Jake MacDonald (1949–2020)

A shout out to Kenneth Kidd for giving me a copy of this book of short stories for Christmas. Ken and his newspaper cronies regularly fish together. Some of them, including Kidd, have contributed to this book. I am not a fisherman. Never liked it. But I can appreciate what fishing means to the psyche in this intolerably fast and noisy modern life. Fishing ties to together man and nature, fathers with sons, grown men with their ideas of what it means to be a grown man, citizens with their country, and comedy with tragedy. I felt so many of these emotions stream through the pages of stories which included work from Americans Annie Proulx and Thomas McGuane and well-known Canadians such as the David Adams Richards and Marni Jackson, a neighbour and family friend. Among the more personally painful stories for me to read was the memoir of editor Jake MacDonald of his fishing trips with the late Paul Quarrington, accomplished writer and folk musician. Quarrington and his family were customers of mine. Not surprisingly there are a lot of Scots in these pages and salmon fishing in the Miramichi Valley of northern New Brunswick. Richards' story Reflections From the Pools ties together sea, land and sky in a most poetic fashion. And time. And generations. I highly recommend these stories not only to sportsmen, but also to lovers of the wilderness, the folly of men, and the mystical pull of the competition between men and fish. (Since this review was written, my landlord and friend Ken Kidd passed away while on vacation in Africa. RIP. Our acquaintance was too brief.)… (mais)

This isn’t a long book and it’s probably meant for teens mainly but it is an engaging story. I remember when it was chosen for On the Same Page which was a book that all of Manitoba was encouraged to read in 2010-2011. Amazingly that was 10 years ago. Oh well better late than never.
Juliana is a teenage girl who grew up in Northwest Ontario but her parents separated and she and her mother went to live in Winnipeg. Juliana’s father stayed on at the lodge on Lake of the Woods that his family had owned and operated for 3 generations. He had run into tough financial times and couldn’t afford to visit Juliana in Winnipeg very much. She missed him a lot. When summer came she finally got the chance to spend a week with him at the lodge. However her Dad was busy almost all the time with work and money concerns. Then a fishing contest started at the lodge with big prizes for anyone who caught big fish. Juliana was determined that she and her Dad would enter the contest and catch a prize winning fish. Juliana would get to spend time with her Dad and the prize money would bail her Dad out of the financial difficulty he was in. Juliana had seen a monster fish under their boat house; at first she and her Dad thought it was a sturgeon but when her Dad finally saw it he realized it was a muskie. The Ojibway of the area called these enormous muskies “medicine fish”. There are very few of them left in Lake of the Woods. It would be a prize worth taking but Juliana knows she can’t kill the muskie if she catches it. She intends to catch and release it but first she has to catch this wily creature.
This book certainly isn’t preachy but it does have lots of good lessons about the preservation of our natural heritage and how to live a good life. Jake Macdonald died earlier this year but has left a legacy of great writing.… (mais)

Jake MacDonald tells great stories and he's funny in just the way I like. I found myself chuckling quite often as I read this collection of personal remembrances. I thought if anyone could explain the allure of hunting and fishing Jake MacDonald could. Jake starts off when he was a young lad going out hunting with his Dad. They would leave on a Thursday afternoon from Winnipeg and drive out to Marsh Manor, their hunting lodge. Both the name and the description exaggerate: a decrepit, mouse-infested old City of Winnipeg trolley bus . Once there his Dad and his Dad's buddies would barbecue steaks, play some poker and drink whiskey and Jake would fall into his sleeping bag and pull it over his head so "the mice wouldn't run across my face." In the morning they would get up before dawn, eat a huge breakfast and then canoe to a hiding spot where they would wait for unsuspecting ducks to come in to land.

Now I get the part about getting out into the country, enjoying the surroundings (although I prefer the mice to stay outside of the area I am sleeping in), getting up early to see the dawn and watching for waterfowl. However, the only way I am going to shoot them is with a camera. I love watching ducks feeding, with their little behinds stuck up in the air, and I think a flight of geese coming in to land is a wonder to behold.

To MacDonald's credit he does seem to eat the birds he kills but he wouldn't starve if he never killed another bird. I also understand that one of the reasons there are plenty of places where I can go watch birds is because Ducks Unlimited, an organization of hunters, has helped preserve these spots. I also know that most waterfowl are not endangered so the hunters can't be making too big a dent in their population. I don't have anything against hunting or fishing as long as it is done in a manner that respects the earth and the animals. But I still don't understand the attraction of spending time and a lot of money to do so. I guess I'll have to accept that I am never going to understand it.… (mais)