-star, fly-fishing, fly out, six-grand-a-week circus in the vast expanse of water and sky, known simply as “the bush.”  All of BWL’s buildings sat on rotting, shimmed-up foundations overlooking Severson’s Bay in the teeny-tiny bush village of Sanity, Alaska. Everybody, especially the guests, made jokes about the name of this village, and after four summers these jokes were no longer funny. It felt like each Sanity remark I heard began to rob me of a little of my own.

Sanity is home to the only big airstrip in that section of the state. By big I mean simply this, twice a week an old C-130 would off load everything from gas to groceries, then fire up and take off again. It was the low roll of those giant rotary engines swinging back toward Anchorage that I heard as I trudged down the wooden walkway toward the crew quarters.

   When I entered my room the only bright spot in the dimness was Nate’s jerry rigged coffee can lamp. It blasted a harsh sixty watts of brilliance on the plywood wall he was using as a creative canvas. He was almost finished with her, the Pin-Up mermaid, complete with Rainbow trout tail, cupie doll lips, and centerfold breasts. He had been working on this project since July. A week of bad weather had kept the camp laid low under an icy fog, so with an almost dry Sharpie and some pilfered Crayolas, Nate had started to scribble out of sheer boredom. Since then she had become a bit more than a way to pass the time, rather this particular masterpiece was the embodiment of what four months of bush plane rides, salmon lunches, and listening to ones own endless bullshit, could do to a relatively stable human being.

            “You ‘bout ready to roll bud?”

            “Yepper, my gear’s all packed,” Nate cocked his head toward the giant green roll top dry-bag on the floor. “And, I’m almost finished with ‘Autumn’ here”, he stepped back crayons poking out between his fingers. “Ahh, yes I do believe her to be… complete.” With a mock flourish he bowed to his creation simultaneously pulling a fat joint from the front pocket of his sweatshirt. The big doobie pinched between his lips he took two steeps back and framed the mermaid with his thumbs and forefingers. “She, is all we long to have Rusty, she is what we’re searching for.” And with that he popped a kitchen-match off his thumb, filling our cramped space with sulfur and the thick skunky tang of burning reefer.

            “ No bud, she’s what yer searchin’ for. All I’m searchin’ for is a roommate who isn’t too stoned to guide in the next half-hour.” I pulled my salmon blood, grease stained and AquaSeal patched Gore-Tex waders on, and shoved the neoprene stocking feet into a threadbare almost felt-less pair of wading boots. “ You know where I might be able to find one of those?”

            “Shit man, I’m cool, just gotta prepare my self for the job man. It’s like my organic Prozac, ya know.”

            “ Just be ready in fifteen, we’re pushin’ the sun down on this ride.”

            I left Nate alone to contemplate his graffiti, and enjoy the last of his dope. I headed back up the slope toward the kitchen and crew dining area lugging two dry bags full of gear. I had exactly one week left of work, and I knew that my bosses were going to work me just this side of dead before I got to leave. Tonight’s fools’ foray was just the beginning, an overnight, “camp on the hole” trip, with five clients and the lodge’s owner. All of them who now happened to be deep into the third day of a week long bender that had no appearances of slackening. I hustled through the crew room once again, grabbing the squirty bottles out of the fridge. I checked each lid for maximum tightness and set them in my dry bag. I was choking down the last of a mostly brown banana when the squat form of my manager trounced in. “So, looks like your ready. Where’s Nate?”

            “Comin’.”

            “Well you guys gotta help me load the tent, the cots, and sleeping bags in the Otter,” Brad huffed. Brad Singleton was an Oregon salmon guide who’d struck the jackpot. Somehow he’d ridden a streak of dumb luck for six-years as the general manager of BWL, the amazing thing about Brad and the function he preformed, was his complete and utter lack of people skills. He stood about five foot four, had the stocky build of an amateur power-lifter in the process of letting himself go. Brad often times wore the expression of a chimpanzee who’d just been given a rubix cube. He lived his life the way he managed the lodge, with great difficulty. His current conundrum was this evenings adventure, the drunken brainchild of BWL’s owner, Dick Robertson.

            Dick was the sort of person who would have benefited from a frequent flyer program at Betty Ford. He would nosedive off the wagon of sobriety at least twice a season and if the drunken mayhem got bad enough, Brad would send him to Anchorage. I figured that this sunset departure to Lower Ptarmigan Creek was Dick’s last stand. His behavior had been bad enough this season that his wife had actually left him, whereas in years past she had only threatened. I could tell by the look of defeat on Brad’s face that he was finally realizing he was terrible at his job, but was the only person dumb enough to put up with Dick.

            “Tell you what Brad. Why don’t you make sure ol’ rummy and the rest of these guys are ready to go. Nate and I can load the gear.”

            “ Well don’t forget to do it right, you know how pissed JD gets when you load the plane wrong.” This was one of the things that really got to me, no matter how much seniority I had at this place, Brad treated me like I was as dumb as he was.

            “Brad,” I spat his name. “You know that Nate and I are going on this God-damned goat-rodeo, because JD requested us. I think that he’ll be alright with how we load the plane for a fifteen minute flight!” Brad just stood there in his bovine like befuddlement.

            “I’uz just sayin’.”

            “Brad, just go deal with Dick and his merry assholes, ok.” With that I left the crew room once again and headed down the plank walk toward the docked floatplane. Nate was already standing on the dock tossing gear into the rear-door of Whiskey-Tango. N690WT was a red, white, and blue 1954 DeHavilland Otter, and on this evening she was straight out of an Alaska Board Of Tourism post-card, bobbing there in the slight chop, fog shrouded mountains in the background. Had I not seen the clouds open up and start pissing down drizzle I might have waxed nostalgic.

            “Haeey, Rusty-man.” It was JD whom had lived in Sanity so long that his voice had taken on the over annunciated lilt common to the Inuit villagers. JD might have very well been the best Otter pilot in all of Alaska, which put him in the running for best bush pilot worldwide. However he was in the classic bush pilot sense, a bit “off”. If the weather got bad, like it was doing now he would talk to himself in the third person. “Oooo, JD no like this rainy weather, not good.” This would continue while Nate and myself loaded the plane. I climbed up into the gray half-light of the aircraft and began stuffing what appeared to be the entire camping section of a Cabela’s super store into the small cubbyhole baggage compartment. I was consciously trying to save room for my dry bag.  I could envision nothing worse than having all of my gear covered with the stinky ooze of roe gravy, because the bottles had been squished by the weight of all this other gear.

            “ Hey man where we goin’, Everest?” Nate looked up though the hatch at me, his ginning eyes squinty and blood shot, “like when I was in Nepal man…, you know what we are dude?”

            “No Nate, what are we?”

            “Bud, we’re the Sherpas of salmon, sharing a common thread with those human beasts of burden in far off lands. Isn’t it cool.” Nate was a real philosopher when he was stoned. I listened half-heartedly to the rest of his musings, while I rope ratcheted the pile of gear down. JD fought his way up the loading ladder and into the plane, the dimensions of the Otter forced one to stoop while standing, after twenty-seven years it had taken its toll on JD’s body. He huffed with pain as he passed me squeezing into the cockpit, grunting his approval at my stowage job. I jumped back on the dock hearing the whine of the primer pump.

            “CLEAR PROP!”

            “CLEAR PROP”, Nate and I hollered back, as the tri-bladed propeller whirred and shuddered into idle. It sounded like twenty Harleys in a recital hall, I hunched lower into my jacket, trying to brace against the cold spray thrown up by the prop and the ever-increasing size of the falling raindrops.

            “Hey, Sheep Fucker…,” it was Dick’s unmistakable raspy growl of a voice. I turned my gaze from the mesmerizing spatter of the rain drops on the glassy lake. Dick was leading an awkward looking troupe of Gore-Tex clad millionaires down the grassy slope toward the dock. The entire platoon of them was obviously intoxicated, three of the five slipped and fell on the wet grass forcing Nate and I to rush and help them up. “Sheep Fucker, did ya’ bring the secret sauce?”

            “Yes sir, it’s in the plane.’

            “D’I ever tell you boys why we call Rusty here Sheep Fucker?” Dick loved to ridicule me by telling his guests that I was the bastard son of a sheep farmer’s daughter. I never knew where he got this, and needles to say it was beginning to get on my nerves. I think he may have been jealous that a kid from a cattle ranch in Montana was far superior to him as a fisherman, and most definitely as a human being My thoughts as he fumbled his way into the plane concerned him and a lunch encounter with a hungry griz. The rest of the guests loaded, I don’t really remember their names; one was the son of some  corporate billionaire, one was an ex-dot-comer who’d sold his shares in pornfreeusa.com or freepornusa.com (I don’t recall which), the other was a plastic surgeon who had done his best work on some of organized crimes’ top bosses, and the last two were brothers who had franchised, in turn, a doughnut chain, then a string of fitness clubs.

I flipped loose the catch lines from cleats on the dock, pushed the Otter out into the chop and hopped on the float. I had to ride the float for a few hundred yards to assure that we cleared the dock before JD gunned the palne into take off. The trick to this was getting in the plane before the backwash of the prop knocked me into the lake. After four summers I was able to clamber around the running gear of the planes like a red-assed lemur.  I slammed the door with a tinny clunk and gave JD the nod. He worked the flaps eased the throttle lever forward and we were air borne. Nate was already dozing in the jump seat to my right. He squinted at me from underneath his cap and handed me an ear bud headset from a Walkman. I slipped the phones on underneath the hard-shell muffs we all wore so the eight hundred horses of the planes engine wouldn’t cause us to go deaf. Above the muffled roar eased the fish belly smooth voice of Old Blue Eyes. Nate raided his eyebrows and grinned. The first few bars of “Come fly with me,” slid me into a doze as Whiskey-Tango banked right, and nosed through the pinkening light toward Ptarmigan Creek.

                   The plane throttled down, I sat up fast nudging Nate in the shin with my boot. We touched down and slow taxied into the lagoon that had been formed by the eternal lapping a of Big Windy against the mouth of the creek. Nate and I hopped out onto the float. The rain was falling as if from buckets, and we grimaced at each other and leapt from the float into the shallow water. We hand turned the plane, swinging its nose back out into open water. The guys began to unload stumbling onto the bank rod tubes in hand. Nate, JD, and I hustled about the task of unloading all their gear. Making no motion to help Dick and his guests lounged on the bank passing a bottle of wine and shouting something like encouragement. JD started to get pissed, throwing dry bags, and other gear at random out the door. He looked like a bear digging after a marmot, his angry haste was effective, and the plane was empty in seconds. One could almost make out his caveman raging muffled inside the Otter as he slammed the door. He restarted the engine, lowered the flaps, and gunned the throttle taking off in a gale of prop backwash, blowing the hats off of our jeering spectators. JD banked and circled the plane, her engine roaring sympatheticly to her pilot’s rage in the open quiet of the evening bush. He swung back toward the group sitting on the bank. Nate and I looked at each other with dinner plate eyes and hunkered low, JD buzzed mere feet off the tundra his left arm extended out the pilot’s window in the rain. His chubby middle finger neatly extended in Dick’s direction JD gunned back toward Sanity.

            Dick and his boys rolled in laughter on the bank, “ Oh I love pissin’ that crazy son of a bitch off,” he slurred. “Hey boys, get up here and start setting this tent up. Can’t have my guests’ equipment getting damp can I?” I shook my head and hoped that JD hadn’t busted one of those bottles in my bag in his flailing haste. “Nate you get that tent staked out. Sheep Fucker you run up stream and “season” The Rock. We’re gonna’ hang a couple hogs before bed!” The guests were all fumbling with booze heavy, cold numbed fingers trying to set up rods and tie on flies. Nate was busy rolling out the giant tent and motioned me up stream. I opened up my bag and felt around inside, I whispered a silent prayer of thanks that all the bottles were uncrushed and still sealed. Grabbing one I ran up stream past the giant boulder known as The Rock. I waded slowly out into the middle of the creek looking suspiciously over my shoulders as I did so. The reason being was that Ptarmigan Creek was watched over by ADF&G troopers who had a cabin on a bluff over looking the entire drainage. No smoke puffed from the little chimney, the jet boat was moored high and dry, and the place looked vacant. I flipped open the squirt top of the bottle and squeezed. The instant the milky pink ooze blended smoke like into the cold water the shallows erupted with the emerald backed swirling of behemoth rainbow trout. The bottle half empty I trudged back out of the water and down the bank to assist Dick and his guests with their rods.            

            What I had just done was highly illegal. The reason we were ordered to chum, or bait up these fish, was because the clientele at BWL was one of the most inept groups of water-whippers in the lodge business, as was Dick. However he and Brad constantly filled the lodge to capacity forcing their guides into the compromising position of what I’d come to know as Master Baiters. In short we chummed the shit out of every rainbow fishery in the Big Windy drainage and our guests took home the trophy rainbow pictures to prove it.

            When I got back down to camp Nate had the tent set up and the Coleman stove going under the blue tarp awning, boiling up a pot of coffee. The guests stumbled in and out of the tent in their stupor as I corrected, and retied their tackle. Dick had already low holed everyone and was hooting in excitement at the bend in his rod, a giant chromer leapt from the creek, and shot down stream. One of the doughnut brothers ran down the bank with a video camera, the other’s clambering to get lines in the water. Before succumbing to exhaustion and booze, the six of them they had managed to land one thirty-plus inch trout apiece. It was still raining hard and was all out dark by the time everyone was out of the water. Had I have said “nice fish” one more time I would have shot myself. The group headed into the tent, no expense being spared three propane heaters assured that they would stay warm and dry, while in contrast Nate and I would sit up all night under the awning waiting for sunrise.

            Shivering in the cold Nate and I could hear the drunken chatter from inside the tent. The squeak of wine corks being pulled from bottles and the gasp after the shots of eighty dollar a glass Scotch was telling a story of a hard morning for our illustrious owner and his brave clients. I had just dozed off when the plastic surgeon stepped out into the drizzle. “ Goddamn it I’m thirsty, I need some water.” Before I could react he had tilted his head back and was squirting the remnants of a chum bottle into his mouth.

            “Oh shit,” I muttered under my breath.

            “Blaaagh, what in the hell is that crap?” 

            “Oh that’s my protein shake,” Nate muttered nonchalantly from under his hood. “I brought a couple, you guys should all drink some, it will keep ya from being all hung-over in the mornin’.”

            “Really?” The surgeon gaped.

            “Really?” I nudged him in the ribs.

            “Oh, hell yeah man, rich in vitamin B flushes the toxins outa’ the blood stream.” Nate didn’t so much as flinch. That doctor grabbed three more chum bottles and disappeared back into the tent.

            “Fellas, hey fellas, here drink this up, it prevents hangovers.” Nate and I chuckled at the gags and forced swallows as Dick and his clients drank the bottles of chum. The glow in the tent went promptly out and was soon followed by a racket of drunken snores. I looked off to the East and the horizon was beginning to lighten.

            “Hey bud, d’you bring your rod?” Nate whispered, both of us now fully awake.

            “Yeah. Why?”

            “Well you know I was thinkin’ that we sort of can’t get fired for fishin’ with less than a week left…”

            “And?”

            “See it’s light enough for you and me to fish, all that booze these guys drank is gonna curdle that chum, and they’re gonna’ feel like hammered shit once it starts.”

            “So you’re sayin’ we should enjoy our last big fishin’ trip, maybe land a couple hogs, jobs be damned?”

            “Yepper! That I am!” With that we leapt to out feet and each loaded up a giant wad of Beechnut. We looked at each other grinning while we rigged our rods, donned vests and checked the film in our cameras. I was boiling over with joy, and I had to admit that I felt more kinship toward that pot smokin’ hippie than I had toward anyone else in a long time. He unzipped the door of the tent and disappeared inside for a moment. I wondered what the hell he was doing, hoping Dick didn’t wake up and ruin what was unfolding as the best way of getting fired I had ever imagined. I heard a shuffle and then the telltale tearing sound of duct tape being pulled off a roll. In a few minutes Nate emerged grinning like a Cheshire cat who’d just eaten a ton of shit. He promptly turned zipped the tent back down and pulled a suitcase lock from his jacket pocket.  We were now both laughing uncontrollably running up the bank like two kids out of a classroom on the first day of summer break. Once we got to The Rock we rigged our rods and caught the faint sound of the first retching from camp. Nate produced an expensive looking flask bearing Dick’s initials from his jacket. He twisted the cap off in a deft poetic motion.

            “Here’s to our jobs Mr. Sheep Fucker.”

            “Indeed, you filthy hippie,” I slugged back a smooth shot and then passed the flask back to Nate. By this time the sound of the puking from camp had increased, as had the cursing and struggling with the tape that bound each man in his sleeping bag.

            “Hey Nate”, I hollered wading out. “What’d you say to guaranteeing our success,” I pulled the last bottle of chum out of my jacket pocket.

            “Rusty, you are by far the greatest Master Baiter in the history of BWL.” Before the last drop of chum hit the water Nate was hooked-up into a giant bow, the lodge record. Which was the first of twenty huge bows we caught that cold, foggy morning.

We did end up getting fired, but it was overwhelmingly worth it. JD stole the Otter and flew us to Anchorage that very afternoon. He also bought my first class ticket back to Montana.

What happened after that I don’t know for sure, I heard rumors that JD bought Dick out and fired Brad. I sent this story into Outdoor Life for one of those “It Happened To Me” comic strips, but it was rejected. However a couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Fishventure Magazine, and there on the cover was JD sitting proud at the stick of Whisky-Tango, Nate standing regally on the float. The plane looked the same except for air-brushed on her fuselage up near the nose was a pinup mermaid, and beneath her tail was a new name, Master Baiter’s Lodge. There’s got to be a lesson in there somewhere? Right?