Call Someone Smaller
Monday put us back in the Huntington Pit, where Heather had unfinished business with a hole in the ground.
Huntington began as an underground mine in 1918, long before anyone decided that removing the mountain from above was a more efficient way of doing things. The old miners drove horizontal tunnels, or drifts, into the rock. Later, the mine became the much larger open pit we dive today, exposing some of those old workings along the walls.
One of them sits in the northeast corner, about 100 feet down. Naturally, Heather wanted to go inside. Finding it took a while ~ visibility was bad enough that the wall existed mostly as a rumor.
Somewhere behind that light is a wall, a drift, and Heather. You'll have to trust me on all three.
Heather’s plan: ten minutes maximum inside.
Fifteen, I’d start to worry.
Twenty, I’d leave my bailout bottle at the entrance and go for help.
Nowhere in this plan did I go in after her. If she got stuck in there ~ all hundred-some pounds of her ~ I was very clear that my rescue plan began and ended with “call someone smaller.” The only problem being that if Heather did get properly wedged in a century-old mine tunnel, you’d need to summon the rarest creature in northern Minnesota: another technical cave diver, available on a Monday, small enough to fit through the restriction.
She knows this. She has always known this. She tied off and vanished into a hole blasted into rock before either of our grandparents were born ~ entirely at peace with the fact that her rescue plan, should she need one, was a guy floating at the entrance thinking about fish photos.
After five minutes, she’d seen enough. The roof wasn’t particularly reassuring, and a couple of small rocks had already come loose behind her. Seemed like a sensible reason to stop exploring a century-old mine tunnel.
We moved on.
The rest of the dive belonged to the fish. Bass fry hung in loose clouds in the shallows, largemouth patrolling underneath like they owned the place. The sunfish were jumpy, darting off in little bursts every time we got close, like they all had somewhere else to be. A couple of smoky thermoclines drifted through, which in bad visibility make for oddly good photographs.
Then I found the pike.
I should mention here that I fish while I photograph, in the sense that I forget I’m doing it. Dangling about six inches above my camera lens, held up by a small float, is a blue reflective Rapala trailing a little skirt of bright dangling strands ~ the underwater equivalent of a hula girl on a dashboard. It’s been there so long I stop noticing it exists, right up until some fish reminds me.
This pike noticed immediately.
He was tucked into the weeds, and for about ten minutes we performed a very slow negotiation. He’d drift toward the lure a little, study it, then turn away and settle a couple feet off. I’d close the gap an inch at a time, more sediment-crawl than swim, until he was ready to repeat the whole routine. Approach, consider, retreat, reset. Ten minutes of this, and at no point did he seem to register me as the actual six-foot animal hauling a camera rig behind the lure. Just mildly curious about the shiny thing, entirely unbothered by the rest of it.
I got some of the best pike shots I’ve managed.
Heather got her tunnel. I got my fish. We logged two and a half hours underwater and stopped at Dairy Queen in Crosby on the way home.
Not a bad way to start the week.