Adventure and the Gate Keeper Bass
July 9th 2019 6:52am no clouds, warm and humid a perfect summer day. The kind of summer day that made you forget about the long cold days of February in northern Wisconsin. I had biked the five miles to the 44 acre, sixty five foot deep Little Bass Lake in Oneida County. Little Bass Lake is surrounded by the Northern Highland American Legion State forest it has no homes on its shore just a two mile long dirt road that leads to a tiny parking area and a boat landing for non-motorized boats. The first draft of this story was written after I had gone on a three hour circumnavigated snorkel of Little Bass Lake as I leaned against a birch tree drying off in the sun being kept company by a not so overwhelming annoyance of deer flies and mosquitoes.
The surface of Little Bass Lake was smooth and complacent interrupted occasionally by a pan fish breakfasting on a bug that lay on the surface. I gear up with my snorkeling equipment and camera and enter the water deep enough to put my flippers on. There is no shock to my system as I submerge myself in the water the warm days and knights have taken that out of the water.
I adjust my mask and notice that I have been enfolded by a throng of tiny one to three inch sunfish curious to see if I may be something to eat. The sunfish scatter with my sudden movement forward as I work my way into a patch of lily pads.
In theory I’m seeking to take that one exquisite underwater photograph but in reality the atmosphere of the adventure, exploration and experience cannot be fully summarized in words and photos.
A chorus of croaking frogs echo’s across the lily pads as I serpentine through them and curious bass and pan fish shadow my movements. I move out of the lily pads and down the shore line past sunken downed trees and abandoned for this season fish nests. Groups of fish come and go from my vision as I flipper over bright green clouds of cotton candy like algae that rest on the bottom made neon green by the morning sun shine.
On the west side of the lake is a long and elevated Glacially formed bank with a unnatural cutout that had been hand dug by loggers in the late eighteen hundreds to help expedite the vast forests of this area to sawmills.
I look down the dugout channel the sunlight not being able extend through the thick cover of leaves from the trees that lined its banks. The channel is fifty yards long and opened up into a swampy area on the other side. The channel is filled with three feet of water thanks to four years of record breaking amounts of rain and snow.
I slowly snorkel in to the channel trying not to kick up sediment with my flipper-ed feet. The water is clear but dark from lack of light, the tees that line its banks roots poke out into the water in spots but nothing else grows in the dugout channel.
Ten yards in a grizzled good sized bass with a scare at the hinge of its jaw (photo 006) possibly from a fight with a fishermen comes to within twelve inches of my masked face and seems to be trying to stare me down.
I lightly flipper myself further in as the bass darts from one side to the other slowing down when it comes in front of me giving me the watchful eye , this must be the gatekeeper of the dugout channel. The pass to enter must be persistence when I reach the opposite end of the channel the bass has left me.
As I enter the swampy end the water feels colder, ten to fifteen degrees colder the swamp must be the source of a spring. The swamp ranged in depth from eight to thirty six inches deep the water was clear and populated with several different verities of fresh water aquatic plants their names I do not know and a half dozen very tiny pan fish that didn’t take much notice of me.
I try to orbit the edges of the swamp grounding myself on ocations having to back up and adjust my course. On one of my course adjustments I encounter a unique algae form. Six to eight inches long, two to three inches across attached to a stick that had fallen in the water is a pale see through green self-contained, artistically designed delicately formed geometrical universe.
I admire and photo it wondering what it might be and as I move on I see more of them roughly the same size most attached to something but a few have come lose and are floating free. My skin has become goose pimpled, my hands ached with stiffness and an ice cream headache was farming in my frontal lobe from the cold spring water it was time to leave the swamp. As I neared the exit of the dugout channel I could feel the water warming and the grizzled gate keeper bass let me pass with little notice.
I enter the main part of the lake and investigate more of the shoreline and go around a point entering a small bay of the lake. At the end of the bay a great white pine has succumbed to storms and the consequences of time and has fallen in the water its trunk still attached to the shore (photo 009). Half of its great length is underwater the other half is above the waterline its branches (photo 010) reaching out to the sky making it look like a prehistoric leviathan entering the water after a nap on the sunny shore.
I’m guessing that the tree was over a hundred years old; at its base I could not come even close to getting my arms around it and not having the patience to try and count its rings this seemed like a good indicator of what its age might be.
The white pine for most of its life was a spot for eagles to sit and survey there territory or chickadees to build a nest to raise their young or to give a red squirrel a branch to sit on while it gnawed on a pine cone. Now it was providing shelter for small fish or a hiding place for bigger fish trying to surprise its prey the pine no longer living but still part of life.
I watched and photo’d under the old pine a group of pan fish and bass who seemed unfazed by my presence until my stomach growled with hunger and the fish scattered out of my sight. So like my ancient ancestors who crawled up out of the primordial ooze looking for something to eat and wondering how many more miliniea it would be before they could get a pizza delivered I to needed to get out of the water and get something to eat.
