Unsolid Ground

the unique mayhem of a fly-fisherman and his passions

“Sometimes I go to the country, sometimes I go to the town, sometimes I get a great notion, to jump in the river and drown….” —-traditional

It was the end of July that vagrant month of Quebec wild-fire smoke and pink-blossoming gurl-power bracketing biblical floods no Nadal at Wimbledon and Jim Gaffigan comedy special to smooth out the rough edges of an impending political tsunami of insanity in our Union, under fire and not from Russians….August in the north has ever been a personal touchstone and next time i set foot in this river, in that month, i will gratefully keep some of its bounty, for dinner and to shore up strength for all the shitstorm to come….yep…

Welcome to Cook’s Run, a cold spring creek which meanders unheralded thru wild country in the western portion of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I fished it on Friday with mixed results and i’ve become so far ranging and long-winded below i’m not sure the full story can be adequately fleshed out as it contains a digression in the spirit of last weeks confessional on the explicit appreciation of the charms of fairer sex but it must be within context so…we shall see….

Finally tearing myself away from months of steady considered productive labor on this tax-sale bought home which now that i’m living in it these past three weeks demands even more tasks as they flaunt themselves while you pad barefoot to pee off porch. And on that particular score having built the porch and framed in the 6 foot sliding door that overlooks this recently mowed field across my dirt road while perhaps rousing the interest of luminously russeted and oddly muscled deer feeding on the fresh cut tops, (the flock of turkey are bolder, more careless, almost sneering in their dominion) anyways it feels good and somehow deserved, earned.

Whoever mowed Monday and i was delighted as the satisfying drone of tractor recalled the quirky pilgrimming French Canadian farmers of the cherished Vermont decades where for me the adult world first started taking shape even as its boundaries constantly tested. He, the mower, had anticipated the rain which did come later in week and with rumbling and flash of lightning in the mild night following a serious downpour which i don’t dwell on when on phone recently to friends i knew in Montpelier area because they have had the summer from hell… Before it did he bundled up the hay in bales as you see which is a common sight around here and you cannot do that with wet grass. It will eventually combust into flame in a hot barn or at very least get mouldy.

I did install the overhead lights with some blatant solitary cursing as the mobile home ceilings sag even if roofed over and are made of this composite shitty cardboardy crap which isn’t worth hassle or cost of time to replace with sheetrock so i live with it, embrace it. Also up in Houghton doing the weekly Wal-Mart food shop hit the re-store there for a $60 window to bring more light into the outbuilding where i have slated a used full mattress for company, if they dare…. And it did. A great view behind to forest as well:

The casement window has screens too and just now my neighbour Tony a former tribal police chief and now 26 years into retiremnent informed me he saw a wolf not a coyote, but a bigger bodied snub-nosed round eared WOLF, solo, nosing around for prey off the dirt road at 9 am a few hundred yards from my place. I’m excited about that for sure!!

Back to the fishing:

Cooks Run had been etched in imagination since browsing a respectable fly fishing guide book from couch of north Florida home two years ago. A book by the way which along the way with google maps became shortly enough a bible of sorts, worn and smeared from soot of campfires and stuffed with notes scribbled on flyers for lighthouses, waterfalls, hidden state campgrounds where once i had a small inland lake to myself, the book a valued torch leading to all the adventures that lay ahead. The author had noted one particular section of this river which for locals was known simply as “the Meadows” and in its treacherous access, areas of quicksand (marked by that stick) and wolves in the woods (i’d never lingered in dark late enough to hear them, no fucking way!) he described as “not for the faint of heart.” For someone like myself thems are fightin’ words.

In any event the writer conjured up the jolt to arm of taking a wild rambunctious brook trout on the surface with a dry fly liberally dosed with silicone to ride high and be taken in a thrilling splash to rival any “meet-cute” moment of Hollywood lore. I might add here what you already sense is a common thread in my own writing but also amongst us fly fishermen: the seduction of trout is akin to that of another sort of beguiling pursuit altogether. First you must go to the pristine unspoiled places the ones you desire frequent and trust they are feeding. Thats important but even if not there are various other methods to entice but it gets tiresome. The best is when both parties are somewhat willing. Then you try and present to them with as much self-possession and skill as you can muster an attractor which they will spring on. A shower might help, women like a sharp-dressed man according to Billy Gibbons. They can be notoriously picky and equally contradictory as is their nature sometimes quite non-chalant in a take as long as they don’t suspect artifice, ie sense a drag in the leader plying the fly along the water’s surface say like the self- aggrandising insecure wake of a two stroke motor-boat. As for setting the hook it comes naturally enough after awhile but oddly the thrill of strike never gets old and the idea of playing them in gently and “catch and release” is another angle you can explore in different ways. If you keep a trout it should be consumed with respect and gratitude and if you release or they you by will-fully snapping tangled floro-carbon tippet around unseen sunken alder roots or leaping from palm while you held it too casually drinking in its kaleidescopic bright speckled spots on the slippery smooth papery skin it jumps aways, flops into the cold water stunned and you help it swim away, guiding with fingers… You shrug your shoulders, take a deep breath of gratitude, perhaps recline like Ferdinand the Bull in the yeilding hummock grass of bank letting go of your predatory side, dosing in the sun a smoke dangling from mouth and smile tinged with wryness for none to see.

The kicker, the absolute lure of his, the guide’s description was it was accessed only by an “un-marked tote road.” Rather than try to describe in my ponderous prose that latter concept which usually means you better have decent tires and a 4x4 and tolerance for cedar and pine branches scratching the sides of your Toyota as you by-pass fallen majestic white pines blocking the way, i’ll just shoot you an image:

Ok so now we may be on the same page.

The Run started haunting my dreams a few years ago right before i’d even ever known Michigan as anything but Gerald Ford’s and then Michael Moore’s stomping ground or a place where Hemingway’s Nick Adams sank into physical love for first time with dark haired bold Chippewa girls when not pulling in massive trout one at a time into a birch bark canoe, the eery call of loons emanating from the night fog above lake like ghosts, like fate itself.

Curled up on the couch contemplating a recent 1700 mile motorcycle trip through the state of Alabama from my north Florida home (again) via first the Redneck Riviera and its famed Flor-abama bar, north along a scenic elongated Mobile Bay then a pass thru mocking-bird environs of Monroeville, the motor of my trusted steed purring between clenched knees, absorbing, absolving and in cheap motels too where in one all black town the price was $50 and the table in the nominal office was a freezer next to which a toddler squirming in a push-cart raised its chubby fists towards your cash with glee… all these vignettes and mile by mile shedding the tattered remnants of projection, insecurity, regret, loss while conjuring childhood scenarios which ever idealised the unexplored open road.

Traversing the Black Belt and a crossroads town with its history of sparking the Selma march with the shooting of a young black man in 1963 by a police officer around activism for voting rights, Tuscaloosa where graduating co-eds grasped boyfriends for selfies in masks by statues of elephants and on to Tupelo where a female guide with Dolly Parton aura chatted and fended off queries about what tupelo trees looked like with a laugh while swinging on porch of Elvis’ modest lap-sided childhood home, it was a slow day and the pandemic just tapering off, then on to the somber Shiloh battlefield to sate my ongoing fascination with Civil War history and then around darting around Birmingham, Gadsden and thru the steep and wooded Talladega National Forest. Small towns and sawgrass as i neared home and reaching out always, finding a marker with indicating Rosa Park’s childhood home outside Ozark where i was searching for the source of a wide river that ran all the way to the Gulf by my town…wide and muddy with russian boar in the woods locals would hunt with their dogs and bind up to take home and train the others, listening for passing freights while enchanted by youthful gap toothed married waitresses dripping southern accents like honey-suckle at diners and they recounting stories that sounded soothingly like an Alan Jackson tune. That little jaunt, undertaken with unfiltered joy over ten days, solidified the desire for more.

The bike trip with Black Beauty my trusted used 1100 Honda Shadow Spirit acquired for a job at Destin toll booth to re-calibrate from a stretch of physical and emotional turmoil where i lost a girl, and then a few years later my parents and dog and then fell off a roof uninsured coming to with helicopter blades whirring overhead and knowing, yet again, there were months of dreaming ahead… Sure, then there was the pandemic and shootings and cultural wars and generalised hysteria but instinctively i’d fall back into the solitary retreat from the incessant warring and virulent gun worshipping into reading and guitar playing and watching Game of Thrones years after anybody else did. Thats when after the job hanging 300 sheets of rock and rough taping it myself and some extra $ in the bank even if i hadn’t tapped out what inheritance there was and meagre social security a year away i rode up into Alabama and unconsciously almost formed another plan. And it had to be Michigan as it was practically due north and ever since i’d read somewhere once there were rivers in the sparsely populated upper region that had never seen the shadow of a fisherman i was a convert. I could brag here of being a risk-taker but at a certain age and with my own lack of responsibilities hampering, ex-wife, kids, grand-kids blahh blahhh, that would be stretching credibility to the breaking point. Besides i feared most of all the stagnation, the bleeding out of my soul in the southern humidity despite the joys of found friends and feeling Faulkner more in bones ie via the psychic and physical “environment”, but also once a bad case of heat stroke and all of this had been gradually receding in the rear view of stalwart and noisy Black Beauty’s exhaust.

Of course i didn’t take her up that first spring as i would the next two in towed U-Haul and with carpentry tools, and clothing to boot to get by the first frost and even snow i hadn’t seen, felt, in 20 years. Ended up camping that first early summer on the Pere Marquette river, then making 2 week camps at intervals in other state forests along the Boardman, Jordan, and Pigeon rivers, reeling from the challenges of light deprivation, wood collection, bent over coleman stove on ageing hips with pee jar in low slung one man tent and always diverse side-trips to other smaller rivers via 2-track paths and casinos too like on the outskirts of Travers city where in one memorable evening trading wise-cracks with the feisty amenable Native American black-jack dealer i emerged with their money! actually quitting while ahead, with two thousand dollars in cash. I wish i could tell you here that i walked out into that mid-summer evening with a glowing, adoring woman on my arm who had witnessed my final $100 bet and a side one for the dealer as well as i stood pat with a 20 against his 5 and he was all grins knowing we had both won. The others at the table knew it too and actually stood and clapped at my gesture as i stood to leave dramatically abandoning instinct to piss it all away as i had so often before and even the striking young woman at end of table whose attentions i’d sought sporadically all evening despite the disappointing materialisation of a boyfriend or husband on her shoulder kissing her neck and out of thin air from the direction of the craps tables. Despite that as i left she might have conjured up a forlorn smile. Yeah i did mention i am a dreamer but don’t have to be sleeping to do it.

So i gathered the gear Friday easily from the various places they had been stashed, going thru vest to identify which flys were in what zippered pocket, extra leader, reading glasses, a small knife for gutting trout. (the budget!!) The wading boots and waders spread out to dry from whatever damp depth they were fetched from. Plenty of time to sidetrack to small crossroads store the last contrived stop before the time zone changed on your cell phone as one nears Wisconsin and its a haphazard marker i’d been fooled by initially but now i knew and even if you gain an hour the sun is always your true clock, the arc of sun not controlled by digital manipulation. Yet.

She was there behind the counter as always and her daughter who previously sat reading and appeared peeved at the world in general in her slight alienation after only a year had sprouted up into full unabashed womanhood, long legs filled out and flashing and her mother beaming not at me, she knew better, but that my appreciation no longer focussed entirely on her now as they had, gently if obviously from the first when this part of the world was seducing me.

And now it has. The rain had put the trout down, no doubt engorged with the wash of worms and terrestrials and the evening became a meditative one on the water, sometimes casting is like that, not a thought in one’s head, the waders and legs finding grip in the more hardened middle of slow moving river. Indeed when i first scrambled in a little ahead of that stick and overcome with deferred lust tangled foot in alder root as i fought the damned quicksand as i had the first time i fell straight into the water and rushed back onto the bank cursing in a panic while heavinf =g phone into grass tom dry it. Later casting with looping unrushed focus the firm footing felt good and even later driving home thru the Baraga Plains towards my new home and truly mine now in so many ways i enjoyed even the annoying wet cling of soaked jeans on thighs and the tangerine sky whether it was caused by the smoke from distant Cree lands or not. I stopped and snapped an image so i wouldn’t forget and then….continued on.