Boys' Weekend

Soaking in something I never knew I needed

Nate and Jamie with some nice Red River catfish.

A good friend of mine periodically goes off on weekend trips with her “Goldies,” a close group of friends that have been doing trips to places like Minnesota’s Boundary Waters for years. All my life, I’d always shrugged off the significance of that sort of “girl’s” or “boy’s” weekend. Until last week.

I went up to Grand Forks, North Dakota with my friends Jamie and Nate to chase the mighty Red River channel catfish. We’d had plans to do this for a while, but the weekend turned out to be very much needed; I’ve been kind of in my own head lately, and getting out of town seemed like the ticket.

If you’ve never fished the Red River of the North, as people call it — there’s a more famous Red River that separates Oklahoma from Texas — it’s, well, not really majestic. First off, the river is narrow. I can usually cast an ounce of lead clear across it, if I want to. Second, it’s rarely deep. The deepest hole we found was 40 feet, a good hole in any river, but there was only the one. And that spot did produce several catfish.

It’s also weird to fish a brushy, tree-lined river knowing full well you are most definitely in the Great Plains. Every so often, you could glimpse the vast, flat expanse of the Red River Valley beyond. Look west and you could almost see Bismarck; OK, that’s a lie, it’s 250 miles away, but you get my point.

A bend in the Red River of the North.

Other than the occasional hum of distant farm equipment, with few houses or structures along the banks you could easily imagine yourself floating downstream a century ago. The Red is lined by a cathedral of cottonwoods, living and dead. The flutter of their leaves makes a dull roar that sounds like the approach of those hurricane-strength winds that sometimes batter this place.

Gigantic skeletons of cottonwoods, killed by flood in years past, clutch the bank with their exposed roots until the next storm topples them into the river. As fishermen, we three sought out those fallen giants.

Jamie had brought his boat, an antediluvian Lund with a 35-horse Evinrude that dated from the Reagan Administration. He was nervous about its health, but she ran fine all weekend. The program was to find those fallen trees (called snags), anchor up, crack a beer, and fish them. Most fish prefer structure, and in a river, a fallen cottonwood can house a city of random fish.

And random is what we wanted.

As I wrote in my story on fishing in Florida, bottom fishing with bait is my favorite thing to do because it’s basically fish bingo: You never know what you might catch. Lakes tend to be fairly drab in terms of variety, but rivers? Rivers hold multitudes. And since we decided to fish with straight bait — cut-up suckers and nightcrawlers — who knew what we might catch?

Turns out a lot. Channel catfish were the target because they can top 35 pounds in the Red River; I’d caught a 21-pounder there a year ago, and I think I got a 30-pounder up near Winnipeg in 2018; I can’t remember the exact weight. But we also wanted to eat some kitties, too. That meant smaller fish because you can only keep one longer than 24 inches. So I fished worms, and Nate and Jamie fished mostly cut bait.

This is the big channel cat I caught in 2018.

The strategy worked, because they caught some nice big cats, and I caught lots of eater-sized kitties. But that wasn’t all we caught. All of us landed freshwater drum, a species unjustly accused of meh-ness by foolish anglers all over the Midwest. I love them, and have been evangelizing their merits for years. Nate caught a pretty walleye, too, and I caught a burbot! Rare in rivers, these are.

Big Nate clutching a walleye like he means it.

But the kicker came out of a huge cottonwood snag: A lake sturgeon! I’d never caught one before, and although it was too small to keep, it was an amazing catch. Sturgeon were almost wiped out of the river in the past, so it’s fantastic to see them coming back — just watch out for the razor-sharp scutes, which will cut you to ribbons.

My first-ever lake sturgeon. Ain’t he cute? And pointy!

The fishing was great both days of the weekend, but it was the cameraderie that made this trip memorable. I’ve known Jamie for years, and am just getting to know Nate better, and turns out the three of us make a fun team. Nate runs a YouTube show that I’ve been on called Shorelunch with Nate P., and his personality is as big as he is — and he is taller than six feet and tops 300 pounds. (Nate is a big boy) Jamie works for the VA and has written wild food articles for Outdoor Life magazine. He also specializes in cocktails made with wild ingredients.

I could tell you that the weekend was full of beer drinking, farting, steak-eating, whiskey, and jokes. And that would be 100 percent accurate. Nate drank so much of Bell’s Two Hearted Ale that we decided to rename it Bell’s Two Farted Ale for the effect it had on his innards. But the weekend was way more than that.

It was… fellowship. In the root sense of the word. I normally act the same way I do around men as I do around women. I have trained myself this way. So it took me a full day to break all that down and release my inner “guy.” Yeah, I can tell dirty jokes and drink Scotch and beer and yes, fart with the best of them. But I normally don’t.

I needed to that weekend. I needed some time and space to reconnect with things that make me happy, to put my phone away and live. And lest you think it was all monosyllabic grunts and whistles and bodily emissions, we also talked. Talked about things trivial and deep, about women and relationships and jobs and life’s Great Mysteries.

Am I miraculously cured from what ails me after that weekend? No, but I am a helluva lot better for it. More of this, please. A lot more. But maybe with a little less farting next time. Talkin’ to you, Nate!