Finding Fish

Thirty years ago and more, locating fish required ingenuity and luck. Jerry Hayenga, a 74-year-old Minnesota fisherman, remembers how his teen buddies hooked a headlight to a car battery and rowed it out in a boat at night. “They shoved it under, with a funnel over the headlight to direct the beam, to spot walleyes in the shallows.”

Jerry Carlson’s grandfather found fish by “reading the wind.” The freelance writer and fishing columnist recalls that wind direction and the number of consecutive days blowing informed his grandfather where to set his line. “Rarely did we not have good success that way,” he says.

But today, the 59-year-old former fishing guide says you don’t even drop a line down unless you “see” fish. “You cruise the area first, watching the electronics — the fish finders, or sonars, as we prefer to call them — to determine if fish are there and how deep.”

Electronic fishing aids have become increasingly sophisticated. Sonars now include GPS (Global Positioning System). “When you find a good spot, punch a button, and you can save the location accurately within 3 feet,” Carlson says. In addition to boat location, sonars indicate water columns, bottom terrain, and water temperature; suggest trolling speed; provide views of fish around the boat; and offer weather threat matrix, a feature that allows sportsmen to fish longer with its “angler-friendly interpretation of weather conditions in your area.”

The electronics do pretty much everything except put the hook in the fish’s mouth. “It used to be that we might catch a couple of fish here and there,” Carlson says, “but with the new sonars, over a period of a few hours, we can pick up our limit of fish. [Yesterday] I watched my electronics and saw that the fish were at 15 to 17 feet near the weed line, which usually means they’re more aggressive. We caught our limit early and went home. The sonar makes one huge difference.” Only the fish don’t approve.

Poles, Rods, and Reels

Bamboo poles were the old rods of choice, cheap and long enough to allow anglers to toss a bobber out 15 to 18 feet from shore. Early manufactured fishing rods were merely 4-foot-long pieces of thin steel, recalls Ned Kehde, columnist for In-Fisherman magazine. “Those early rods and reels were not very castable. It took a lot of dexterity, and when you’re 8 years old, you aren’t very deft. My mother and father spent a lot of time taking backlashes [tangled lines due to spool run over] out of my reel.” Bait often was flung free of the hook, soaring far out into the lake.

“The rod was just stiff steel with no sensitivity at all,” Hayenga recalls. “Fighting a big fish was tricky, and you could get busted up or bloodied knuckles.” In comparison, modern rods and reels are ultra light with hugely improved casting ability.

Today’s rods are mostly made of graphite and designed to take tension off the line. Rods come in differing lengths and strengths: short and stout for trolling big-game fish; short and flexible for areas with limited casting (under trees); and long (up to 12 feet) for casting greater distances.

Reels come in spincast, enclosed to prevent backlash (one turn of the handle brings in several feet of line quickly); spinning, excellent for casting light lures and bait; and baitcast, used when heavy cover is targeted. The reels have centrifugal or magnetic drags to prevent backlash. Some are equipped with line counters so you know how much line is out.

What’s Your Line?

“In the old days, all we had was heavy, black, braided line the fish could see,” Hayenga says. “But you still caught fish.”

“You could catch big fish with it, but you couldn’t lift them out of the water,” Carlson says. Today, with the right line, you could reel in a 100-pound fish, and the choice of line can get complicated. Monofilament — clear or green — is the most common line and can be used anywhere. Super lines, fusion, and braided types are smaller strands put together to make one stronger line. Thin super lines are much stronger than monofilaments of the same thickness, and they have little stretch. Fluorocarbons look like monofilaments, but are all but invisible underwater. With very little stretch, they lead to better hook sets (lingo for hooking a fish).

“Fish have microscopic vision,” Jerry Carlson says, “so you can never entirely hide what you’re doing. But the less you show them, generally, the better success you’re going to have.”

Taking the Bait

“Fishing is the sport of drowning worms,” an unknown author once penned. That might have been true in the strictly-live-bait era.

“Bait was basically worms or minnows, but mainly worms,” Hayenga recalls. “You got worms or grub worms from manure piles and any kind of little minnow you could get, often little perch.”

“We seined minnows — just about as much fun as fishing — always found a few frogs, and went fishing,” Carlson says. Nightcrawlers were always good bait, and, in the 1970s, leeches made huge inroads. Still-popular baits include crickets, grasshoppers, salmon eggs, fish pieces, corn kernels, hot dog pieces, cheese, and dough balls. Meanwhile, artificial baits designed both to trick fish and to lure fishermen to buy them have proliferated. Among the hottest are scented bait, with lure manufacturers vying to produce the smelliest concoction.

“The scented baits are very innovative,” Carlson says. “Plastic worms or spinner rigs impregnated with a little scent are wonderful for attracting walleyes. When I took kids fishing at the lake, I gave them each a bottle of Gulp! which has 400 times the scent of PowerBait. I think it works better than the real thing.” Gulp! advertises several delicious (to fish, at least) flavors, including crab, squid, sandworm, shad, shrimp, mullet, grub, and leech.

And then there is Eurolarvae, an exotic term for colored maggots. “It’s wonderful bait, and cheap,” Carlson says. “Fish love them because they smell like food and move and wiggle. They are propagated in chicken guts, and when the chickens are fed certain dyes, they come out red, green, or yellow.”

Changeless

Though most aspects of fishing have changed over the years, the essential core has not: the art of stalking the fish and the desire (some say obsession) to nab the finny devils.

In Fisherman’s Luck, Henry Van Dyke wrote, “No amount of preparation in the matter of rods and lines and hooks and lures and nets and creels can change its essential character. … There are a thousand points at which fortune may intervene. The state of the weather, the height of the water, the appetite of the fish, the presence or absence of other anglers — all these indeterminable elements enter into the reckoning of your success. … When you go a-fishing, you just take your chances. … You try your luck.”

Fishing is a love affair, Kehde says, like falling in love with your wife. “It’s all the mysteries of life combined, an uncontrollable passion.”

“Fishing may have changed,” Hayenga adds, “but it still is wonderful. Any day on the water is great.”

The New Fishing: Hook, Line, and Sonar The Saturday Evening Post

When Gary Greff returned to Regent, N.D., during a respite from teaching, he had no idea his life’s work would change to helping save his hometown. Regent had dropped to 238 people. If something wasn’t done, it could become a ghost town, sharing the same sad fate of hundreds of other high plains hamlets.

But Gary had a dream, to bring people and businesses to his small community. “I’ve always been a dreamer,” 59-year-old Greff says. “When I see something, I always wonder: ‘How could you make it better?’”

His dream was triggered one day when he spotted visitors snapping pictures of a dummy in overalls hoisting a thousand-pound bale over his head. “I thought, ‘If people will drive off the road for that, how many more would come for something grander?’ No big business would come into a small community like this. We had to work with what we had, which was a paved highway, so I figured, ‘I’ll give you a reason to drive down it.’”

Enchanted Highway Is Born

That grander reason is the Enchanted Highway, gigantic folk art sculptures along thirty-two miles of panoramic views of grassland, buttes and bluffs, beginning at I-94, ending on Regent’s main street.

Today that dream is thriving, with seven scrap metal sculptures completed, beginning with Geese in Flight, taller than a 10-story building, wide as a football field, dubbed by The Guinness Book of World Records as the “world’s largest scrap-metal sculpture.” Down the road about every three miles, rising into the limitless prairie sky, are Deer Crossing, Grasshopper’s Delight, Fisherman’s Dream, Pheasants on the Prairie, Theodore Roosevelt Rides Again, and (1.5 miles out of Regent) The Tin Family. All are massive, constructed of local materials — oil well tanks and pipes, old farm machinery, scrap metal. Metal wields great significance to those who work the land and depend heavily on machinery. All were assembled with common prairie-folk skills — metal cutting and fabrication, repair, and welding,

Community Pride

The first two sculptures reinvigorated the community, Greff says. Supported financially by city, local civic organizations, and the N.D. Council on the Arts, a local crew of farmers and ranchers spent the winter of 1992 welding and erecting Tin Family. It was first “because family was important in settling our country,” Greff says. Like the other sculptures, Tin Family utilizes local products like barbed wire for the mother‘s hair and grain
augers for her earrings, while the son licks a lollipop — the bottom of a farm fuel tank. “Normal-sized sculptures wouldn’t lure people into my sleepy town,” Greff says, so Tin Pa is 45 feet tall (supported by 16 telephone poles), Tin Ma 44, and Tin Kid 23 feet high. “Some engineering figured what size could be supported.”

Greff received some community help for the second one, Teddy Roosevelt Rides Again. Roosevelt, astride a 51-foot-high sculpture of his favorite horse, said he would not have been president except for his time in North Dakota.

Since Roosevelt, Greff has been pretty much on his own, with each sculpture taking two to four years to complete. “Nobody else could give up that kind of time,” he says.

Without artistic experience, Greff draws on graph paper and expands onto two-foot squares of butcher paper, a blueprint to make the pieces. “If the finished product doesn’t look anything like the plan, I’ll just call it modern art,” he laughs.

He figured he would be finished by 1997. “I was so naïve. It’s 2009 and I’m working on the spider web, no. 8.” Nos. 9 and 10 will be, respectively, a 75-foot-high buffalo and a tribute to Native Americans.

Greff works full-time on Enchanted Highway without an outside job, relying on donations and grants to raise $20,000 needed for each.

High-school students help. Kathy Greff, Gary’s sister-in-law, says her four sons worked on the project, along with area kids. “They’ve learned a lot, responsible job safety, welding, site mowing, and upkeep. Eagle Scout projects have been created for them, building playground equipment and bulletin boards for the sites,” which contain parking lot, picnic tables, information board, and play area.

“They’ve also learned about recycling,” Gary Greff says. “Most of the sculptures first belonged to something else.”

Success Is Tempered

Greff notes few minor setbacks. “I swore I’d measured the shop door accurately, but a pheasant three inches too wide forced me to cut it in half.” The buck’s front leg had to be cut off the buck because telephone poles made the road too narrow. It was rewelded at Deer Crossing. Welding sparks at Fisherman’s Dream started a grass fire. “In town they said we’d had the world’s largest fish fry,” Greff laughs.
Difference-Maker?

Greff’s dream was to bring people into town, and in 2007-08 20,000 visitors signed the guest book at the Enchanted Highway Gift Shop. Postmaster Ervin Binstock says, “On Main Street I see an unbelievable amount of traffic and tour buses coming through”: Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, visitors from every state, plus Africa, Europe, Asia.

New businesses have started up in Regent as well: two gift shops, an RV park, a convenience store, and a B&B, though owner Donald Gion says tourism hasn’t helped his business much. “Lots of traffic comes into town, but people don’t stay. They visit the gift shops; some eat at the café or fill up gas, and move on. We need some kind of evening program, an economic development to keep people here longer.”
Future Dreams

Gary Greff is working on that part, too. He bought the school building for a national art school, drew plans for a theme park with a signature huge eagle on a globe, as well as a water park and amphitheater. “They all need funding,” Greff says. “My dream now is to make Enchanted Highway the number-one tourist attraction in North Dakota. I really believe it can happen.”

Julius Honeyman, who donated land for Pheasants on the Prairie, says he can do it. “I think it’s amazing what one guy with a vision and a dream can do if he puts his mind to it.”

Enchanted Highway visitors think so, too. An older fellow recently stopped Gary Greff. With tears in his eyes, he said, “If I had died before I’d seen this, I would have died a poorer man.”

North Dakota’s Enchanted Highway The Saturday Evening Post