River People: Dave's Stuff

The first time I fished with Dave Lemmen I showed up with an old bamboo fly rod bought at a flea market for a quarter and some K-Mart flies. Because he was a gentleman it took him about five minutes to comment: "A guy who writes as much as you do about fishing ought to have better equipment." He then picked up my rod, fingered the cheap reel, and simply said, "Jeesh." A week later we were in the local Orvis shop, "making up for past bad judgment."

Before I met him, one fly rod was the same as another - the cheaper the better, and better always meant Zebco. Reels were only places to store line until it rotted. I thought flies were something you bought in individual blister packs at the local bait shop and vests were made out of old boy scout shirts. It seemed simple enough before Dave: less is more.

He had exquisite Orvis gear. And he had everything. CFO reels in several sizes, a plethora of rods of assorted lengths, vests, and boxes of flies beyond comprehension. He seemed to live by the principle that your wealth was measured in African village standards. Instead of cows showing relative holdings, it was flies and fly fishing paraphernalia.

For years Dave and I fished the Mainstream of the Au Sable, always careful to check with the locals in Grayling for particular hatches, tallying the previous night's fishing like baseball scores. We imagined that our lives were legendary and each time out we tried to add to the legend. We fished like demons: up late fishing hex hatches for days on end, then rising early for streamer fishing and dawn breakfasts. I slept in his den and marveled at the mounds of outdoor gear, the dressers laden with every kind of fishing and hunting paraphernalia imaginable. It looked like an annex to Abercrombie and Fitch.

We gave our spirits to the river too. We named places like Barth's Water where we fished Hendricksons at the mouth of a feeder stream and then picnicked on the hummock of grass and red pines that marked its inflow. We drank and laughed our way down the river in Dave's riverboat, floating nightly, first for rainbows below White Pine campground and then stalking huge browns gorging themselves on hex flies.

Through it all, almost twenty years, Dave was a consummate friend, a man who raised friendship to the level of art. What I didn't have in the way of gear or clothing he either loaned or gave to me. He knew fly fishing and gear better than anyone I knew and organized his life around those moments when he brought his stuff from the closet into the daylight.

What I marvel at now is the range he had as a person. He fished and hunted, knew the best ways to gather leeches for Canadian walleye trips, the best places to snare nightcrawlers. A college sociology professor by training, he left his job at Alma College, moved north to Grayling, and became a probation and parole agent. Each trip into his office meant a trip downtown for coffee followed by a swing by the Old Au Sable or The Fly Factory for a look at the latest flies being tied, or another piece of gear to add to our collections.

Three years ago one of the worst fires in the history of Crawford County took his house, his beloved pets, and all of his gear. I was there the day after the fire sorting through ashes for anything recognizable. We found the charred carcasses of two of his three dogs, and three mangled Orvis reels. We buried the dogs in the heat and smoke and I sent the reels in with a plea for new ones. Weeks later, after his close friends had given Dave a new "Far and Fine," two new reels and spools came from Tom Rosenbauer at Orvis. Dave was back on the gear trail.

Chalk the next hit in his life up to his reaction to such a severe loss, chalk it up to bad luck, or to the twist of fate that strikes us down. Dave was diagnosed with lymphoma six months after the fire. Two years passed with a regimen of chemotherapy, operations at Mayo, a bone marrow transplant in Nebraska. In December, more than a year ago, my best friend, a compadre on the stream and in my life, died at fifty. My last words to him, while he lay in a coma were, "I'll meet you at the river."

Imagine confronting a pile of your best friend's fishing gear stacked in the corner of his guest bedroom. I had spent years fishing with him, watching him handle his gear like a pro. My first impulse was to sift through the cache of gear, holding each item in my hands.

His wife, Nancy, and I carried his stuff to the river and began sorting it out with the help of another friend, making sure there was something for each of his inner circle of fishing friends, men who had shared the river with him for the last twenty years. We talked carefully, our goal being that each friend had something of substance, something of practical use, something to help continue Dave's memory when we used his gear on the river.

One friend in particular, a pharmaceutical salesman, received not only some of Dave's gear, but also got back all the drug advertising giveaways he had supplied Dave in recent years: compazine night lights, Tagamet hats, a collection of pens and pencils all with different names of drugs emblazoned on them.

At our fifteenth annual fishing trip/poker blow-out on the North Branch that Dave had masterminded in the beginning, I parceled out the bags of Dave's stuff to each friend. The moment, without Dave, was penetrating, opening again the wound of loss, the terrible void of his absence. The group's agony was broken when our drug-selling friend laughed himself onto the floor getting his handouts back. We then drank a toast to Dave, thanking him for his gifts but especially for his gift of friendship.

Later that night I sorted through what I'd given myself from Dave's gear: two boxes of flies, a Patagonia vest, and a pair of bifocals to string around my neck. The flies, mostly small daytime flies for float fishing would come in handy in the spots where Dave always pointed out likely brook trout habitat when we floated below Camp Chicago. Another box was filled with terrestrials; bright hoppers with rubber legs, dry skunks - the flies of August and September when we'd float the bigger water below McMaster's Bridge rolling big browns in the bright sunlight along grassy banks.

Now I carry some prized possessions of a dear friend in my fishing vest. I take them out almost every day. When my hands go down into his vest I think of him: master angler, a man of letters, a true friend who raised the art of friendship to brilliance. The hours I spent in the front of his riverboat were laced with banter, therapy, the balm of his laughter. For me, Dave Lemmen was a living admonition to literally treat life as a feast.

Certainly, I will miss all the gifts he offered every year by his presence. But the great joy is that I had him as a friend for so many years. I miss him most when I'm on the river, when I'm using his flies, or stuffing a cheap cigar back into his vest. I now fish almost exclusively with the rod Dave willed to me. I meet him at the river every time I step in; he's there, of course, at every bend, behind every sweeper, his spirit abiding in each fish rising.

RWOL

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