Tom Heberlein’s ghost still lingers when guests enter the Old Tamarack Lodge, the professor’s aging shack in central Ashland County.
Though he’s been gone seven months now, you feel his friendly presence when opening Old T’s locked doors, inspecting the vestibule’s firewood, and hurrying indoors to escape your mosquito entourage, a summertime hazard in Wisconsin’s Northwoods.
Five steps later you picture Heberlein sipping coffee at the table, reading aloud a favorite line from a book or magazine he pulled from shelves on the shack’s eastern wall. If ol’ PointyHead was truly there, of course, he would have prefaced his narration with: “Hello, Scribbler! Listen to this …”
But he’s not, so you sigh, enter the adjacent “Captain’s Quarters” bunkroom and drop your gear on his chair by the window. You choose his chair over the lower bunk deliberately. It’s too soon to intrude on the man’s former bunk, even just to stash an overnight bag. After all, that’s where “the captain” spent the entire opening day of the November 2023 deer season; his last day at Old T.
His grandson found him lying there in the dark shack when returning from the woods after dusk, and rushed him to the Ashland hospital. Heberlein made it home to Madison a week later, but the countdown had begun and he was dead within five weeks.
With those memories plaguing your conscience, you unroll your sleeping bag across the top bunk, step atop the chair and climb aboard. Lying there in the dark, you hear winds rocking the forest and rain hammering the shack’s old shingles.
Breakfast the next morning is meager: granola bars and reheated coffee. A quick duty dominates dawn’s schedule. You grab a shovel and an 18-inch 2-by-6 board from the truck and hike south from the shack, hurrying to your task before the mosquitoes sound Reveille and turn to their torment.
Your good friend, Dave Burgess of Colorado, hikes effortlessly alongside. Once at Heberlein’s gravesite, you yank the wooden cross from its shallow hole in the red clay, and Burgess digs the hole a foot deeper. You then bolt the wooden extension to the cross’s shaft, seat it into the fresh hole, and supervise as Burgess shovels shut the hole, tamps things down and restacks the surrounding rocks.
A quick inspection convinces you the cross will no longer lean after you turn your back.
Minutes later you back your truck onto the Conley Road and fasten the chain across Old T’s driveway. Then you drive south to fish with John and Brenda Maier of True North Guiding and Outfitters, several miles east of Hayward.
Heberlein would have liked your plans, even though overnight downpours and brisk cold fronts seldom spur good fishing. Then again, good fishing is also about friendships, and Heberlein helped introduce you to the Maiers, however slowly and indirectly.
Funny how that can happen. You and the professor first exchanged business cards during a chance encounter near Woodruff in 1991. Though you visited by telephone that decade while doing interviews on work-related topics, you never visited Old T until passing through Mellen during a snowstorm in late November 1999. Then you started hunting deer from the shack in 2001, and became a regular in 2003 when Heberlein’s invitations were more implied than spoken, making deer season an annual obligation you embraced.
Within a decade, from afar, the Maiers noticed your frequent visits to Old T and the Chippewa Tavern in Clam Lake, roughly 15 miles south from Heberlein’s shack. They reached out and invited you to visit their place several miles west of the village. Another friendship took root and spread, eventually ensnaring Heberlein, too.
Brenda Maier, in fact, put Heberlein onto a Northwoods gobbler in May 2022. He flubbed the shot after Maier called the big bird into range, but that miss only strengthened their friendship. Funny how that can work, too. As Heberlein’s turkey hunt played out in futility, everyone shared their affections for the sprawling Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, the east and west forks of the Chippewa River, and the abundant fish and wildlife in both watersheds.
Heberlein neither fished nor floated either river fork with the Maiers, but he arranged for friends and relatives to fish with them during his final few years, and to report back with stories and photos.
And so it was that Burgess became yet another of the Maiers’ guests in mid-July for a float-and-cast daytrip for muskies, smallmouths or walleyes; whatever hit first. The plan called for John Maier to guide the float’s first four hours, and for Brenda Maier to take over after a midafternoon backwoods rendezvous. They explained they were babysitting grandkids, and let you decide for yourself which task required relief: directing fishermen or entertaining grandkids.
Either way, you agree these portions of the Chippewa River basin are gorgeous and mostly anonymous. Not once in nearly seven hours of drifting downriver do you see another human, except those in the Maiers’ boat. Maybe that’s because 58% of the 182,257-acre West Fork’s watershed is forest and another 33% is wetlands. The village of Clam Lake is the watershed’s only community.
The East Fork’s watershed lists 17 trout streams, more than any other watershed in the entire Upper Chippewa River Basin. Nearly all those streams hold beaver dams. This watershed is also flush with forests and wetlands, but sparse in agricultural activity. Glidden is the watershed’s only village.
When your trip ends with no hookups from two muskie strikes, and three fat smallmouth bass from twice that many strikes, the Maiers claim responsibility the meager results. Burgess wouldn’t accept their apologies, however, noting the harsh fishing conditions they faced: a rare July cold front, heavy overnight rains, high water and unusually fast currents.
But because Burgess is a polite man, he left unsaid the Maiers’ most daunting handicap: the daylong presence of an outdoor writer in the boat’s stern. Perhaps Heberlein could have exorcised such a curse, but in truth, fishing was never his priority.
Besides, friendship has its limits. In life or after death, friendships can’t end such a jinx. Although not as well-known, inviting a scribbler onto a fishing boat damns it more certainly than bananas ever will.
John Maier, left foreground, guides Dave Burgess, rear left, and Patrick Durkin on a fishing float trip for muskies and smallmouth bass near Clam Lake in Ashland County. — Patrick Durkin photo
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