Meet Steve Fobister

Steve and I met the first summer I worked as a fishing guide in Northwestern Ontario at the small family-run fishing camp on Delaney Lake owned and operated by Herb Helzer and his wife and three daughters. Two extended family clans of First Nations Ojibway were as crucial to the camp’s success: the men as fishing and hunting guides and the women managing the domestic chores. These three families worked together for years and the small scale and intimate setting resulted in them becoming one big family and, for the summer I was there, they adopted me. We worked together, we ate together, we lived together, and on those few days the camp was empty of guests, we played together.

I was introduced to Steve as Little Stevie.  We were both 16 and not only work mates but Herb charged him with the task of teaching me how to guide Delaney Lake and, a short portage away, the English River.  Between jobs like cutting pole pines for a new cabin roof or seining for minnows for bait or hauling garbage to the dump, and as we moved from one fishing hot spot to another, Little Stevie showed me the Ojibway burial ground, where Christian crosses mixed with traditional carved totems; he showed me the rock wall covered with faint red painted pictographs from his ancestors and told me the stories about the more recently painted images; and it was Little Stevie and two boys from the other family clan that took me to the Hudson’s Bay Post for the first time.

Just as the first summer was winding down Herb announced to us that he sold Delaney Lake Lodge and purchased a new fishing camp further north on Gods Lake, in northeastern Manitoba. Little Stevie let me know that he and his people were going to work the next summer for Barney Lamm at Barney’s Ball Lake Lodge, one of the English River’s chain of lakes, and I followed them there.

By the middle of my first summer at Ball Lake I was guiding regularly but Little Stevie chose not to. He had a deal with Barney; he would shadow Barney and learn all about the operations of a fishing camp from the inside. He wanted to grow up to be capable of managing the camp for him.

There was a lot to be learned at Ball Lake Lodge, we operated on such a grand scale. The operation was one of the biggest in the province, with a guest list that included the Getty Oil brothers, John Wayne, Natalie Wood, and Patrick Hemingway, the son of the author and a famous African safari guide, and many other rich and famous. While Delaney Lake rarely needed more that 6 or 7 guides on any given day, Ball Lake Lodge would regularly employ 25 and sometimes as many as 40 guides when the camp was at capacity.

Some of the guides were from the last off-the-reserve family clans I grew close to at Delaney. Most of the guides were from the First Nations Ojibway Reserve at Grassy Narrows; they stayed for weeks at a time in the guide bunkhouses called the Bachelors. This being the 60’s, some of these young men and teenaged boys who grew up on the reserve were becoming militant in their views towards the while power structure that for a century had defined their existence and dominated their lives.

I was a target for that anger. I was told “Yankee go home” as I walked by a group of young men. Twice it became threatening. One night I was corned between two Bachelor bunkhouses on my way from my cabin to the wash house and challenged to a fight; that’s when Little Stevie arrived and immediately the group stepped back.

And once I brought it upon myself, when I felt justified to call out an inexperienced guide whose negligent behavior had put the safety of one of guests at risk out on the river, and I was soon surround by nearly a dozen angry young men who dared me to say anything more, then spit threats at me. Again Little Stevie stepped in and when he said whatever it was he said–he wouldn’t tell me–the circle parted and he escorted me out.

Soon all the Ojibway guides who grew up on the reserve and were my age or in their 20’s began to shun me.  The guides I knew from Delaney and most of the older guides from the reserve were always hospitable, willing to work with me, some ready to teach me. And little Stevie and I grew closer.  I always figured Little Stevie was trying to make me feel welcome when he started calling me by an Ojibway name, N’gosh.

And in one of the next blogs I will tell the story of why there there are so many Ojibway in the Grassy Narrows English River region with the last name of Fobister.

 

 

The dead loon

It was the summer of 1967, the summer I turned 16, the first summer of four that I would spend as a fishing guide in Northwestern Ontario.  I had two guests in my boat, and we were heading back to the lodge after a great evening of smallmouth bass fishing.  Floating in the water ahead I spotted a loon, and I watched him, fully expecting he would dive as we approached.  Loons never let us get any closer than twenty or thirty yards before they’d slip under the surface and I was still so fascinated by these birds that at their disappearance I would begin to count and often counted out a minute before the bird resurfaced.

This one  didn’t move as we got closer and closer. I veered away and we passed within five yards of the bird.  The brilliant black head was iridescent, his eyes were bright red, his black and white plumage and snow white belly were beautiful.  We roared past, the bird bobbed in our wake, but he never dove.

The next morning I wasn’t guiding but was helping the other guides get their boats ready for the day when I noticed the loon washed up on shore, dead.  I wrote about it in my next letter home and when I returned home at the end of the summer my father showed me he had saved that letter, And he saved the others I wrote as well, about visiting an Ojibway cemetery, about chasing black bears away from the garbage dump, about the camp owner’s daughter giving me a kiss, My father told me I ought to think about being a writer.

Thanks Dad