Ed Dallas — father, husband, Beargrease musher, cross-continental bike rider, raconteur, part-time movie-actor (Iron Will), Minnesotan, and Force of Nature, died last Sunday, the 21st of September. I will miss him. He was an inspiration to me. He and Julie, his wife of fifty-one years, visited us here twice, first in the early 1990’s and again in 2018. He always loved these monthly musings of mine and he let me know right away whenever he read them. Of course, for anyone writing anything and putting it out there on display to the world, there is nothing better than hearing from a kindly reader like Ed, with some homespun literary criticism such as”Wow, you knocked that one right outta the park!” (When dealing with any aspiring writers in your lives, trust me, people:  flat-out flattery will get you many miles down the road.)

It was last Sunday, too, the final day of Summer, that Kristen and I went together by boat down the coastline east of here. We pulled in near the mouth of Tent Creek, to pick berries and have a picnic.  Getting there, we rounded what has been “Dallas Point” ever since Ed and his family came here on a canoe voyage in 1992.

Dallas Point, for there a legend was made 33 years ago. We were paddling our twenty-six-foot voyageur canoe, a big fiberglass replica painted up to resemble (at a distance) a birch-bark canot du nord of fur-trade times. It was a flat-calm hot summer day, and we were paddling but not paddling too fast for there to be some fishing lures trolled behind us in the water. Just a few minutes earlier, Kristen and a photographer friend of ours, Donna, had hooked a fish and landed it into their smaller canoe. Donna was struck by an idea, as we rounded the steep rock headland where it drops off into the deep blue of the bay.  She asked Ed, who was in the stern steersman position of the big canoe, whether he would mind if – just for the sake of photographic artistry – the already-caught lake trout could be attached to Ed’s line, so he could hoist it sparkling in the sunlight off the gunwale of the birch-bark replica. Ed, being Ed, said that would be just fine with him, so the shot was set up, twice-caught fish and all. 

Another fellow on that trip was Jim Cotton. Jim had been up to McLeod Bay a few years earlier, as part of a team of paddlers who heroically delivered three custom-built 24-foot canoes all the way from Yellowknife to Walmsley Lake, the headwaters of the Hoarfrost River. Another long story, but not for tonight.  Jim had been in the Vietnam War – serving as a medic if I am not mistaken – and while there he had contracted some form of brain fever that severely affected his speech for the rest of his life. His speech was impaired, but not his mental clarity. He had a sharp sarcastic wit, but his lines were delivered at a snail’s pace while he painstakingly formed the words. As Ed hoisted the twice-suffering trout into the canoe and Donna snapped photos, Jim quipped, word. by. word: “Say. Ed. Did. You. Ever. Catch. A. Live. Fish?”

We all cracked up, but Ed got the last laugh. As we rounded Dallas Point, he kept trolling his spoon, and suddenly he said, “Whoa, back paddle, hold up, everybody, I’ve hooked bottom.” We held our paddles up, the huge canoe with six aboard lost headway, the drag on Ed’s reel buzzed, and then came a string of gibberish from Ed, something along the lines of “arr-ha-ousha-what-the-whoa-whoa-WHOA!” The bottom of the lake he thought he had snagged had suddenly started to move.  He had a live one. A very big live one. Either that or a small submarine.

Maybe Ed did not battle that fish for forty-five minutes, as the story now goes. Maybe it was thirty-five. It was way past twenty-five. And finally, that ancient enormous lake trout – all forty-six pounds of him or her — was lying tangled in the remains of a busted landing net in the bottom of that big canoe.  Ed was beyond excited. Jim was without sarcasm.  The rest of us, knowing that there was no way that monstrous man-handled fish was going to go back into the lake, were trying to guess just how long it was going to be on our camp menu. (Answer – about four long days, for eight of us. Remember my grandfather’s old adage about fish in the fridge, and relatives staying as house-guests: Three days, he’d say. Four at the very outer limit.)

As Ed got older his memory started to fail. I would bet my bottom dollar, though, that catching that big fish on that beautiful summer day on McLeod Bay was a memory that stayed and stayed, somewhere deep. I will bet, too, that none of the other six of us ever forgot that day.

Nor will I forget the night at the end of the trip, when, after the ladies had finished, Ed and Jim and Ed’s son Jay and I all trooped into the sauna to clean up and sweat and cool off with plunge after plunge into the lake. At one point in the festivities (which, I am quick to point out, did not include beer — sad but true), Ed was maneuvering his massive frame and considerable beam  down off the high bench in the hot room when he suddenly lost his balance. He stuck out a huge hand and found a brace against the interior log wall dividing the dressing room from the sauna, and barely kept himself from falling.  That massive log building made a lurch that I honestly thought might have knocked it from its boulder footings.

Jim, steaming silently and ever aware of a chance for some good play-by-play, spoke up through the steam. Word. By. Word.

“Amazing. Catch. Ed. I   can   see    the    headlines   now……    ‘American…     tourist…      injured…       while…      dismantling…      sauna……’ ”

We’ll be missing Ed. He was a gem. Jim Cotton, too, is now long gone. Good times. Times gone by. Were they simpler? Not sure. Seems so, sometimes.

I do look forward to seeing some beloved faces around the campfire up yonder, so to speak. Ed among them. I do fear, though, that we might still be grilling thick slabs of that darned fish, and hoping someone else will finally polish off the rest of it.

Yep, corny post, Dave.  But I know a few who would have liked it just fine.