WILLIAM BATES slumped at the pump last Saturday morning at a gas station on State Highway 169, 70 miles north of his Minneapolis home, and disconsolately refilled his green Jeep Wrangler with $2.11-a-gallon gas. Still another 70 miles south of Minnesota's most hallowed angling destination -- 133,000-acre Lake Mille Lacs -- the lanky Mr. Bates then looked at the gridlock of cars hauling fishing boats on the road he had just pulled off of. "I can't take it anymore, I'm turning around and going home," he said, paying no mind to the neatly arranged, unused fishing tackle in his car.
Mr. Bates, the 34-year old vocalist for Heliosphere, a Minneapolis techno band, grew up outside Milwaukee, an avid fisherman. Two weeks ago, he said, he decided to escape urbanity for a weekend. He would make the pilgrimage to the event that for generations of Minnesotans has served as the self-defining epic of the year: the season opener for walleye, the regally regarded official state fish famous for its difficulty in snagging and the tasty meal it delivers when you finally snag one.
Yet to reach this fishing heaven, one must usually endure this ninth ring of traffic hell. It had taken Mr. Bates and his bandmate Andy Davis, 26, four hours to traverse these 70 miles, as the highway choked with heavier traffic each minute. At this rate, he calculated, they would spend more time over the weekend inhaling exhaust on highway blacktop than fishing for walleye.
"I thought I could escape for a few days up north and get away from all the technology that my life revolves around," Mr. Bates said. "I was going to relax, people-watch, and from what I remember from fishing in Wisconsin, have an excuse to drink beer." He then pointed to the parking lot of idling cars trying to get to the same Eden he had been aiming for. "But this!"
"Minnesotans are crazy," Mr. Bates concluded, slamming his door, then driving to the highway ramp to turn south.
Neither Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources, nor its highway patrol, has estimates of how many of the state's 1.5 million people licensed to fish -- 36 percent of the entire population -- headed north this year in search of the walleye grail. "No one says where they're going when they come in here for their leeches, lunkers or minnows, but they're going to Mille Lacs," Ike Isaacson, the owner of Roy's Live Bait Shop in Excelsior, said Friday evening, about five hours before the 12:01 a.m. opening.
Still, the urgency to somehow beat the traffic and just get there is indicated by the cardboard sign on the front door of Roy's, 18 miles west of Minneapolis. The bait store stayed open until 2 a.m. on the first day of the season and then re-opened three hours later. According to Dawn Zieroth, 27, renowned as one of the state's leading fishing and hunting experts, "just as everybody has their secret fishing spot, everyone has their secret plan to beat the traffic."
"Some fishermen take Friday off and leave Thursday," she said. "Some take a half day off Friday, and leave that afternoon. Others purposefully stay in the Twin Cities until late at night." Does any plan for easy driving really work in a state where there are only two seasons, winter and road construction? "I saw a lot of cars and boats all the way back to the lake near my home in suburban Minneapolis Friday night," Ms. Zieroth said.
Guessing traffic patterns wrong, and it seems impossible to guess right, can mean turning what at another time would be a two-hour ride from the Twin Cities to Mille Lacs into a nearly weekend-long affair. So, hard-core walleye seekers have to evince a kind of suspension of disbelief that this time they won't get caught in yet another unending traffic jam.
"I'm in such a hurry to get up there fishing that I don't even really notice the traffic," said Travis Tuma, 32, general manager at Joe's Sporting Goods in St. Paul, who successfully avoided the motorized quagmire by timing his departure to Mille Lacs at 5:30 a.m. Friday morning.
Mr. Tuma, of course, is a pro. Some of the worst traffic jams, however, can be caused by Walter Mitty-like Ahabs who forget to keep their eye on the road because they, too, are enraptured, daydreaming about soon landing a 28-inch-long, 8.8-pound trophy walleye on Minnesota's most famous lake.
"Driver inattention is the one thing that causes more problems than anything else out here," said Trooper Jason Peterson, 30, as he cruised Interstate 94 going west, one of the three traffic arteries out of the Twin Cities to the northern lakes (the others are 169 and Interstate 35). "If anything has changed in human nature, it's that people's stress levels are way up. They're not speeding or drunk so often as they're thinking of something else."
By Rogers, about 30 miles from downtown Minneapolis, it was obvious at 6 p.m. Friday that the grid was being locked. "Drivers are speeding up to 5 or 10 miles per hour, but there's already a lot of standstill," the trooper said. "This one-mile area alone is going to probably take an hour to dissipate. And it'll only get worse in a few hours as trailers start blowing tires and blocking lanes."
Some of Minnesota's most accomplished fishers have finally opted for apostasy, and decided not to bother. Abe Schwartz, 91, for example, is a brawny, retired insurance executive who earned his moniker -- the Mavin -- a generation ago in roadhouses and marinas all the way up to the Canadian border for his fishing prowess. He had no interest, he said, in leaving his driveway last weekend, where the Mercury bearing license plates reading "A MAVIN" sits alongside his tiny three-seat aluminum fishing boat.
Though Mr. Schwartz normally fishes across the state two or three times a week, winter or summer, last weekend he didn't even stop by Lake Minnewashta, his favorite local spot, only 22 miles away from his suburban home in St. Louis Park. No wonder: traffic at Minnewashta's boat access was so bad Saturday afternoon that Type A's were cursing peers for not getting in the water fast enough.
'I leave the walleye opener weekend for the once-a-year wonders," the Mavin said. "The rest of the year is for us fishermen."