Anticipation

Living in the North means waiting for spring. The winter has its charm, with its silent woods and clean whiteness; but at some point it reaches its annual apogee and begins to decline, through thaws and melts and mud and gasping blizzards. We notice this turn with our noses. Frozen air does not carry scent well and it's the first smell of earth and water that recalls our ancient memory of spring. At that point we stop enduring winter and begin waiting for spring.

In the primitive part of our brain, our sense of smell is closely tied to memory and emotion, and that first scent of spring touches us deeply. Somewhere in our genetic memory is relief that, this year, we won't starve or freeze before spring comes. 

Today the stakes are not so high, but we still feel it, especially we anglers. Yes, there is ice fishing but it is at best a placebo. Dynamic, open, moving water is what we need. Of this we are urgently reminded by that first earthy smell, and so we wait for spring.

In the North we usually begin waiting in early March, when the extended forecast looks just like it did back in late November and running rivers and warm evenings seem imaginary. We begin to question our knowledge of reality: are our memories of last summer from the same universe as this Hoth-scape? Did those hot and sweaty alder swamp death-marches really take place? Have I ever actually left the house without a coat and gloves? Why do I own these flip-flops?

Fishing writers have covered this ground many times. We all do some standard stuff to try and maintain: spread our fly boxes, rods, reels, and other paraphernalia around the living room for sorting and organizing; hang our waders in the kitchen and patch last season's pinhole leaks; re-read "Spring Fever" essays by our favorite fishing writers. These rituals help, but treat the symptoms only. Some even seek outside satisfaction, like watching organized sports or riding motorcycles.

Of course, the secret is to savor the anticipation, rather than endure it. The smell of a loaf of bread baking is an integral part of enjoying the bread moments later, warm and sweet with melted butter; so too with the smell of springtime.

Fly tying is a perfect application of this. I'm able to distill the swirling expectations and dreams of the coming season, with the help of a strong beer, into full fly boxes. On a particularly good night of fly tying, music playing softly and my wife reading nearby, I find myself almost wishing the cold would remain so I could enjoy the moment a bit longer.

But eventually there comes a day each year when the final gasp of winter has passed and the earth is poised for spring. You can feel the pressure of the impending green: billions blades of grass pressing against the frosted topsoil, billions of tree buds straining to burst into leaves, and billions of gallons of water filtering from the snowy woods into the rivers, slowly swelling them until they overcome their ice dams to roar and foam to the lake.

These last days of waiting, full of potential energy, can be the hardest. These are the gray days when there might be fish in, somewhere, so we load up our gear for the first time and check our known waters to see if they're ready, and maybe explore new spots we would otherwise pass. We discover that we missed that pinhole leak in our waders, that our knot-tying finger calluses have gone soft, and that interesting-looking spot we've been wondering about for years isn't that interesting after all. Sometimes we actually find fish on these days. These days are good days, even if they are not exciting or picturesque. 

If fishing is a metaphor for hope, then these acts of anticipation – the hours at the tying desk, the early days with no expectations – are some of the purest expressions of it.  

On really good writing:

"...when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."

– Holden Caulfield

I'm not sure a phone call is always appropriate, but I understand what he's saying. We all crave just a few more words from Maclean and Hemingway, yet we know that in truth it's the unanswered questions in their stories that leave room for us: missing sequences in a DNA helix, for us to splice in just enough of our selves to allow the story to really mean something.

Still, I'll bet that an evening on the river with Professor Maclean and Papa would be a lively time.

I recently sat across a dim kitchen table from songwriter-poet Stan Rogers, asking questions which he evaded with a smile – this dreamt while I slept in a starlit canvas tent, deep in Tahquamenon country. On this trip I listened to Stan for four days straight, his short discography on repeat in the Jeep. And in my sleep. I'm left unsatiated, hungry for more. But there isn't any more, and I suspect this hard stop magnifies his words' and songs' lasting power.

In a heartbeat I would call up Stan Rogers, long-distance to Nova Scotia. We'd gather some friends, family, a bottle, and sit around a kitchen table and laugh and sing.

Of course some writers are entirely unapproachable: Tolkien, C.S. Forester, Patrick O'Brian, for three. Their work is heavy fiction, a real and complete world. It would be easier to call up their characters (Lucky Jack Aubrey always has a good story to tell) but other than stories we wouldn't have much in common.

Some writers I'd be afraid to talk to. Cormac McCarthy comes to mind. Reading his troubling books – in moderation – is as close as I want to come to that man's consciousness. Solzhenitsyn and Vonnegut, too. They've shared their pain with us and I wouldn't ask any more of them. 

Lately, because I write this blog, I've been reading a lot in the flyfishing writer world. By its nature I'm connected via earth-flattening internets to a multitude of writers. Automatically included. Some really good, contemporary, like-minded, writers. No phone-call necessary: e-mail is easier. They're writers.

Through reading dozens of blogs we are organically drawn to those writers with whom we share certain appreciations; for fish, woods, water, words, minutia. We should not be surprised when we happen to get along like old friends.

That's what fishing with Jason has been like. I'd been following his work for a year before we met at a flyfishing trade show this spring. One weekend this summer I asked him for up-north campsite suggestions, hoping to avoid pitching my tent in a rowdy RV park. Following his lead, I found myself bouncing my Jeep down a sand two-track, and setting up alone among the pines, within earshot of a cold stream and wild brook trout. 

Perfect. One of his favorite places, it turns out, and now one of mine.

Later that night he and I stand in another river, talking quietly in the dark as we wait for Hexagenia limbata. Above, stars glitter and shoot, while a serious storm clambers out of Lake Michigan and overland toward us. It's a primal feeling, the desire to seek shelter at the weighted approach of a good storm in the dark. The leaves betray the front as it moves over us and the encroaching clouds flicker and glow from within. Walking artillery, headed our way. The lightning bugs flash chartreuse at a too-high frequency, as if the electrical static has them supercharged. But we still have some time.

The fish begin to rise before we see the bugs. Jason lets me make the first cast, the first fish plays along, and soon we're releasing a healthy fourteen inch brown trout. Another rises in the same spot – but this one is big. It's Jason's turn, but the fish ignores his fly and continues to rise, arrhythmically. So, show him something else. Rather than re-tying in the dark, Jason trades his rod for mine (ask any gunfighter: the fastest reload is a second gun) and the fish commits to the slightly-different fly.  It doesn't run, but dogs around our legs in the dark, getting larger – eighteen! twenty! twenty-three?! – as it pulses through our red headlamp beams. With Jason's camera I take the shot and the fish is released.

The camera flash dazzles our eyes, but not as much as the lighting that is now nearly upon us.

Jason: “You want to stick it out a just bit longer?”

Tom: “Yeah, I think...”

FLASH BOOM!

Unison: “Time to go.”

                                (They exit, river left.)

We sit in the Jeep for about an hour just in case the storm blows through, shouting over the Jurassic downpour and thunder. Hamm's, Oberon, books, hunting, writing, family, fishing. It doesn't blow through, but we don't run out of beer or things to talk about, and the time is not wasted. 

We've since worked a couple brook trout streams, trading good runs in a comfortable rhythm. We've hiked windblown wilderness flats for carp. Last weekend Jason and Alex (also an accomplished writer/photog) invited me to fish another nighttime river. Between groups of bugling and smashing elk we thrashed the water with rodent imitations and cautiously picked our way around the beavers' punji traps. 

Jason and Alex deeply love their part of Michigan. I'm a lucky beneficiary – sharing experiences and ideas with writers I admire in the beautiful places that trout live and that I, a Minnesotan, would not find on my own. They have these premium spots saved up, distilled from a lifetime of water explored. Concentrated awesomeness, which they share a bit at a time.

Shared with me because I was able to do what Holden Caulfield wished he could. Terrific friends indeed.

*     *     *

Appendix A: some more really good writing.

Erin Block, Mysteries Internal

Wendy Berrell, Fishing and Thinking in Minnesota

Matt Dunn, Fishbeer.com 

Tim Schultz, Madness and Magic

Appendix B: some July and August photos

The night is dark and full of terrors.

Especially for Hexagenia limbata in northern lower Michigan.

These American mayflies spend most of their two-year life span burrowed in underwater muck banks, but near the end, they are compelled by hot June weather to swim to the river's surface, shed their nymphal shell in the surface film, and ride the current as their cellophane wings dry. They are cumbersome, nearly two inches long, and don't fly well, so they evolved to make this transition at night, when they are less visible to fish and other predators. For thousands of years, this emergence was the ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. 

It was probably in June of 1886 when Hexagenia limbata first found that the heavy dark of hot June nights was no longer safe.  

For in 1884 Salmo trutta, the European brown trout, had been introduced to Michigan rivers. When God created lower Michigan's slow, sandy, cedar-swept rivers, he created them with brown trout in mind. In the fertile, cold spring water, they grow long, thick, and hook-jawed, and specialize as nocturnal hunters. They kill and eat whatever finds itself swimming in the dark: smaller trout, mice, frogs, bats.

Most of these trout have outgrown insects.  The calorie cost/benefit ratio is not profitable. But they will make an exception for Hexagenia limbata.

On these nights, Hexagenia limbata run the gauntlet in the millions. Apex predator trout eat them off the oil-black surface.  Small trout cower in the deep holes and logjams.

To flyfishers, the unique opportunity to hook a lifetime-class trout on a dry fly is presented. The catch: it will be in the dark. 

*     *     *

Floating a river in the profound dark of a moonless June night creates a strange memory. Without constant visual imagery for a framework, I'm left with non-linear flashing scenes, strobed into memory by a red LED headlamp or heat lightning, and woven together by sound, smell, texture, emotion, and sleep deprivation.

In mid-June the daylight lasts until well after 10 o'clock. We float downstream as the dusk completes -- by 11:30 the Au Sable River Valley is one of the darkest places in the continental United States. I lean back and look up through the tree-canyon walls, and am startled to find that the starscape has depth. My eyes falsely read the brighter stars as nearer to earth than the dim. It's dizzying.  I return my gaze to the river and allow my pupils to readjust from the brightness of the stars, but still they strain against the blackness of cedar, Norway and white pine boughs in the absence of colored light. The seams and bubble lines absorb some starlight for relief from the obsidian water.

We pass another fisherman, not in a boat but sitting patiently on a cedar log, headlamp on low for safety as we pass. Pleasantries are exchanged in impossibly soft tones.

"Seen any bugs yet?"

"No, but I heard a riser just around the bend."

The dark swallows him and us again as we slip past. Solitude is immediate. The water gurgling around deadfalls and the faint rush of it against the hull of the wood boat add to the isolation by covering all but nearby or loud sounds. A healthy branch-crack from the woods; two barred owls conversing across the water; my own breathing. Finally, the dry-leaf rustling of an enormous insect passing in the dark; then another. Soon, a general raspy humming that implies thousands of Hexagenia limbata in the air around us. 

And then the sound we are straining to hear: a big trout eating a fly. First is the wooden clap of his jaws, on each other or the water's surface, followed by the resonating plunge as he forces his bulk back below the surface.

The sound drifts to us from far downstream. As we move we use the white light to avoid a low-hanging cedar sweeper and in the five seconds of painful brightness so many Hexagenia limbata are attracted to it that I now have them on my shirt, in my collar, in my hair, on my hands. They are untouchably delicate and just moving around in the dark litters the boat with the dead and maimed.

The momentary white LED has burned the scene into the backs of my eyes: the air is thick with bugs, but there are few on the water. Good. My fly won't get lost among genuine examples when I cast. We slip downstream and drop the drag chain close to where we guess the rise was, and wait.

For some reason elapsed time is hard to estimate in the near-total dark, but eventually he rises again. It is shockingly loud -- I swear I hear jaw-snapping and tail cavitaion. Close, but still invisible. Seems to be less than two rod lengths away, alongside a log on the bank that, straining, I think I see. I have to wait for the adrenaline to clear from my bloodstream but I unhook my fly from its keeper and flick it a few feet upstream on the edge of the ghost-log. I can't see the drift, but the fish can. I hear the jaws close and I strike back. The rod doubles dangerously at this close range and the fish sounds under the boat.

He's not a fast-running fish but is strong and remains at depth, head-shaking, for a long time. In the hand he is heavy, with a wide, firm back and a deep, soft belly, full of Hexagenia limbata.  We surrender to our eyes and indulge in white lights. Silver halos around black and red spots give way to bright goldenrod flanks. His jaw is hooked and scarred, his eyes reflective. Reptilian. A killer. A nightmare caricature of a daytime trout. After one searing flash photo he goes silently back into the opaque water.

This continues, though most fish do not eat on the first cast. Many do not eat a fly at all, though they continue rising to naturals as we cast ours over them. An hour, maybe, casting to the same fish. He might take it on the thousandth cast. Just have to get the perfect drift -- hard to do by feel.

At four in the morning a fog settles over the water and the stars begin to fade. The fish quit rising immediately, sulking to deep undercuts to digest for eighteen hours.

The morning after is missed -- slept through -- but the noon after suggests that it was all a dream. The river glows with sunlight, and slips by as always; small trout finning in the shallows. With the powerful visual stimulation before me the sounds, scents, and feelings of the night before seem imagined. The boat is littered with fly carcasses, natural and imitation. Hexagenia limbata, yellow-brown in life and white in the monochrome of the night before, is black in death.

Last week, mobile phone cameras and social media made it possible for me to watch the real-time inundation of my hometown, Duluth, Minnesota, by a 500-year rainstorm. Up to ten inches of rain fell on a region with full water tables. Roads throughout the area are washed out, bridges damaged or gone, sidewalks buckled, and low-lying neighborhoods are full of mud and water. Tons and tons of clay sediment stain Lake Superior orange -- visible via satellite. Familiar places are underwater, on Weather Channel highlight clips.

I expect home will feel different when I visit next week. Physically, the damage will be there, people will be talking about it, and I will feel like I've missed something significant, something that people who live in northern Minnesota should not have missed.  

But I don't live in northern Minnesota any more. And each time I return, minor changes stand out in sharp relief from the people and places I used to know.  These changes are gradual -- it takes leaving a place for a time, and returning, to see them.

Flyfishers abhor change. We obsess over preservation and restoration. Mainly of rivers, the goal being the protection of the fish and fishing for ourselves and future generations, but also of tradition, sport, legend, genetics, and heritage. 

One of the reasons we love rivers is because they seem constant.  The current is always there, with its unending sound. It can literally drown out all distractions, and along with the rhythms and aesthetics of flycasting, a river can completely enthrall us as a place of peace and beauty. Add in willing fish, and highly addictive moments of perfection begin to occur. Before long, we need our river. 

But the truth is that a river is the essence of change. It is never the same two days or two years or two moments in a row. Banks erode, trees fall, sand shifts. Water rises and drops. The very idea of a river is difficult -- is it the streambed? Or the water? The streambed is just earth. Stones and mud. The water is transient: on its way seaward and only just passing. It's never the same water, even though we think of it in those terms.  

And so goes Duluth, or any other home town. The people and places have always changed and continued to change by the moment. It's true that when I leaned off the clutch in 2009 and headed for Michigan that I would never return to the same home; but that had been true my entire life, every time I left for the weekend or for the afternoon. 

*     *     *

The Lester River is a small swamp-born Lake Superior tributary that flows past the front yard of my childhood home. It was and is my Curtis Creek. It has never held a lot of trout, as it enjoys little or no cooling groundwater, but it has for the last century or so supported a small wild population of brook trout, supported by occasional DNR stocking. Most of my childhood summers were spent chasing these fish. They taught me about patience, determination, reward, and mosquitoes. 

I've watched the Lester evolve over the years. The trend seems to have been toward warmer water and mucky weed growth, and therefore away from ideal brook trout habitat. When I fished it last summer, I caught one twelve-inch painted brookie and one twelve-inch wolfish northern pike.  He could have been an explorer, down from one of the upstream lakes, or he could be a harbinger of something more significant.  

But last week somewhere around ten inches of rain fell on the small but already-full Lester River watershed, and the river went over its banks in a violent way.  The bridge on our driveway remains, but had water running around it and up to its iron I-beam foundation. Two grey telephone poles have spanned the rapids next to the bridge since before its construction. Perfect for sitting and watching the water pass underneath and trout rise in the pool below. Those poles are now somewhere downstream. 

They say it's a 500-year storm. That could (in a stretch) be taken to mean that no white man has ever seen the Lester River with this much water in it.  I have no idea what it means for the trout. I'm hoping that the muck and weeds will wash out, and exposed gravel and boulders and newly-fallen trees will provide fresh habitat for the brook trout that remain.  I'm hoping that runoff from washed-out roads and new construction upstream doesn't choke it with clay, sand, and sediment. Either way, it will be a new river. 

Then again, it's a new river every day. All that changes is how new. 

The last two months have sped past without much time to reflect. In memory they exist as an incomplete collection of moments rather than a linear history. Here are some of them. 

At the Head of the Lakes, one of my favorite places, the beautiful and remarkable woman to whom I am closer than I have ever been to anyone else agreeing to become my wife.

A perfect day with old friends roaming and fishing Lake Superior's North Shore.

Surreal weather in early March bringing summer fish into the shallows of Lake Huron and new friends with insider information inviting me along to chase them; big-lake early-season fish coming easy.

Good company on the magic Au Sable river, in a 1920s Au Sable riverboat, casting self-tied flies to rising wild brown trout, who in some cases obliged me and ate.

Gaping at the unpolluted and moonless starry sky that night, all sounds fading but that of the river, soaking in the strong medicine.

Discovering that even without a guide or boat I can find rising trout, cast to them, and in some cases convince them to eat; and do so on the same water I haunted all winter seeking steelhead, but is very different in spring, and full of visible life.

Driving through Chicago and feeling content with how alien the city seemed.

Finding inspiration in the history and astonishing healing power of the Mayo Clinic–St. Mary's Hospital, its staff, and architecture.

Trusting the heart of a loved one completely to strangers, at the same time literally and figuratively, and finding them in both cases not just capable, but in fact gifted.

Being surprised by the eager, wild Minnesota trout from the geologically unique Driftless Region, who came to hand easily and immediately, as if they knew I only had 45 minutes to fish and wanted to make a good impression.

Returning “home” to Michigan and realizing that those quotation marks are less necessary than they were last year.

Being introduced to a tract of country that is fascinating, beautiful and unique in terms of its fishing, history, and geology; a place that after visiting alone I find myself in a contemplative but slightly frightened state of mind, as if I have been watched, trespassing on some other time's property, and got out just in time.

Startling at the spiteful, thrashing escape/release of first northern pike of the season and being left wet and grinning.

Feeling slightly liberated by catching beautiful trout on dry flies in a picturesque setting but deciding to not try and take any photos of them; laughing aloud alone in the woods at how much damn fun I'm having.

A huge brown exploding on dry fly while I was looking for a spot to put my foot; the leader instantly snapping back at me flyless, the trout keeping my Robert's Yellow Drake, size 14, as face jewelry.

Fishing with friends instead of alone for the first time in a month; last summer's river, running high and muddy, with trash and “Eat No Fish From This River” health advisory signs lining the banks, and bass slashing at hatching bugs.

Spotting a large bass who thinks he is a trout sipping mayflies (early Isonychia bicolors) 70 feet from my vantage point on the bank; somehow managing to place my big streamer in just the right spot to remind him that he is a meat-eater; watching him rise and look at my fly for an instant before inhaling it–only to have my knot fail and line go limp almost immediately.

Realizing later that the bass mentioned above was the most rewarding fish of the night, even though I landed several others who ate unseen from deep water.

I have never caught a steelhead.

I have tried (without much dedication) to find them in Lake Superior's tributaries. There, they are crowded out by stocked Kamloops rainbows and I was crowded out by territorial bait fishermen.

But there is something about steelhead. Something beyond their size and power and beauty that draws fly fishermen to them like few other species. It's a tradition born in the green rivers of the Pacific Northwest and brought to the tributaries of the Great Lakes along with the fish themselves.

So I have begun trying again, now in Michigan, so far still without success. But not catching steelhead is more rewarding here -- you can fish Lake Michigan and Lake Huron tributaries in the winter, when Lake Superior's are frozen solid right to the bedrock. In the winter in Michigan you can catch brown trout incidentally and have the snowy river to yourself.

In the past weeks I have become an adept builder of egg flies and flashy streamers. I can tie my leaders with almost no feeling in my fingers. I have learned the value of a hot cup of coffee from a thermos at lunchtime. I have become a roll caster and stack mender, though my attempts at line control are often crude and unpleasant to watch.  My partner and instructor -- a wizard of this particular river -- divines fish out of pocket water with ease and skill, after letting me try each likely spot first.

The steelhead are not forgiving of an imperfect drift. It's strange that they will eat something that is made of sparkly plastic and feathers, of a shape and color nowhere occurring naturally on this earth, but if it does not drift perfectly they will refuse even the most perfect imitation.

Fortunately, some will eat a fly on a perfect drift even after I've swum one past their face nauseatingly. This means that my partner might hook it and I will get to help land it -- get to lift from the water a round, healthy fish, outlandishly large for the size of the river in which it is a transient: a giant annual intruder. It seems to be changing color from silver to dark rainbow before your eyes, as it acclimates from its blue great lake environs to the confined and dark holes the river offers. We keep it from the water just long enough for a picture before it angrily shoulders its way back to the dark cut bank.

So he catches some, and we kill none, though I would not hesitate to eat a hatchery-born fish.  I keep trying, missing strikes and feeling for a moment one heavy fish shaking its head somewhere on the end of my line in a black-green hole.

As the season turns, the snow melts, and the waters and temperatures rise. Fresh, aggressive fish enter the river from the lake in large numbers, and the fishing improves drastically. But I suspect it will be at the price of the solitude and beauty the winter woods have enamored me with. Soon I will be elbowing for space among a host of hungry bait fishermen, with their fillet knives ready to kill and bleed the bright, wild fish onto the muddy bank. My chances of success will be much higher in the coming months, but I find myself dreading the spring.

It occurs to me that what I fear is not the company or even the killing of fish but instead the diminishing of the fish and the river itself as objects of my pursuit. Their mystique fades as they become a commodity managed by the state for angler consumption rather than a wild animal to be understood. I fear the woods will change from quiet solitude to trampled trails littered with trash and fish gore.

It feels backwards, but for the first time in my life, I'm wishing winter would remain a bit longer, so I can keep fishing.