On Traveling

Rosy of cheek and toothy of grin, the three Yankees burst through the automatic doors of the Super Wal-Mart in McMinnville, Tennessee. River water that had parking-lot flash-frozen on their waders melted again in the relative warmth of the store and their Vibram soles squeaked offensively on the tile.

They were in town to find and document a Tennessee musky; the polar vortex was in town to set records. These three hardened winter steelhead anglers from Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan had come farther south than ever before in their lives only to fish in the coldest temperatures of their lives: six degrees above zero, Fahrenheit, was the high that afternoon. And they had moved muskies. They had coaxed the outboard motor to life, cursed at iced rod guides and flies that stuck to every metal surface, and stomped frozen wooden feet – but they drew muskies from deep within the steaming and impossibly green water.

And that afternoon, in the actual last hour of light, they had caught a fish. Not a monstrous fish, but an eleventh-hour keystone musky that sanctioned their suffering and prevented them from having to say “we didn't get the shot, but it was still a good trip,” yet again to their families and friends – and editor.

The cold had the town shut down, except for the Super Wal-Mart. Enter the heroes, now, seeking a bottle of real Tennessee whiskey with which to properly toast the fish, the trip, their hosts, and anything else within range.

“You guys carry whiskey here?” they asked of the first cashier they came upon, a girl likely not of drinking age, who was too startled by their waterproof bib overalls and ice-beards to answer immediately.

But the crone at the next register was ready. She had seen their kind before. Her small eyes twinkled with joy, but she did not smile as she croaked: 

"This here’s a dry county.”  

Old Country

This is old country.

The wilds we paddled this fall are not much changed in a hundred centuries, despite the warring and logging and fires and mining and recreating. For beneath the visible scars the country is old. Old beyond all human understanding, beyond our disloyal memory with its sliding temporal scale and romantic filters.

We paddle through this country, on a watercourse slipping backwards over the great ancient bottomland, having reversed its flow after the grand deluge drained the liquid glaciers to the sea. We drift over the scoured and pulverized earth which has since become soft and peaty and full of life, this life itself a remnant, clinging to what was the edge of eternal ice just a breath before. Subarctic creatures, which have clung here since long before they were called by Latin names, before English and French names, and even before they were first called by words of men, now lost.

And we paddle, speaking their English and Latin names as if those words have any real significance. We pass into the wild more as spectators than intruders, really. Encapsulated, like the foreign bodies we are, in our Gore-Tex and polypropylene and language, we go mostly unnoticed. The dark tannic water and its microcurrents absorb the whirlpools made by our paddles, and moments after we pass it is not certain that we ever did.

Yes, of course, we catch some fish. We have tied garish hair and holographic hydrocarbon synthetics to forged nickel steel hooks and we swim these flies deep, beyond where the shallow northern sunlight penetrates, in a world we cannot see or understand.  Presently, a fish will strike the fly with calculated emotionless violence, and is hooked.  Through the electric throbbing of a fly rod we transcend our exile and truly intrude – participate – in the wild. We are pinned taut to an ageless beast of coiled fury and teeth that knows nothing of us or that he is called Esox or that even in this remote wild his flesh is tainted with heavy metals that fall from the sky like some steampunk plague. He knows only the waterborne rhythms and images that tell him of prey or danger, sensed with organs stropped to a razor-edge by eons of death and killing; like a mathematical equation worked and reduced to its most simple and perfect form, and in its solving is the reduction of fish, frogs, mice, and ducks to elemental protein. 

So in our arrogance we count coup on them. We hold them in our warm alien hands and regard them with ape-like curiosity and they stare back with reptilian indifference.  They do not wonder at us, and they do not hate us any more than that same mathematical equation can hate.  We do not understand this and we try to reason out their motivations and urges in an attempt to feel more connected to their timeless existence and to the place itself.

We camp on a rare sandy hill within that soggy muskeg waste, raised longwise like a new scar from the glacial flatness of the outwash plain. Wolves are close, invisible but one ridge away, and they howl late into each night, whether to just to each other or also to us we do not know; that they know of our camp, it being upwind and stinking of plastic and canvas and man, is certain. We wonder aloud about this and about their lives and goings on.

But ascribing to them human motivations prevents us from asking too seriously why their howls cause our blood to chill and our small hairs to stand up. As the cadence of distinct voices washes over us, it resonates deep, the perfect pitch, vibrating forgotten primal chords. The tone is one of fear: of shining eyes in the night and heavy padded footfalls just outside the firelight; fear of awakening to hot breath and cracking teeth. This fear, however obsolete, may well be the only emotion we truly share with the wolves, who perhaps associate with our scent some inherited memory of crushing leghold steel and snapping rifle shots.

So we sit opposite our small cookfire and speculate on their schedule and what they might be saying, as if each echoing rise and fall were a verse of words to be translated. We avoid the truth of it: that words are neither sufficient nor appropriate to describe their speech or their existence, the enduring trail of death and blood that wolves live and must live lest they cease to be wild, cease to be wolves.

We will never find communion with the wolf by seeking his humanity; he has none. Instead, we must accept that within us is the very same crimson predatory instinct that drives the wolf.

It is with this in mind that I prepare for another week in the wild: hundreds of miles westerly but a very similar place – old country. There, too, packs of wolves range widely, loping in ancient and bloody pawprints, crossing man’s roads occasionally but his immediate path almost never. And the waters there are dark brown, only recently the ice-blue of glacial melt, and harbor the northern pike in their terrible and prehistoric economy of death.

Instead of a fly rod I will carry a rifle, a transition made every November, an urge rather than a choice, whether brought on by the smell of dying leaves or shortening photoperiod or some other older indication I do not know. Fishing companions will be traded for hunting companions, though some of the people are the same, and for a week we will live in these woods much the same as hunting men have for eons, since before there were rifles, before English or Anishinaabe words were spoken here; even before the very first words were spoken in these woods – that primitive tongue long lost.

At night we will laugh and talk about the hunt and stare into fires and into the stars; sometimes, wolves howl and we stand silently in the dark, heads thrown back, our breath rising into the cold starlight as if we, too, were howling. In the frosty mornings we will listen to ravens carve across the sky, chucking and hooting like heralds of a returning ice age; and we will listen to our ears ring, unaccustomed by modernity to the stark silence of the woods, and we will commit acts of killing and blood, and we will be part of the wild order of things, somber and honest and vulnerable.

*     *     *

 

 

 

Committed

We drove west toward the setting sun, which was disappearing into a heavy cloud bank. The put-in was only a few minutes’ ride from our campsite, but we spent it mostly in silence. 

“I’m kind of nervous,” I said at last.

“Me too,” JT answered quickly, as if he had been thinking the same thing, or had been about to say it himself. 

Both of us had night fished before, and are accustomed to the weirdness of a nighttime river. But neither of us had ever done anything quite like this.

It wasn’t that the trip we were about to begin was particularly dangerous. We had floated it earlier in the day to make sure it was passable. In a few spots, it almost wasn’t, even for my small canoe -- nobody has been through with a chainsaw, maybe ever. There are trees and logs to haul over and scrape under and carry around, and some just under the surface waiting to spill us.   

But if we paddled slowly and remembered the deadheads and sweepers we had seen that morning we would be fine; the canoe had proved responsive to our paddles and we had proved able in our joint handling of it in tight spots. We had digital and analog navigation aids and extra batteries for our LED lights. And eight-weights.

Still, a twinge of apprehension. Maybe actual fear. We knew that once we let go of the bank and began moving downstream on the black slick, it would be many hours and miles of severe darkness and skilled maneuvering before we could rest. We also knew there would be no occupied structures nor any public roads to offer an escape along the way -- which is of course a major part of the reason we were there.  

The stream is legally navigable, as the ancient saw-cut logs in the deep holes prove, but narrow, and choked with wood: cedars and white pines generations dead, petrified in the icy water. Its course is nothing but switchback corners, bottomless holes, and undercuts; it is far too deep to wade in most spots and the banks are high and unclimbable anyway. It flows cold and clear and in the daylight glows with a strange greenish glacial tint.  The tract of prehistoric seafloor it carves across is now a river bottom of cedar, willow, and marshy meadow, undeveloped and unwelcoming. No manicured banks or cabins with porch lights; just a few old foot bridges, some wrecked, to break up the wet wilderness.

Rumors of big trout in this region and previous foot expeditions around its margins had led to this idea, and the land-that-time-forgot atmosphere of the place haunted us, so there we were. Just after sundown with rainclouds mustering and distant lightning silently flickering, we carried the fifteen-foot aluminum Grumman Aircraft Eng. Corp. double-ender canoe through the head-high grass and lowered it several feet down to the water. I handed down to JT our rods, packs, and paddles, and we neared our event horizon. The current, irresistible as gravity, was about to take us somewhere black and unknown.

"Ready?"

"Yep."

We let go of the grassy bank, allowed the magnetic water to draw us downstream, and in an instant left behind the road bridge and the car and the easy way back. 

*    *    *

No photography that night. Between the dark, wet, and concentration on boat handling and fishing there was no opportunity for it.  Instead presented here are pictures from the days before and after -- it is also grasshopper season and while the trout we caught were small, the fishing was excellent, the stream beautiful, and the company good.

  

  

   

Night School

After a month and a half of intense and diverse fly fishing it feels like a lifetime ago that I was sitting at my tying bench anxiously waiting for the rivers to open. But that doesn't mean the anxiety is gone. Michigan Junes are so full of important hatches and active fish that I am terrified I’ll miss a critical week or evening or hatch or rise or fish because I managed my time wrong. I feel actual physical anxiety over this for the first part of the month.

So I continuously refresh my always-open browser tabs for weather and USGS streamflow data and try to guess which nights the variables will align: hot daytime temperatures, high but wadeable water, scattered thunderstorms or, at least, some cloud cover. Into this metric is factored the Up North rumors that whisper their way south in shorthand Latin-ish jargon and the non-fishing commitments that must be mentally rearranged.

Isonychias on the South Branch. Four over twenty on drakes last night. The lawn can grow another inch. Recurvata reported north of Wolverine. My wife will forgive me in July. Carp and smallies on the flats, bring an eight weight. I can get another few hundred miles before that oil change.

I will only hit the perfect cocktail of weather, bugs, fish a few times per year and on those nights I still have to bring good casting, the right fly, and the patience to wait for a rising fish. Those are perishable learned skills which are best taught on and by the river. Reading and studying during the non-June months can lay the foundation, but classroom time – river time – is mandatory. A weekend student does not do well in this class. It's night school, then, for those of us who work and can't attend full-time, and who don't want to resort to nymph fishing. Night school: class meets after work, when conditions dictate, if you can, even if you shouldn't.

Night school is hard, because it requires keeping a full kit in the car, camping in the rain, a gas station diet, and early morning deer-dodge drives to work, unshaved and unshowered, still repelling mosquitoes. Meanwhile, the lawn at home looks like a hayfield.

Jason Tucker coined the term “dirtbag trip” for these short-notice overnight jaunts, but in the heat of a Michigan June, night school sessions running back-to-back, the line between dirtbag and deadbeat gets a bit fuzzy. Two weeks ago I toed that line dangerously, but the education proved worth the risk.

Having driven two hours north after work and hastily set up camp nearby, I stepped into a favorite bend of the S. Branch Au Sable River, Mason Tract country, which was brimming at a wholesome 300 cubic feet per second. Class commenced. Isonychia bicolor spinners clouded the air in the valley and hatching duns dotted the water. They were like redcoats marching into musketfire – their collective success depending upon discipline in the face of likely individual death, which here came in the form of trout from below. The fish were predictably eating every third of fourth fly, and betraying to me their preferred tempo and drift.

After some re-tying I found that they would take my favorite fly, a Robert's Yellow Drake, size 14, so long as it was tied gray or brown instead of yellow. The first fish to hand was a brook trout of ten inches. Familiar. A year earlier, almost to the day, I had started a night in this exact spot with a ten-inch brook trout on a Robert's Yellow Drake, and had gone on to a can’t-miss night of solitary dry-fly success with a dozen fish up to seventeen inches, punctuated by one much bigger fish that screamed downstream before breaking off. This year I was hoping for another attempt – as if one can learn the secret to fighting big trout on a four weight by practicing five seconds per year – but catching the same ten-inch brookie in the first moments was an unsettling omen.

The next fish was rising rhythmically just upstream in an oily-black eddy with tiny dueling whirlpools. After a few bad casts and four short identical drifts, the fish ate the fly. (Lesson 1: drifts that look identical to me do not look identical to the fish. Cast again.) He rolled and thumped, dark gold in the stained water, one rod-length away and just enough for me to feel that he was bigger than I had expected. (Lesson 2: a prime holding location suggests a big fish even if the riseform doesn't.) He turned and headed downstream in a sickening flashback run and the leader broke.

I cut off my 4X tippet, tied on three feet of 3X tippet, and tied on a new fly. The next few rising fish ate willingly (Lesson 3: use the heaviest tippet that fits through the hook eye) but the hook did not stay stuck. This continued until they stopped rising, just after dark. Three excellent river bends, four different flies, and at least ten different fish: stalked, watched, cast to, and hooked, only to have the fly come free moments later.

A timing issue, probably: striking before the fish had the completely taken fly into its mouth. (Lesson 4: a bony, toothy trout nose does not retain a light-wire size 14 hook very well. Wait a beat before striking) Too much practice, maybe. Hard to diagnose with rising fish all around, but the only explanation in hindsight.

It took the walk back out to the campsite to shake the frustration and disappointment at a wasted night of rising fish, and then it took a beer and a sandwich to shake the guilt I felt for being frustrated and disappointed after a night full of rising fish. I knew that the night was full of success: firstly, being there; secondly, stalking a rising trout, choosing the right fly, placing it correctly, and fooling him into eating. Those are the hard parts. But that final consummation of touching the fish for a moment before letting it slip back into the river is, ultimately, the goal. To count coup. Without that, the success is academic only.

I had all night in the blackened tent to work on it, encouraged by the white noise of rain on canvas and a pair of vocal barred owls. The disappointment and frustration of failure are human and critical. The passion to pursue fish and game comes from somewhere ancient, and not from physical hunger but instead from a need to figure it out. To do better next time. It is why we talk, read, and dream about fishing when we are not on the water and is exactly why those acts in themselves are fulfilling. This insatiable learning – and teaching of the lessons to others – has made our species successful. It is why family traditions centered around hunting and fishing are among the strongest of any. There will always be learning to do, always another fish to teach us a bitter lesson, another puzzle of insects and weather and water to put together, and another person to share it with. Without these things, if fish were easy to catch, we would not fish. 

This is where the true passion lies, though on nights when the lessons are harshly taught we question our motivation. But eventually the investment in failure and frustration matures, if we keep trying.

A week or so later Friday night I was knee-deep in another Michigan river fishing and waiting with friend Erick for the brown drakes that were supposed to appear at dark. Fish began rising sporadically before we saw any bugs, and my Robert's Drakes were not fooling any of them. We were working our way up toward water Erick knew to be good and he stopped me to suggest that we sit on the bank and watch and think for a few minutes.

This is something that is almost always a good idea when fly fishing and something that I do not do enough. It is while seated and watching that you see the river change from a moving part of a complex system into a static element within which fish live. Seated, watching, you can begin to notice trout rising in a particular seam, just off of the same cedar branch, every ten seconds. It helps to look away for a few moments, to clear the mind and the eyes and to break the spell of the moving water. For this reason smokers (especially pipe-smokers and hand-rollers) are often better fishermen than non-smokers. Ex-smokers have it particularly hard.

Erick and I fall into the latter category and so have to force it a bit. After a few minutes we noticed some small rises in a deep run along the cedars (see Lesson 2). Still, no drakes. I scooped a tiny reddish-brown spent-wing spinner from the surface film – not a brown drake – and suddenly noticed that the water was covered in the tiny not-brown-drakes. Blanketed. The rising fish had become quieter but more consistent. I selected the only fly in my box that was the right size, a number 16 Borcher's Parachute, and tied it to a fresh section of 4X tippet (see Lesson 3). I worked my way into position across the current from the fish, who was now coming up every few seconds, silently, nose only, leaving bubbles in the film. My first cast was short a few inches; the second cast was right on, and the fish rose, but took a natural just next to my fly. (see Lesson 1.)

Patience is everything. Discipline. Let him eat another natural before casting again. Take a breath. When his nose came up this time, it came down on my fly. Half a breath (see Lesson 4). I lifted the rod, and he was there, heavy, solid, deep into the graphite. Downstream he went, my reel buzzing, but I had room so I let him go, pulling sideways and slowly working him back up, twice, until Erick slipped the net under him. A big brown, not twenty inches but more than seventeen. Redemption, hard-won. We fumbled for a photo but I don't have much practice holding big trout and he slipped back into the water and was gone.

The very next cast was to another riser who was smaller but more photogenic. Erick hooked and landed another pair of fish immediately after on the same fly, and then it was dark, and over, the brown drakes never appearing, although we waited on a cedar log for another hour.

We approached the lesson plan that night as a team project. It took the combined river learning of two of us to figure it out, and that magnifies the victory. Images of that night, with its learned and calculated success, its nosing trout and bank-to-bank spinner fall, will be burned into our ancient hunter psyche for a very long time.

The rest of the weekend was a mixture of fishing success, with plenty of lessons learned, taught by backcountry brookies, trout of the Pigeon River Country, and Great Lakes open-water smallmouth bass and carp. The Lake Michigan carp lessons carry an extra sting, because I have yet to count coup on one. And so I have homework.

And I am glad for it. Glad there are no degrees or final exams in this school, and that I can study and practice for the rest of my life both on and off the water, on my own and with others who also want to learn. Glad that I can withstand the failures and that the rest of my life can withstand my seasonal neglect. 

Glad that there are another eleven days of June, and that Hexagenia limbata class hasn't started yet, although it is on the schedule.