Behind Anung’s Journey: Steve Talks About Famous Guests

This is part 3 of a six part video series where Carl and Steve Fobister, creators of ‘Anung’s Journey‘, talk about their time together and Anung’s origins. Watch part 1 & part 2 here!

The second fishing camp that Steve and I worked at, Ball Lake Lodge, attracted many famous and near famous guests. Here’s a quick video where Steve remembers some of of the most famous.

For those of you who were fans of the Cubs, White Sox, and Blackhawks and watched on WGN television, and listened on WGN radio, the announcers Jack Brickhouse, Lyod Petit, and Vince Lyod, were frequent guests as well.

Behind Anung’s Journey: The Day I Met Steve Fobister

This is part 1 of a six part video series where Carl and Steve Fobister, creators of ‘Anung’s Journey‘, talk about their time together and Anung’s origins.

When I traveled to Winnipeg in November to meet with Steve and present him with a box of ‘Anung’s Journey’, I arranged to have a local videographer, Tyrone Otte, shoot us in our hotel talking about the pioneer days, the good old days, the four summers in the mid to late 60’s when Steve and I worked together, at Delaney Lake Lodge for one summer, and Barney’s Ball Lake Lodge for three.

This is the first of six short videos we edited from that evening.

This first video is our memories of the day we met. I talk too much, at the start, to get us going, but stick with us and I think you will enjoy them.

And thanks to Kevin Qian for creating the video graphics package and all his support.

To Guide, I Lied

I wanted so badly to be a fishing guide.

I spent my first summer, the summer of 1967, the summer I turned 16, working at a small family owned fishing camp on Delaney Lake for room and board, as a camp laborer. I was allowed to take a boat out with Little Stevie every chance I got, to learn the water, to prepare to guide.

The second summer I moved to a much bigger fishing camp and Barney Lamm, the owner of Ball Lake Lodge, began to include me in the guide pool as “the number three guide in a three boat party.” When six businessmen came in a group for their three or four day fishing adventure, they would need three boats–two guests per boat. So two guests would go out with Joe Loon, two more with Matthew Beaver, and two with me. The idea was I should always keep one of the other boats in sight during the morning fishing for walleyes, that I would meet them at shore lunch, and then we’d fish for northern pike or smallmouth bass in the afternoon, all part of my continued apprenticeship, and I loved it.

But by the time I guided my second party of guests as an apprentice I began to suspect that something was wrong, that perhaps my guests weren’t pleased with me guiding. I hoped it was my imagination, but then, after shore lunch with my third party of guests, it became very clear that guests felt let down with me as their guide…I watched as the guests argued about whose turn it was to be stuck with the kid who looked more like their paper boy than a fishing guide.

A trip to the Canadian wilderness was to be a grand adventure for these men, and I didn’t fit the story of what that adventure looked like.

So I decided it was time to declare the experiment a failure, that I couldn’t be the source of their disappointment, and prepared to tell Barney I had to go home to make some money for college.

How different my life would have been if I hadn’t first checked in with one of other white guides who worked there, David King, a man in his late 20’s, from Kenora, the frontier town where guests boarded float planes on their journey to camp. I asked him how he handled his guests’ disappointment when they realize they aren’t going to have an Ojibway guide. He told me he never experienced this disappointment I was describing and then we saw I was wrong–I wasn’t a disappointment because I wasn’t an Indian; I was a disappointment because I wasn’t of this place…I wasn’t in anyway authentic.

That’s when David invited me to his cabin after supper, gave me my first beer, and told me that I was now Carl Nordgren, a Canadian bush boy, born and raised in Williams Creek on nearby Lac Seul. Then he decided I was raised by my grandfather, a locally famous musky fisherman, and that I played Canadian 12 man football in high school, and with my curly and nearly black hair, my nickname was the “Black Swede.”

I washed down the idea with a second beer and thought, okay, maybe this could work. I sure wanted it to.

So I didn’t say anything to Barney about leaving, and waited until I was given my next ‘3 boat party’ guide job, and I introduced myself as Carl from Williams Creek.

And it worked. The guests began to follow my directions more carefully. We caught more fish. My tips were better–20 dollar bills replaced 10’s. I said little, for fear of getting tangled in too many stories, but it was clear my guests were enjoying the trip much more.

And it worked for a second group of guests. Then a third. In fact it worked so well with the third guests that our fishing was spectacular one day. In the morning we caught more fat walleyes than any other boat. And in those days anything over a 15 pound northern pike was considered a great success and we caught two just over 20 that afternoon.

So that night, in the bar in the lodge after supper, and unbeknownst to me, my guests were bragging to all who would listen about what great fishermen they were. Barney heard them and apparently the conversation went something like…

Barney: “Not bad for a kid from Chicago.”
My guests:”No, no, Carl’s from Williams Creek.”
Barney: “I only have one white guide named Carl, and he’s from Chicago.”

When my guests came down to the dock for the next day–fortunately their last day–they didn’t tell me what they had learned. They acted the same as before, except now they kept asking me more questions, about growing up in Williams Creek, and what it was like to play on the bigger football field with 12 men, and about my grandfather and his musky fishing. And I answered each question…later I saw that they had given me a shovel and urged me to dig a deeper and deeper hole.

So we fished all morning, had shore lunch, and were half way through the afternoon of fishing when the guest in the bow of the boat leaned around his friend and looked me in the eye (he’s 50ish, I am not yet 17) and said “Nordgren, you are one lying son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

“What are you talking about, sir?”

“Barney told us last night that you’re from Chicago, and all the stories you’ve been telling us are lies.”

Well ladies and gentlemen, I began to cry. I was so ashamed. I tried to explain why I had done what I had done, and considering that they had just spent 4 days in a boat with someone who was lying to them the whole time, they were very gracious.

That night I knew I had to resign. I figured I had betrayed Barney’s trust and that he would be very upset that I had lied to his guests.

His reaction was unexpected. He explained to me that the major complaint, the only regular complaint, he gets from guests is that the Ojibway guides won’t tell the guests stories about this place. The older guides, the men in their 50’s and 60’s, only spoke English well enough to communicate the days’ logistics and plans, not maintain any sort of narrative. And the younger guides, the men in their late teen and 20’s…well, it was the late 60’s, when people of color were defining new relationships with the white man’s power structure, and these guides weren’t eager to be entertainers–they didn’t want to do more than the basics of the job.

So Barney told me that now that he knew my strategy for pleasing guests he would support it, as long as I made a concerted effort to learn the stories of the Ojibway and the English River, and of Ball Lake Lodge, and share them with my guests.

I said yes! And I continued being an apprentice guide that second summer, and was a full fledged guide for two more summers after that, telling stories from the back of the boat.

Ball Lake Lodge

How about it? This photo is from the early 60’s, just a couple of years before I started working for Barney Lamm at Ball Lake Lodge.

You want a sense of the scope of the business he built? Well, all the buildings in the left third of the photo were for camp operations, and there are others not captured in this picture. There are storehouses, the ice house, a fish house, Barney’s office and radio room, his wife Marion’s office; there is the camp store where guests could purchase fishing tackle or soft drinks or a Hudson Bay coat; the lunch box room where we collected supplies for our shore lunches; a motor repair shop and building that housed the electric generator; two bunk houses called ‘The Bachelors’ for the guides who lived at Grassy Narrows but stayed at camp when working; a bath house with showers and a washing machine; cabins for bush pilots that may need to spend the night; a dance hall; and cabins for cooks and the diesel mechanics and other skilled employees required to maintain this small village needed to support the fishing camp that could, when filled to capacity, host nearly 100 guests at a time.

I counted, there must be about 40 boats pulled up on the beach, outfitted to handle two Guests to a boat, three if need be. Barney employed a lot of guides.

By the time I began working there Barney started tacking a new red carpet down the length of the long dock; my first job was to keep it swept clean, always, two or three times a day.

You can only see four Guest cabins, sitting just above the beach. The rest of the cabins, the main lodge, are all tucked back in the forest, behind the ones you see, and off to the right.

The first day I arrived I was set to work as part of a crew that was going to build a new dock, much smaller, around a rocky point that is outside the photo, to the right. Dutch, Brian’s right hand man in the daily operations, was in charge of the job. I listened to them fine tune their plans and as Dutch turned to get to work, and as I followed him, he said to Barney something to the effect that, sure, they have a smart plan for building this dock, but after all “the devil is in the details.” I have such a clear memory of Barney stopping him and telling him with a certain passion I found compelling that no, Ball Lake was built with a “God is in the details” approach. I came to learn he was right, as Brian taught us how to fill each inch and every minute with a generous care for his Guests.

And those planes, tied up to the dock, a Norseman, a Beechcraft, and a Cessna, are but a small sample of the fleet of bush planes owned and operated by Brian’s float plane airline, Ontario Central Airline.

My fictionalized version of this, the Great Lodge at Innish Cove, is true in many ways to this remarkable place, this Eden, built by Barney and Marion and Dutch Ackerman and Joe Loon.

It makes me happy, it makes me sad.

In Praise of Barney Lamm

I’m surprised there hasn’t been a song written about Barney Lamm. He lived such an extraordinary life of adventure, surrounded by legendary figures as he was creating his own.

He began building Ball Lake Lodge on the English River in Northwest Ontario in 1947, starting with a single two room log cabin on a beautiful sandy beach 50 miles north of the frontier town of Kenora. Over the next couple of decades he and his wife Marion built it into one of the most successful and famous fly-in fishing camps in all of Canada, the destination of rich and famous Americans as well as adventure seekers from around the world who enjoyed a bit of rustic comfort at the end of the day. Over the years Barney and Marion hosted John Wayne, the Getty Oil brothers, Natalie Wood, Patrick Hemingway, and James Hoffa, among others. Barney was an international sportsman of renown and he and Hemingway published a book about their safaris in Africa that Barney would give to favored guests.

He also built Ontario Central Airlines, perhaps the largest float plane airline in Canada during its heyday, and a great strategic business partner for his fishing camps—Ball Lake Lodge was his number one operation, but he also owned Maynard Lake Lodge, priced more for middle class guests.

Excuse me, but he would frown if I left it guests. He always insisted it was Guests.

OCA had a fleet of Norsemen, the plane you see in the picture, a few Cessna’s, two Grumman Goose’s, a Beechcraft, and I recall the drama of a big PBY landing on its belly in the middle of Ball Lake a couple of times. I think he bought it as a curiosity but soon sold it.

He not only transported his guests to his camps, and the constant flow of supplies his camps needed, but he also transported passengers and supplies to the other camps on the English River’s chain of lakes, as well as the engineers and miners still exploring the wilderness for resources and knowledge.

He respected the Ojibway who worked for him and treated them fairly and was made an honorary chief of both the Grassy Narrows and White Dog Ojibway Reserves and later was Ontario’s Business Man of the Year.

When I worked for him I always found him to be a wonderful man, both demanding and generous, very clear about what he wanted, the best first boss a 15 year old kid could have. After a season spent in a ‘room and board’ apprenticeship were I earned my keep as a camp laborer, my second year I began to guide and Barney assured me that even if I was just 16 that I could guide two 50 year old highly successful businessmen out on the river and its lakes for four days of fishing, that I would ‘be in charge of my boat’, if I practiced servant leadership.

He didn’t use that label—it was a couple of years before Robert Greenleaf wrote his seminal essay on the concept where he coined ‘servant leadership’—but he helped me understand that as a fishing guide if I first and foremost saw it was my job to serve the men in my boat, to care for them, that when they saw they were the beneficiaries of that care, well then they would willingly grant me all the authority over them I needed to do my job, and that if I continued to use that authority to care for them, they would continue to grant me more and more.

I am delighted and proud to say it worked. I guided for three more years, for Barney in Canada and on the White River in Arkansas, and later I found bringing a servant leader leadership strategy to my start- up work was generative of the best outcomes. Thanks Barney.

Barney’s legend continued to grow when it was discovered that the English River was toxic, that it was polluted by a chemical plant 100 miles upstream. Though it would mean the destruction of his businesses, he blew the whistle on what was happening. When the Canadian government and industry tried to cover it up he flew in scientists to test the waters and it was discovered there was the greatest concentration of the highly toxic methyl mercury ever discovered. He and his family became the target of death threats when he demanded the problem be seen for what it was—an environmental disaster of the greatest magnitude that would have devastating impacts on the Ojibway for decades, for a century. And since that truth would lead to serious economic loss for many in the area he became the target of death threats; when next they were directed at his five daughters he sold their home in Kenora and moved away.

But he continued to fight until he died, certainly to protect his own economics self-interests, but always fighting for truth and justice for the Ojibway of Grassy Narrows and White Dog as well.

It’s a fight that continues, for neither have been accomplished.