Flashback 1997: Gone fishin'—though it's hardly a lazy day

The Surveyor in 1997 (Photo from Sun-Times files)

      I'm going out onto the lake for a story later this week, which got me thinking about previous episodes of aquatic reportage. This is from the brief period when I was the environment reporter, and my 12 hours on the Surveyor probably constitutes the most physically unpleasant thing I've ever done for a story. When I phoned the fishery ahead of time, I remember asking if I should bring a lunch. "Bring a big one," Larry Champion said. "Because we're going to eat it." I scoffed that I had watched autopsies at the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office, and was made of stronger stuff. But he was right. The lake was so rough, at one point I clamped my eyes closed and tried to wish myself ashore. It didn't work.

     Just after 4 a.m., and Captain Larry Champion is walking through Joe's Fisheries, the last commercial fishing fleet operating out of Chicago.
     "I'm going to wake up my Indian friend," he says, going to where his first—and only—mate, Jerry Kingbird, a Chippewa Indian from Minnesota, sleeps in minimal comfort.
     Together they load ice into the Surveyor, a 48-foot steel bulldog of a boat. "Fleet" is a grand term for the three battered and aging boats Joe's Fisheries runs. Today the Surveyor, built in 1944, is the only one venturing onto the lake, leaving the dock at 1400 W. Cortland in search of the elusive chub. The stars are still out. The lights along the river throw gold on black water. Somewhere, a siren.
     "We shouldn't get our butts kicked half bad today," says Champion, 29, waiting for the lake locks to slide open. The day before, 10-foot waves forced them to turn back without hauling in their nets. The state inspector who rode with them in the raw weather is a no-show today.
     The Surveyor is fishing for bloater chub because chubs are the only fish allowed to be taken commercially. The inspector was there to see how many non-chubs ended up in the boat's net. Perch were legal until last spring, when the state banned taking them, citing low populations.
     "It's hard to make a living just on chub," Champion says. "Fishing has gotten so political."
     Once the lighthouse is passed, the water springs to life. Lake Michigan is the roughest lake in the world, and today eight-foot swells rock the boat like a toy—one moment the pilot's window looks up at the sky, the next, down at churning water. Jets of spray explode through the scuppers, as the boat rolls 40 degrees to either side of horizontal.
     "It's like a washing machine out there now," Champion says. "But by this afternoon, she'll be all right."
     The chubs are waiting 12 miles from shore, a churning world unfamiliar to shore-hugging summer boaters. The downtown skyline is a faint thumb-long strip of grey stubble.
     At 7:40 a.m. Champion cuts the engines to half speed. "See it?" he yells to Kingbird. Metal doors are slid back. A yellow buoy is hauled in, then an anchor chain, then two and a half miles of monofilament net.

Bloater chubs (Sun-Times photo)

     That's a long net, hauled in a few feet at a time, by a winch called a lifter. The process takes five hours of non-stop effort. The fish come up in twos and threes. About 90 percent are dead—the net was set six days previous—and have bloated up (hence the name, "bloater chubs"). Some are very dead; split, spilling their viscera. It is not pretty.
     A yard-wide steel table runs the length of Surveyor's lower deck. Champion stands near the front, by an open hatch, and as the net comes off the lifter, he pops the chubs with a spike to deflate them and free them from the net. Kingbird lays the nets carefully in a dozen black tubs.
     Because the nets are set at a certain depth—about 225 feet—most of the fish are chub. One in 15 or 20 is a stray trout or burbot. Other things do come up, occasionally. Champion once hauled up what seemed to be a human thigh bone. What did he do? He makes a thumbing motion, over the side.
     The record for a bad haul is five fish. A good day is 400 or 500 pounds.     "Some days there's only water in your net," says Champion, paid on commission. "Like a salesman; you don't sell no shoes, you don't make no money." Still, he always wanted to fish.
     "As a kid I thought this would be a great way to make a living," he says. "I don't have to deal with the public, out here by yourself with Mother Nature. But now it has become so political."
     Champion would like to be able to fish for perch again—something vigorously opposed by the state's army of 800,000 sport fishermen.
     "Perch should never be open again for commercial fishing," said Henry Palmisano, an advocate for Chicago sport fishermen. "We don't commercially fish anything other than chub, and that should be it."
     At 1 p.m. they pull up the second anchor chain and buoy. Now it's time to put the net back. Champion turns the boat around. He and Kingbird don big rubber gloves. The net, having come in the front, goes out the back, over an inverted U-shaped "spreader," zipping out at five feet a second.
     Champion stands at the boxes and feeds out the nets, chub scales flying off like iridescent snow. As soon as one box empties, Champion kicks it away and yanks the next box over. Kingbird stands by the spreader, trying to keep the net open wide. Neither speaks. Neither wears a watch or buttons or rings— once the net caught on Champion's watch and yanked him off the boat.
     The net takes 40 minutes to go back into the water. "Now it's boogie time," Champion says. With the autopilot steering the boat toward Chicago, the two pour the fish onto the steel table and begin gutting with chub knives. The boat pitches and rolls. Champion once cut his finger to the bone.
     They get back to Joe's Fisheries about 4:30 p.m. -- nearly 12 hours after they started.
     Fishing chub is an exhausting, smelly, dirty, wet living, but it's still a living, and the fishermen plan to do it as long as they can. "This is the only thing I've ever done and the only thing I'll probably ever do," Champion says.
     They weigh their catch back at the fishery—565 pounds of chubs that, after being smoked, will fetch $3.35 per pound wholesale. All in all, a good day.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 17, 1997

Gerald Kingbird (left) and Larry Champion unload chubs onto a scale for weighing at Joe’s Fisheries. (Photo for the Sun-Times by Phil Velasquez).

Northwest Side notes: Why are we so irritable?

      

     Coincidental that both Northwest Side Bureau chief Caren Jeskey, and I were both thinking of Indian spiritualism yesterday. Hearing Prime Minister Narendra Modi suggest that India needs to make more toys, I was musing how cool it would be to have an elephant-headed Ganesh the Remover of Obstacles action figure, maybe with various outfits, like Barbie, and whether Mattel could offer a line of various Hindu deities. Or would that be sacrilege? Meanwhile Caren was thinking of Gandhi and the ideal life. Although this is not the first appearance of his grandson in EGD: I met him seven years ago, and posted the link in her report below.

     How can we get along as a city, a nation, as a world, when we can’t get along with the people next to us? Partners, neighbors, family, colleagues? The person in the next lane on the road? We honk and weave and forget that there is a person in the other car. Perhaps even someone we know. It’s lost on us in those heated moments that the very person we are flipping off (literally or in our minds) may be the same person we hang out with at the dog park.
     What is is about us that makes us so irritable towards others? No wonder we can’t seem to come together on grander levels such as creating a harmonious world community. Will we ever learn to share resources and work communally? In a me against you society few are happy. Where has the art of forgiveness and compromise gone?
     In 1991 Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson Arun Gandhi founded the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence (https://gandhiinstitute.org). They offer “training in skills such as Nonviolent Communication, meditation, cultural humility, and experiential interconnectedness, and foster responses to systemic violence… through projects focused on urban agriculture, racial healing work, and restorative approaches to conflict.”
     You may have heard that Gandhi is said to have abused his wife. Here is what he has to say about it in his autobiography: “I forgot myself, and the spring of compassion dried up in me. I caught her by the hand, dragged the helpless woman to the gate, which was just opposite the ladder, and proceeded to open it with the intention of pushing her out. The tears were running down her cheeks in torrents, and she cried: 'Have you no sense of shame? Must you so far forget yourself? Where am I to go? I have no parents or relatives here to harbour me. Being your wife, you think I must put up with your cuffs and kicks? For Heaven's sake behave yourself and shut the gate. Let us not be found making scenes like this!’”
     “I put on a brave face, but was really ashamed, and shut the gate. If my wife could not leave me, neither could I leave her. We have had numerous bickerings, but the end has always been peace between us. The wife, with her matchless powers of endurance, has always been the victor… The incident in question occurred in 1898, when I had no conception of brahmacharya. It was a time when I thought that the wife was the object of the husband's lust, born to do her husband's behest, rather than a helpmate, a comrade and a partner in the husband's joys and sorrows. It was in the year 1900 that these ideas underwent a radical transformation, and in 1906 they took concrete shape. But of this I propose to speak in its proper place. Suffice it to say that with the gradual disappearance in me of the carnal appetite, my domestic life became and is becoming more and more peaceful, sweet, and happy.”
     One of the original feminists, though it took him a while.
     Per Wikipedia, “Bramacharya is a concept within Indian religions that literally means to stay in conduct within one's own soul. In Yoga, Hinduism and Jainism it generally refers to a lifestyle characterized by sexual continence or complete abstinence.”
     Our desires often trump our goodness, our intentions, our permanent values, our purity. We work to stay balanced, to not go overboard, and to ease into a life that makes sense for us. Where we can have fun and express ourselves, but we also temper ourselves where needed.
     Enter the popularity of yoga. There are eight limbs in this ancient practice. The physical practice, asana, is but one limb and the only limb most Westerners study. The others involve our attitudes towards ourselves, others and the environment, and our meditation work. Yoga sutras lay this out for us. The second yoga sutra states that yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. What does this mean? To me, it means that we reach a place of equanimity. We can see the good and bad in the world. We can see what we like and don’t like about ourselves, our relations, and the world around us; yet we learn to respond creatively rather than reacting harshly.
     Being human is not easy. Facing mortality is not fun. We will all decline and then die, yet we take ourselves so seriously. Our egos rear up and say “me!” “Mine!” “I want!” If we are able to, we can throw money at and manipulate the world to appease our desires. When that happens we get accustomed to having what we want when we want it. The problem with that is that others can leave us. Money sources can dry up. Even if they don’t, if we do not practice kindness, compassion, and restraint, our so-called loved ones may not love us all that much.
     I believe the key to happiness is radical self-care and authenticity. If we are rested, pain-free or coping with pain in a healthy way, and using tools of self-soothing rather than checking-out and neglecting ourselves, we have a better chance at leaning into our mortal lives with grace.
     I have not mastered this, but I am seeking to get closer to the place where my priorities are in order and I can keep things simple rather than rallying against the world, or resisting the reality of my human existence. From this place, I can see myself clearly and then make plans to live the best life that I can live. If we all lived our best lives I bet we’d get along with each other better.

The mayor isn’t very good at this, is she?

     “Rahm Emanuel was abrasive,” my savvy Chicago pal said. “But if he’s sandpaper, Lori Lightfoot is a belt sander.”
     I don’t know about that. I always thought of Rahm as more oily than caustic, a salubrious insider slithering through the drain pipes of power, popping up through a grate to lubricate a momentary ally, then dissolving into the gutter with a wet splat, and gone.
     Now our current mayor, well, I don’t have much direct personal experience to bring to the table. Lightfoot sat down for an hour with me and my colleague Lauren FitzPatrick for a profile when she was running in 2019. Lightfoot struck me then not as caustic but guarded, measured, deliberate. Not personable in the look-you-in-the-eye-and-ask-about-your-dog sense. Not much eye contact, really.
     But then, Lightfoot isn’t a politician. Her campaign chairman told me as much while we chatted at an ACLU luncheon. A reluctant campaigner, he said, she had to be dragged into a room of potential supporters, where she’d stand, regarding them with disgust, until poked. Then she’d murmur something and flee.
     Voters claim to like that. They seem to like electing officials who aren’t politicians. Yet they wouldn’t hire a plumber that way, based on complete lack of familiarity with plumbing.
     We saw the result again at Wednesday’s bizarre, amateur hour City Council meeting. Maybe we’re used to Rahm, and Rich Daley before him, who turned the Council into a trained seal act, rearing up on command, clapping their flippers together and barking approval in unison in return for a herring delivered in private.

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Inoperable bollard

     "That's a lovely view," I said, settling on a park bench on the trail ringing the Basin in Northbrook. "I just want to sit here and look at that bollard."
     It was a joke, of course. My wife and I sometimes cap off our workdays by walking on The Trail Through Time, an expanse of prairie that Northbrook has cannily crafted out of wasteland. Beyond it are soccer fields, a skateboard park, the new rec center, and the Basin, a storm water catchment area made into an attractive field.
     "Is it good-looking?" she said, or words to that effect.
     "No," I admitted. "I just like saying the word, 'bollard.'" Perhaps not a familiar term to everybody. "A wooden or iron post, on a ship, a whale-boat or a quay," the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, "for securing ropes to."
     Or a concrete post concealing a light on a suburban path.
     The joke, in case it doesn't translate beyond the moment, is to take in this beautiful expansive view—the photograph doesn't capture it—and focus on the little squat post lost in shadow in the foreground. Then again, I'm not sure it was funny, even then.

     Our walk takes about an hour, over the train tracks, past St. Norbert's. We encounter people with dogs, families on bikes, numerous redwing blackbirds. We don't normally pause to sit. But we'd gotten up early and were tired. I didn't see the bollard until we sat down.
    I took out my phone and snapped a picture of it.     
     "Maybe I'll do a blog post," I said.
     "You did one already," she replied.
     More than five years ago. When I noticed a sign, "Operable Bollards" on the campus of Northwestern. Not exactly the most dramatic post. But she remembered it. That's flattering. One wants this stuff to stick in mind.

     

Time will blow away all that you possess

 

     My mother-in-law, may she rest in peace, owned six roasters.
     You know, those large oval roasting pans, heavy black steel with removable lids. Speckled with white dots, for some obscure aesthetic reason.
     Six.
     A fact her family discovered after she died, 10 years ago, and we began to go through her house. Roasters stashed in closets, on shelves in the basement.
     I wish I could have asked her: “Why so many?” Though the answer would almost certainly have been a chuckle and a wave of the hand. Our guess was it had to do with the Great Depression.
     She did cook a lot.
     We kept one roaster that reminded me of a World War I dreadnought and unloaded the rest for a couple of dollars apiece at the estate sale. We never use it, and I wonder if the others are also just being stored until they’re on the move again, passed along to new owners, down through the generations. I hope at some point somebody roasts something.
     We are, many of us, surrounded by such enormous shoals of stuff that its utter superfluousness seldom occurs to us unless the stuff’s owner dies, and we’re in charge of deciding what to keep (not much) and what to give away (most everything).
     Or some natural disaster suddenly sweeps it into the street. When I heard Monday that a tornado had hit Naperville and Woodridge, my first impulse was to race there and talk to residents picking through their devastated homes.
     Because I still remember, vividly, Plainfield after the tornado hit in 1990. An older couple going through their flattened home, finding a teacup, intact, and just laughing. They were glad to have the teacup, plucked out of the chewing jaws of nature.

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Flash: Most reader letters are nice.

     I believe I've been guilty of promulgating an untruth, or at least a misperception.
     Over the years, I tend to share outrageous, vile, deranged reader feedback, for several reasons. To reduce the sting by casting it in hue of connoisseurship—look what an amazing specimen of insult this is. To amuse my non-crazy readers. To humble brag about being made of strong enough stuff to take such abuse. And perhaps because it can be seriously funny.
     In doing so, I've created the impression that I write my column in a hailstorm of scorn, and that really isn't the case. First, because contempt tends to come from a certain small subset of masochistic regulars, who keep reading while purporting to despise everything I write. Those go straight to spam and are usually never seen, never mind read. Still, they write, continually, sometimes for years.
     And second because I gets lots of appreciative email, much more than the negative stuff. Much gratitude, many kind words, Which I don't share because, well, first so as not to brag. Showing off praise, it's unseemly, is it not? I don't think I've ever posted a bunch of complimentary emails, though I do admit occasionally forwarding a particularly positive note off to my boss. "See, SOMEBODY likes this stuff!" 

     Besides, praise is, well, seldom quite as interesting as condemnation, in the same way that Inferno is a far better read than Purgatorio or Paradiso.
     After my Monday column taking aim at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for their ham-handed attempt to influence Joe Biden by barring him from communion unless he recants his heresies, several readers commiserated about the bulk of nasty mail I must be getting. On the contrary. I was struck by just how positive most were, and a number of the remarks were quite witty, the top by far being from John F., who writes, "The Eucharist is not a 'dog biscuit' given for good behavior." 
     Margaret B. left the church half a century ago due to its entrenched sexism. "What did it for me was Father," she writes. "It still drives me nuts that priests are 'Father' but nuns are 'Sister.'”
     I never thought of that before, but she's right.
     The open manner with which people talked about their faith was impressive.
     "I used to explain my staying with the church by using the crazy uncle's explanation that there are a few bad apples in every family but most of us are good and just ignore the goofy relatives," writes Christine P. "But 2016 changed everything for me. When the conservative folks thought it was okay to support the prior president on one issue and ignore all his other dangerous and harmful qualities, my heart sank. To single out Biden as the bad guy, Biden who really cares to make a positive and caring difference in the world, makes me so sad. If everyone truly examined their souls, none of us would be worthy of receiving communion."

     There are dozens more, and I won't belabor the point. I'm very grateful for readers who take the time to respond, to compose their thoughts, and often am educated and enriched by what they have to say. I try to answer every well-intentioned email back, while ignoring completely the mean, the sarcastic and the deranged.  I thought I ought to set the record straight. Not that there really is a record. But you know what I mean. Most of you, anyway.

Bishops use sacraments to pressure Biden

     One beauty of being Jewish is that you can’t get excommunicated, Spinoza notwithstanding. Sure, there are various boards of rabbis here and there. But no central authority, the way Catholics have their U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Nor do Jews have sacraments, like communion, that can be withheld as punishment for apostasy. The way the bishops voted overwhelmingly Friday to draft “a formal statement” forbidding Catholic public officials like President Joe Biden from receiving the eucharist if they insist on supporting one particular legal American right that conflicts with Catholic theology: abortion.

     The most important aspects of Judaism: lighting candles on Friday night, atoning on Yom Kippur, pushing back against dogma, can’t be yanked away by some board of overlords.
     In fact, being heretical is almost the Jewish brand. That’s why the faith is so studded with people like Spinoza, or Freud, or Einstein, or Lenny Bruce. When my son came back from sophomore year and gravely informed me he is questioning the value of his religion, I smiled and replied, “Buddy, I hate to tell you, but doubting Judaism is the most Jewish thing you can do at this point in your life.”
     Yes, like all faiths, Jews have our own strong ultra-Orthodox wing, where wearing a pearl gray Borsalino hat will get you in hot water, never mind pushing back against doctrine. But the Hassidim have about as much influence on mainstream Judaism as the Pennsylvania Amish have on the Philadelphia club scene. They do encourage weak tea Jews such as myself to say certain prayers, but are smart enough not to try to punish us if we don’t. Which I respect, even while their lifestyle puzzles me. You’ve got one life. Are you really going to spend it dressed for 18th century Vilnius and arguing obscure points of Deuteronomy dietary law? Don’t let me stop you. It’s a free country.
     And I’d like to keep it that way. Which is why we need to resist the bishops, and remind them their authority ends at the church door. Yes, they are free to define the contours of their own faith. But to inflict a special penalty especially on government leaders is not religion but politics. Not just their business, but ours too. It isn’t as if regular lay Catholics are being punished for their beliefs, not anymore. If some Board of Rabbis were to announce that U.S. senators couldn’t eat latkes at Hanukkah unless they keep Kosher, the ridicule would be Biblical.

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