Spare the rod: County lake's heated dock is a natural home for the existential
Staff writer
Just off Marion County Lake is a heated dock. It is attached to the shore by a small walkway and a few cables, and to the lakebed with metal pipe.
The dock is contoured by a thin balcony, which the local fishermen use mainly to smoke cigarettes and gaze out onto the murky water. They will fish out there if the weather is good and they need a breath of fresh air.
The indoor area is boxy. Six red benches and a railing surround a bottomless center. A heater runs loudly during colder months. An empty coffee pot, a can of Folgers, and an empty sweet tea jug rests on a counter next to a speaker.
The fishermen who gather here spend their days casting rods into the expanse. They play blues and country on the old speaker, drink energy drinks, and speak to each other about fish.
Birds bray incessantly around the lake, and a single pelican floats calmly around the dock.
This pelican is a cripple. It has a massive beak, uneven wings, and a fish hook and two feet of line sticking out of its neck. The fisherman have taken to feeding it crappie and bluegill.
The pelican’s name is Hank, a title bestowed upon it by J.R. Morris, who comes to the dock five times a week to fish.
“There was a 12-point buck in my yard in Colorado Springs every day for five years, and his name was also Hank,” he said.
Hank has been at the dock three weeks now. Someone tried to spear him with a hook a few days ago; it is unclear why.
“I almost beat the hell out of him,” Morris said.
On this Thursday afternoon, three people are fishing in the dock and one on the balcony.
On the weekends, Morris said, the number grows significantly.
“I usually stay away,” he said. “It gets to be like WalMart in here.”
Morris describes himself as a regular, one of “the ones with nothing better to do in their lives.” He once told lake manager Isaac Hett that if a food truck were nearby, he happily would sleep inside the dock.
He is in his 40s, and has some money saved up from his years selling marijuana in Colorado Springs, where he moved after being booked for growing in Kansas.
A local judge, he said, told him it was that or 22 years in prison.
Morris came back to Kansas five years ago after his father fell ill and asked him to come take care of the family home.
“They were at the cancer center for eight months in Kansas City,” he said. “Mom wanted to go be with him, so they asked me to come home.”
His father is recovered, but Morris continues to live at home.
“I don’t really have to work or anything,” he said. “It’s between this or sitting in the basement.”
He enjoys it out here — the community, the peace, the fishing. He casts out perched on the headrest of a bench, his feet resting on the seat. It is a pensive, noble stature.
“Fishing’s way better than drugs,” he said.
It wasn’t cold Thursday evening, but it was raining. Mike Voit was the only soul fishing from the balcony. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, and his dog was at his side.
Voit had been at the lake 40 minutes — the blink of an eye, to a fisherman — but he wasn’t planning on staying much longer.
The past few days, no one had been catching much.
“So far, it’s not very promising,” he said.
Fishing in colder months tends to be slower as the fish metabolism slows.
“They’re not as aggressive as feeders,” Voit said. “Their bite is smaller.”
Voit lives in Marion. He comes to the lake a few times a week.
“It’s really a good little fishing lake,” he said. “I kinda like the winters. All the party-goers are gone. You get more of the natural effect going on — the geese and the pelicans.”
You can catch walleye, catfish, perch, and bass in Marion Lake, but crappie and bluegill are the most prevalent.
On cue, Voit snared a crappie. Hank floated over in interest, and Voit dropped it two feet toward Hank’s mouth.
Inexplicably, Hank dropped the fish, and it swam away.
“You had him for a minute, bro,” Voit told him. “You let him get away.”
According to those who know, a “coffee crew” gathers most mornings in the heated dock. This is, presumably, when the Folgers is used.
The group comes to ruminate on the state of the world. Some of them don’t even bring their rods.
“There’s a wealth of useless knowledge,” Voit said. “A lot of old-timers, a lot of stories. Local politics, religion. You can get your fill of anything.”
Arguments do sometimes occur, Morris said, mainly when newcomers start talking politics.
Oris Schrag, a stocky man with a blond crew-cut, was more generous.
“It’s a place where a lot of people with a lot of different viewpoints coexist,” he said.
Oris, whose name, according to a book his wife bought, means “of the trees” (“It fits my golf game pretty good,” he said), began fishing out of college after a knee injury left him unable to play sports.
“Moving much laterally wasn’t an option,” he said. “I sold all my sporting goods and put it into fishing. From there I kind of got addicted.”
Schrag was a social worker in Wichita schools for 26 years.
“Without fishing, I probably would’ve had a pretty high psychiatric bill,” he said.
Now he is retired, and spends his time by the lake. He uses homemade lures to fish, molding lead and plastic like an artisan.
He considers himself an introvert; during summers, he heads out on his kayak to the center of the lake, alone.
“That’s the thing I really like about this lake,” he said. “It’s pretty, and it’s got a lot of dock accessibility.”
Morris caught a crappie, which he took outside to feed to Hank.
Hank caught the fish but began choking on it. He spent a few minutes drinking lake water to get it down.
“That wasn’t even a big one,” Morris said disapprovingly. “I’ve never seen him do this.”
Most of the men keep very few of the fish they catch. Despite Hank’s voracious appetite, the vast majority are released back into the water. Many a fisherman will drag up a perch, unhook it, toss it back into the water, and resume his personal quest.
Morris sometimes takes a bucket of crappie to his family. They make an excellent fish fry. Still, he catches far more than he keeps.
“I could feed 60 people a week if I wanted to,” he said.
Otis Schrag praised the taste of a cold-caught crappie but similarly rarely keeps fish.
“I’ve ruined too many good days fishing by having to clean fish when I get home,” he said. “With how much energy it takes, I’d just as soon not.”
On Friday morning, the coffee club did not meet as usual.
Tom Masella, one of the leaders of the club, was in New Mexico visiting relatives.
“I think he’s trying to avoid [journalists],” joked a man named Dave Stanley.
“He doesn’t want to be in the Marion County Record?” asked another.
Morris, Stanley, and a few other men huddled around the dock, talking about the wind. It may have been dragging fish away from the dock.
Jimmy Gomez was in attendance. A big, grizzled man wearing Crocs and overalls, he sat grimly next to his fishing cart.
Many of the men have carts to hold their gear, but Gomez’s is the crème de la crème. It is homemade, with a red milk cart as a base and a metal bucket strapped to the front. Seven fishing rods stuck out of it, of which three were cast into the water.
Gomez calls the cart his “baby stroller.” He pushes it around on three wheels. An array of colorful lures are kept neatly in a tray. The cart also has two cup holders, one filled with a Pepsi can, the other with a metallic thermos.
He has been fishing for half a century and puts in marathon sessions on the heated dock.
On Wednesday, Gomez fished for more than 12 hours, from 5 a.m. until sunset. Asked why he did it, he used a favorite expression.
“The tug is the drug,” he said.
Dave Stanley set up a transducer in the water.
A technological marvel, a transducer shoots sound waves out into the brink and can “see” below the surface through received echoes. A school of fish shows up as ghostly and beautiful shapes on the display.
Despite the device, the fishermen were struggling to get bites.
Morris remarked that it had been “by far” the worst day for fish at the dock he had seen.
“That’s why they call it fishing, not catching,” he added.
By 11 a.m., more people had shown up to the dock. One father had brought his young son, which always brings a smile to the faces of the men.
“It’s always nice to see the next generation come in,” Morris said.
The boy felt a nibble, but it was only a branch.
Six old Christmas trees were placed in the water under the dock last year to help increase fishing rates.
It has worked well, according to the men.
Crappie and bluegill like to live in the nooks and crannies, where they can eat mosses and plankton and hide from predators.
In the afternoon, after most of the regulars had left, Lane Peterson took to the dock.
A skinny man in his 40s, Peterson works a day job at Agco in Hesston.
He has fished his whole life. By the time he was 3, he was catching bass in a pond by his family’s farm.
He is unique among the men for participating in fishing tournaments, which he does alongside his father-in-law.
“We won angler of the year two years ago, our second for Midwest Crappie Chasers,” he said. “$7,000 or something. It basically just pays for itself.”
Peterson’s wife, Clarissa, is the owner of Rally Time Jigs, an online bait shop based in Marion.
Part of the reason he does tournaments, he said, is to get the Rally Time name out. He was wearing a ball cap with the company’s name on it Friday.
The weather was good, the water quiet. Peterson decided to attach a different jig to his line and chewed off the old one with his teeth.
He had set up his own transducer, which he also uses for ice fishing.
“I don’t know how to explain it, the peace and tranquility on the ice,” he said. “Some days you can stand in one spot and catch 100 fish from a six-inch hole.”
Most of the other fishermen have outgrown ice fishing. The pastime involves brutal conditions and necessitates mobility.
“I’m too old for that,” Gomez said.
When he’s not on the ice or involved in a tournament, Peterson fishes for crappie and bluegill on the dock.
“I try to do different techniques and focus on something like that that might help me for my tournament fishing, or I try out new [jigs] we’re making at the shop,” he said.
Despite a youthful face, he is a veteran at the lake, having fished it since the ‘90s.
He recalled when the old dock broke apart in 2021.
“I caught a ton of fish because people didn’t come out here,” he said. “I would stand on the bank. The brush was still down there, and I’d just cast out.”
One thing you will discover out on the heated dock: asking a fisherman why he or she fishes is like asking a bird why it sings. It is simply a part of some divine nature.
The hobby is an intensely meditative one, which is perhaps why so many indulge in nicotine or caffeine. It’s hard to sit with one’s thoughts for long without looking for some kind of pleasure.
Still, the thoughtfulness on display is impressive. These are men well-versed in silence.
“The boring’s kind of what you’re seeking, you know?” Voit said.
Catch, and release. There are plenty of lessons to be learned out on the dock. One of these is perseverance. The men sit through bad days because they know good ones will come.
“If you’re fishing, and you lose a fish, what do you do?” Peterson said. “You gonna pout and cry and go home? Or are you gonna put another lure on and get back after it?”
And if the good never does return — if the crappie die out, if faithful Hank disappears — the men still will be there, staring into a quadrilateral abyss.
“I don’t want to die fishing,” Peterson said. “But I’ll be fishing until I can’t.”