MISQUAH — A classified placed this week in the Pilot-Independent — “Wanted: working trolling motor, or a reasonable lie” — has been traced, by no great feat of investigation, to a Loon Lake angler whose own trolling motor went off the end of the landing dock for the second consecutive spring, and who has reached, in his own words, “the bargaining stage.”

The motor, like its predecessor, is presumed to be on the bottom near the landing, where a small and growing collection of them is understood to reside, contributed over the years by anglers who set them down on the dock “just for a second” and learned, again, the lesson the dock exists to teach. “I’m not even asking for a good one,” the advertiser said. “I’m asking for one that runs, or failing that, for somebody to tell me convincingly that mine’ll turn up. I’d take either. I’m not proud anymore.”

Tim Brevik, who fields the area’s trolling-motor traffic whether he wants it or not, said the want ad was “the most honest classified we’ve run in a while,” and confirmed that the shop carries new motors “for people who’ve accepted reality” and a rope-and-grapple arrangement “for people who haven’t.” He declined to estimate how many motors lie off the landing, on the grounds that “some numbers don’t help anybody.”

As of Thursday the advertiser had received two offers of used motors, one offer of a reasonable lie, and one suggestion, from a neighbor, that he simply stop setting the motor on the dock — advice he described as “technically correct and completely useless, like most advice that starts with the word ‘simply.’”