UP into Michigan Part IV

disappearing and re-appearing amidst the widening gyre of passion

“Nothing can touch me here, nothing can touch me here, nothing can touch me here on Crystal River….”—- Tom Petty and Mudcrutch “Crystal River” (extended live version)

Sometimes i feel too beset by the world, its problems, challenges, cruelties perhaps, or injustices. My internet here is pulled capriciously via hotspot fighting cloud cover on phone to laptop and the jarring disruptions need to be welcomed more even as it is paradoxically a lifeline of sorts. This writing platform is just part of the joy in reading, connecting i have found and to fathom it all i have the sort of brain which comes alive waking at 2 AM and wonders: “Fuck!! Just where IS Arkansas anyways??@#!@?!! I am aware of the other states as crazy life-long addict of map gazing anyways stacked up along familiar areas in my head relative to each other: the New England of Vermont and Massachusetts of my birth imprinted seamlessly and its outskirts upstate New York, Pennsylvania a solid rectangle, Delaware, Maryland etc. and all the way down the seaboard southern states elongating in humid torpor to Florida where i have lived 20 years on the Panhandle and roamed over into Georgia, Mississippi, the edges of Louisiana and above many time now through Alabama en-route to Michigan picking off Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana like trucks impeding the furious thrust along interstate and fathoming Iowa, Illinois and Ohio lurking, the Dakotas stacked like crates and then the same to west Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and Texas and the Pacific coast self-evident from California north, Cascade range and apple trees. But Arkansas is like a blindspot and i’ll actually ponder it grinding my teeth and reaching for an Ojibwe-made cigarette for succor and wondering when Clinton was President i hadn’t made peace with that spot on map. He was one good thing to come from there. There are no doubt others.

It was new water to me if shallow for this time of year, the spring having come early, the smelt run gone by and the spawning steelhead having extricated themselves for most part from their narrow stoney confine, contours of rivers like this, feeling their way back re-energised from streams like this to the limitless liquid playground, the exultant freedom of that magnetising body which all here revolves, resolves, around and with deference as a planet does a life-giving sun: Lake Superior.

The West Branch of the Otter didn’t disappoint at first glance and a fly-fisherman knows what he likes in cold clear water, stately towering cedar, weathered logs of white pine strewn stubbornly across a current creating its own lulling splashy eroticised music, the bone scars of debarked exposure to winter’s ferocity the only evidence necessary to bear witness. The fallen logs lie at peace dense with authority of enduring nature’s ferocity creating back-eddies, gentle white-frothed runs leading into bends along the banks where haphazard stacking of timber debris on the corners shore up deeper pools in which a trout might find cover, respite from exertion in molecule-fast water. In the previous 3 years here in Michigan i have taken brook trout from every river i fished and dozens and in every circumstance be it on a wet fly drifted under alders like a child would a worm with no room to cast or more skillfully in an open quiet stretch casting leaving slack line for drift above their pulse quickening circular rises with a buoyant dry and the flash of water when they pounce like a woman’s passing unguarded smile on a sidewalk its perception simultaneous with the yanking down of sensitive rod tip and in that instant you are only there in moment connected to their vital energy.

There is an efficiency that trout have taught me over the years which resonates more now that i am older, the once bold sure-footedness giving way to hip joint stiffness, arbitrary cramping of neck or thigh requiring tolerance demanding surrender as one feels for purchase on shifting gravel, a pair of Dollar Store glasses stashed always in a flapping vest pocket to thread the gossamer-thin fluorocarbon tippet through the balky sometimes rusted miniature circle on fly. This is all a ritual and you are lethe-blessed with just the anticipation of it, the longing. Living in the moment is connected i believe with what has come before and re-lived. The good and the bad and by now, still alive, its all good.

It was a sun-warmed Sunday not yet noon as i pulled on the flimsy thigh-high waders with their own boot attached passing up the more cumbersome light weight pair and overkill for this water and which i’d brought up for Kimmee last June the day we met up for the crazy jounced drive 12 miles on the rutted woods road onto Yellow-Dog Plains to fish that river and she got a crash course in casting a fly and even had one on her third cast a small brookie before the mosquitoes were too much to bear and we headed into the modest town of Big Bay and had a few beers and a delicious reuben sandwich and i flirted with the tall young local waitress who knew fishing and brushed past my unshaved self-deprecating demeanor, tolerant and mirthful. The tips don’t hurt. We drove up across the plains on logging roads and found another path to river farther upstream but didn’t fish it making a game of getting the names of pines wrong, the needles defying even my small handbook for identification. There were already a few spread out cars along those roads, the first of the blueberry pickers and she was playing on her bluetooth an older famous band from Milwaukee she turned me on to. Rebellious, profane, fun.

You would think this was a story which leads like in Hemingway to a spot where he floats one grasshopper after another to be immediately consumed by weighty voraciously feeding fish never missing a hook-up and frying them that night by a fire on a skillet he had carried in with his modest camping gear over the burned terrain past the railroad tracks into the forest. That last was a clue pursued later by those who knew of a real fire in Seney and so identified the true river of his story “Big Two-Hearted River” as being the Fox river astride that town. The Two Hearted lies too far to the north draining into Superior as it widens and was never known for the trout the Fox was and anyways too far to hike into for his war weary protagonist and one suspects he liked the poetry of this river’s name adding “Big” to it on a whim and maybe as sportsmen call the main stem of rivers “Big” where they gather all main tributaries into one main flow. Like the Big Escanaba and John Voelker fished that river, his more local one and his writing name was Robert Travers and beloved for his brief if treasured essay “Why I Fish” and for so much more. The former prosecutor and then judge who shared his lifelong passion for trout stalked with a slender yielding wand and a delicate presentation from Marquette wrote “Anatomy of a Murder” and Preminger the director made it into a film which central crime occurs in a bar in Big Bay and is why i had made the jolting 12 mile journey that first time through the woods from the Huron River. Pilgrims, we all seek something.

I started unlike Hemingway with a burden not of war memories and loss and healing that plays so well into his own poignant story and allows for the metaphor of the gentle water drifting into the darkened almost malignant swamp ahead but a burden with less drama: of responsibility and care and now attachment to the two creatures which came into my life and have now become witness to my passions and i to theirs. They have become almost feral each morning finding deer parts in the adjacent field and i spy them in tall grass the sweet exuberant shepherd Huron working over a skull, the little black pit Duchess prancing teasingly along the dirt road with a splinter of bare bone hanging from her mouth one chasing the other covetously. They jump in the truck now at the slightest provocation and i have become resigned to their muddy footprints all over the house, the scratching of doors and smudges on glass from noses seeking entry, their play-tousling for position next to me in the front bucket seat as we explore, the pit solid as a cannon-ball leaning into me and she won’t be moved as she won’t from the bad where she curls up in a leaden coma. My first but not best loved if only for fairness sake, my boy is besotted with her even as his jealousy is unguarded and vulnerable and i soothe his anxiety with over-analytic guilt and he asked for this anyways all through the southern winter, their partnership fated. By now fanning turkey and darting deer alongside road elicit only half-hearted barks from them and they may stray but always return with a sharp clap and call into the forest alive with their own secrets. God knows i have my own.

A year passes now as i will it with the carefully curated weight of decades to guard against the eternal dirt nap to come. “Nobody gets outta here alive” is a quote of Jim Morrison’s that still echoes over the years, overarches that youthful submersion in experience which takes for granted so much. Thusly so long ago now it seems it was last spring commuting from the off-grid trailer in Aura along the lake wedging into place and with awareness of my own stamping of personality a sliding glass door which with the 4 windows rimming the sleeping area from the autumn before has imbued this rejuvenated roofed over mobile home with power of a glass bottom boat to take on the startling soothing chameleon-like display of the natural world beyond which is the essential nourishment a spirit desires to carry into the next…..hmmmmmm….world?

Now there are more tedious necessary goals ahead, a propane fired heater i must bring to life again, or more honestly as the vent pipe is deteriorated and dangerous with carbon emission and thermostat gone with the wall i ripped out. I will demand services of the same plumbers who spliced in the pex pipe for burst water lines just 3 weeks ago and i haven’t got the bill for that yet. The mowing of grass to keep down the ticks on both me and the animals. Moving things around to the shed which needs roof capping as well now and creating space for the long winter where an electric guitar can be easily grabbed, books arrayed on shelves. The acoustic i finally picked up again after weeks of a sore shoulder and distractions, a move, and it spoke to my soul as it has always.

This is a balancing act, the finances, like finding footing on a gravel stream bed yet the more you risk the bolder you get. The fishing is what brought me here and i hadn’t forgotten it rigging up along the edges of this new water sluicing through the forested canopy the dogs running in and out of view under trees where carpet of fresh green growth was laid out under trees chapel-silent except for their playful snarled tousling, ecstatic now to be released yet again into the wild they have reverted to.

I waded and fished and wasn’t even disappointed there were no takes in that cold water and a first but it was bound to happen and will make what is to come all that much more satisfying for its absence, a quarry subdued. In that spirit of acceptance i let the dogs join me after their afternoon meal distributed off truck tailgate and no need for water ha! in this remote spot and glorious solitude and still fishing over them as they fought the current and avoided the leader trailing in water instinctively, the little one paddling furiously and my eye warily on her, the larger more able to muscle over faster runs, them settling into a grassy sun-blotched patch of clearing above me.

That was a Sunday and i took advantage of the bright day, rain slated to come in and Kimmee had seen forescast as well and camped that night again on the Huron Beach and heard coyote in the woods and took this photo.

We met up for breakfast in Lanse the next morning her final day off qnd in a thin chilly drizzle watched as the dogs chased each other far out onto a spit of sand framed by the Bay and a small marina. That strand is narrow and their racing across its narrowed surface brought to mind Bloom in “Ulysses”, the fireworks above illuminating the figure of a girl silhouetted at a distance but close enough for his imagination to leap towards desire, her bared legs or perhaps the knowledge of his wife Molly’s mutual infidelity.

Kimmee had the cheese on her hash-browns and i teased her about the Wisconsin roots she is grateful to have. She had never walked the modest trail up along the Falls river behind the boiler plant where in season the chinook and coho and king salmon, steelhead, all kinds of trout too run up from Superior that wondrous provider. We found a bench overlooking it and encountered a young man up from Ann Arbor headed with his dogs and girlfriend up into Keweenaw peninsula and all these places are now become familiar and the stories of how they were first found, embraced. I have a few precious stones still in my console in truck of that first year swimming in that cold water all the way up to tip in Copper Harbor camped in tent (and i miss that, a few nights a year at least should be devoted to it) waiting for the off-grid trailer in Aura to become available and that autumn hooking my first steelhead and losing it with the islands glacial-marked in distance and calling out to the future. We don’t take this place for granted and will protect our piece of it. That much with all that is to come, is assured.