April is, among many other things, a time for fools and taxes. Not coincidentally, it’s also the time of year when we’re forced by law to take a break from fishing. Your Minnesota angling license expired just in time for you to get your ice shack off the lake, and you can’t renew until May.
A little mandatory distance from rod and reel is a good thing. It’s like a secular Lent: Giving it up for a little while allows us to reflect on how important fishing is to the Minnesota soul. Confronted with increasingly brazen terrorist attacks and health insurance premiums, we find nothing soothes the spirit like staring into the waters of Cedar Lake, say, or Lake of the Isles. As you know, Minneapolis got its awkward name thanks to the 12 highly fishable lakes within city limits. (Whoever proposed combining the Greek polis with the Lakotah minne remains a mystery. Apparently they weren’t too proud of the silly word.) Still, few people have taken the time to plumb the depths of this metaphor. Fishing is all about revelation. Sometimes you send down your worm, and up comes a thing of beauty. Other times, well… the less said the better.
Witness the recent flap over Jackie Cherryhomes. After being chased out of office last December, the former city council president made fish meal out of most of her files from the Brian Herron years. We’re assured this kind of vandalism often happens when bullheaded incumbents lose their jobs. Still, we can’t help feeling like a fishing expedition onto Cherryhomes’ former hard drive might have pulled up some real whoppers.
Although the Star Tribune chose not to run their fishfinder through Cherryhomes’ waters, they have discovered something else. A March 3, 2002 story claims that “Every day, untold thousands of people fire up their computers and log on” to something called “the internet” where self-publishing mavericks create an astonishing array of “web logs.” Apparently they caught wind of this trend because one of their own—the redoubtable Mr. James Lileks—is one of the nation’s most prolix bloggers, and other newspapers around the country have noticed. We’ve long wondered why the Strib chooses to isolate their columnists in the remote backwaters of the Metro section. But it hadn’t crossed our minds that no one at the paper was actually reading their best-paid staffers. It occurs to us now that www.Lileks.com may actually be a cry for help.
Also noted: KARE-11 news was recently awarded the National Press Photographers Association top honors. In reporting this happy news, Strib reporter Darlene Pfister captures KARE-11 photojournalist Gary Knox in action, on the scene last year where two boys were feared to have been swept away in an icy river: “Over the rush of the water and the scraping of a backhoe,” writes Pfister, “Knox’s earphone caught a softer sound. It was the voice of Olivia’s police chief, consoling the father of one of the boys… He zoomed in as the chief stood close to the grieving father. ‘If you want to be with your wife, that’ s a good idea,’ the chief said gently, his words captured by the wireless microphone Knox had attached to his uniform hours earlier… In living rooms across the Twin Cities, that scene made the news report personal. It’s typical of the intimate, storytelling moments that metro-area viewers have become accustomed to in their broadcast news.”
We’d call that a typical case of eavesdropping, but who’s complaining? The Rake itself was recently the subject of a KARE-11 mini-documentary and a Strib investigation, which certainly stroked our egos in the right direction. We storytellers run in packs, and we know that sometimes a carefully placed eavesdropper is precisely what’s needed. You might call it poaching for good publicity, but these lunkers pretty much jumped right into our boat.
Leave a Reply