​Mirror Lake

By Jim Fuglie

jimfuglie920@gmail.com

I’ll never get used to spending the night in a motel room in Hettinger, North Dakota. After all, it’s my hometown. For more than 40 years there was a “Fuglie House” in Hettinger, including one with a barn.

That was the “Johns House,” named for a pioneer doctor who had built it and later, after he had retired and moved away, rented it to my father. It’s still there.

The doctor had bought a big chunk of a block across from the court house and there were four distinct lots. One for the house, one with a barn, one that served as the neighborhood softball diamond and the great side yard, full of ancient American elms, one tree large enough for the tree house that held most of the neighborhood boys — no girls allowed — when Kool-Aid time followed the softball game or the ante-over game around the barn.

The softball field was in back of our house and home plate was right beside the driveway, just far enough from the house to keep errant foul balls from doing any damage. At the other end of the field, back behind second base, lived the Clements. Center field was actually the street separating our yards. Big kids weren’t allowed to play in the ball games at our house, because there was a real danger that a home run would bust out the Clements’ front window. By the time I was old enough to hit it barely onto the street, still far short of the Clements’ front window, we moved. I think that was the end of the softball and ante games. Eventually the barn was torn down and, to our chagrin, one of the older Mattis boys built a house on the softball field.

But I’m thinking back now to the late summer of 1992, when I found myself in Hettinger on business and there was no Fuglie house. My dad was gone and my mother had sold the house and moved to Bismarck to be near her grandchildren. This was my first trip back “home” since then and I was staying in a motel. I actually felt a little nervous about that and a little naughty.

It was a beautiful, warm summer night, one on which the hot August wind had whimpered into a refreshingly cool evening breeze 45 minutes before sunset, just like it’s supposed to. I debated partaking in conversation with the locals on a barstool at the Pastime against sunset over Mirror Lake and decided the locals would still be there after dark, so I set out to walk around the lake, something I hadn’t done in many years.

I crossed the railroad tracks and wandered into Mirror Lake Park and then headed west to see the improvements that had been made in the years since I last walked this path. The path led to a suspension bridge over the west end of Hiddenwood Creek, where the creek entered Mirror Lake, backed up behind a railroad dam built early in the century to provide water for the trains’ steam engines, snug up against the town’s south side.

On summer mornings when I was a boy, we rode our bikes down Main Street, casting rod with a bobber across the handlebars and a soup can full of freshly dug worms from the garden dangling just above the front tire.

The walking bridge, built long after I had left home, still worked in 1992, but I’m not sure how it survives. In my day, it would have been vandalized every Halloween and fixed the following spring, I’m certain. After crossing the bridge, I continued along a path that eventually led to the road on the south side of the lake, the road that heads back east to the dam and the spillway.

Halfway down the road, just below what used to be Tank place (before Floyd Chalcraft built his house on the hill and they renamed the whole area the “Milwaukee Addition,” an act I thought at the time was pretty presumptuous for a town the size of Hettinger), three young men I didn’t know lazily drank Budweiser from a red cooler and watched their bobbers float in what couldn’t have been more than three or four feet of water. I didn’t stop, nor did I notice any action on the bobbers. The young men seemed to be there more for relaxation than the fishing, I thought as I walked by.

But at the east end of the lake, a different story. As I crossed the spillway and headed back north toward town, I could see, silhouetted by the setting sun, two anglers of a different sort. Fly fishermen. I paused. I knew there were a few fly fishermen in Hettinger, or used to be, my father among them. A few things about these fellows were readily apparent.

Perhaps 150 yards separated them, yet they seemed oblivious to each other — and to me. One, I discerned, was old Charlie Carter. I didn’t know him all that well, so I paused to watch the other. As he turned sideways toward the orange ball of the setting sun, I recognized the slight stoop in the shoulders (although, as I think about it — and I don’t think it was my imagination — he seemed to stand just a little straighter wearing waders in three feet of water than he had last time I saw him standing in his office wearing that old brown suit) of the old small-town lawyer who had probably helped my parents a half dozen times with small legal things and whose front window we had protected by keeping the big kids off the softball field: Jimmy Clement.

I knew Jimmy well enough to visit if he was a mind to, so I stopped and watched for a minute…then two, then five, then ten and more.

It was the perfect time of the day for bluegills on a dry fly. Back and forth, back and forth, with just the slightest flick of the wrist, the right arm seemed almost part of the long slender rod and 40 feet or so of line that moved in the easy, fluid motion of 50 years of practice. Pause as the line — braided, I think, with a clear monofilament leader — caressed the water; pause, twitch, pause, twitch, pause, twitch as the left hand pulled the line slowly back until, at ten feet, with no fish rising to take the fly, the slow, rhythmic motion of the right arm began again.

It was the only movement on the entire lake. His legs, encased in rubber waders in nearly three feet of water, didn’t move. His head, as a golfer’s head on a backswing, held deathly still. His torso — turning ever so slightly from side to side every second or third cast — and his arms were the only movement.

I don’t remember today if he caught a fish. If he did, he surely deposited it through the slit in the top of the ancient leather and straw creel that hung under his left arm.

In ten minutes or more, his eyes never left the water. This was his world, and this was the way it should be on a summer night in August in Hettinger, North Dakota. I thought about calling out to him, some 30 feet from shore, for a visit. I decided against it. There was no reason to, really.

I’d have had to ask how the fishing was and we both knew that it didn’t matter if he caught a fish or ten. And other than the fact that there was no wind blowing on a perfect summer night, and my mother is doing just fine in Bismarck, and he still goes to the office most days for a while, and I still play on his son’s volleyball team, there really wasn’t much for us to talk about that would have been as important as what he was doing right then.

So I walked on, marveling that things really don’t change much in 30 years — except for the years when the lake silted in during the 60s and 70s, the bluegills and crappies and sunfish in Mirror Lake had provided thousands of evenings like that for Jimmy and my dad and dozens (but probably not hundreds) of other true fly fishermen. And if there was ever one thing my dad didn't like on an evening like that, it was to be interrupted.

Jimmy’s long gone now and I haven’t done that walk again in the 30 years hence. Maybe it’s time.