Post Cards from the
Angry Trout Cafe

"I have come to understand my love for you. I came to you like a ma, world-weary, looking for a quiet place. The gas station and grocery store, the church...the river with its cool shady spots...good fishing." Jenkins, from "A Quiet Place"








Those old photos of me out there on the Grand Marais Bay ice don't really do me justice. That square jaw and engineer cap, all in black in white, of course, make me look pre-modern, like the second generation fellow whose family strolled over from Devonshire. No, there's was a lot more too. The days at the bay were anything but gray hues. The whole bay was a white fire, really, and there was always something inside, a similar fire, that didn't particularly like school and I might have played hooky to help Inky and Bjorn chop ice and haul it off the 'house' a block away. I lived my days according to cold calls of the wind, that's true; I might have been driven by the images of old towns along the old Brit coastline, where, if you were a good one, and cared about the mackerel, you caught only your limit with fair hooks, felt that fish, every inch, and understood its muscly miracle. How it had just minutes ago slipped up through that world you and I had planted in us night by night.