Lessons from Wolverine

The post title is an homage to Barry Lopez, though I'm talking about a blog, not a book. Friday I ran across the fine Wolverine Fly Fishing Journal, another Michigan-based blog which includes not only fishing reports but detailed profiles of streams, pages on flies and fishing strategies, as well as assistance with feathering one's retirement nest. Check it out.

Advice to Poachers

If you're going to violate, don't do it in front of dozens of people with cell phone cameras.

Desparado Dumper

I always saw enforcement of environmental laws as a rather bureaucratic sort of policing, an affair undertaken in lab coats and grey suits, not in bulletproof vests and ammo belts. Not always.

KEY WEST, Fla. -- The owner of a Utah truck-wash company who told acquaintances he would rather ''go down in a blaze of glory'' than face federal charges of illegally disposing of hazardous chemicals pleaded guilty to seven felony counts Monday.

In a routine Environmental Protection Agency case that turned violent, law enforcement officers shot Larkin Baggett when they attempted to arrest him in Marathon, Fla., in March. The 54-year-old had been on the run from authorities since April 2008 and had been listed as a fugitive on the EPA's Web site.

When officers tried to arrest him, Baggett pointed a semi-automatic rifle with an extra clip of ammo duct-taped to it at one of the agents. He never got off a shot. Officers shot him in the face and buttocks and riddled his travel trailer with bullets. He was hospitalized in critical condition. In his trailer and truck, police found 3,000 rounds of ammunition to go with his eight weapons.

Now, instead of a possible three- to five-year sentence for violating the Clean Water Act and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in Utah, Baggett faces up to 90 additional years for stockpiling eight weapons and threatening the officers attempting to arrest him....

Baggett owned Chemical Consultants, a company that mixed 55-gallon drums of truck-wash acid and chemicals for removing lime and rust. When it was pumped out, some of the mixture remained in the drum, according to court records. Baggett instructed his employees to dump the remaining toxic chemicals onto pavement to evaporate or into a nearby sewer drain.

The rest.

A lot of people indulge in petty greed, though few are willing to die for the priveledge.

Manistee/Jordan, 7/5-6

Temps in the upper 70s augured well for a hex emergence on the stretch of the Manistee where I usually fish them. After I set up camp I wandered down to the river to look things over and saw a hex dun flutter up from the water: another good sign.

So I was in place in my second-choice spot by 8, and had to share it with only one other fisherman. As darkness fell, a modest number of hexes began cruising over the river. Temps had already fallen considerably by then, so no spinner fall took place, but flies emerged off and on for about an hour. The best feeding activity seemed to occur while I was tying on new flies. I ended up with one 13" brown and a few smaller ones, though my upstream neighbor caught a brown measuring 20".

On Monday, I fished the Jordan, in the Jordan valley pathway area, for the afternoon. Absolutely dead until I caught a brook, a brown, and a few tiny rainbows around 4PM.

Air temps only reached about 65 and dropped into the 50s by evening. I hit the river wearing a long sleeve t-shirt under my sweatshirt, and long underwear under my jeans, and I had the kind of fishing you'd expect when that clothing is called for. Saw one dun and one spinner on the water and a handful of bugs in the air.

I can still catch the hex around here in another week or so, fishing smallmouth...

Saturday Quotes, 7/4/09

Politically, I'm clumsy and full of rages.

--Jim Harrison

I'm there, Jimbo.

By contrast, demonstrating an utter lack of political self-awareness:

Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out.

--Sarah Palin, upon resigning Alaska's governorship.

That's a heck of a quit notice.

And one quip in response:

"[Palin] should also lead the nation's mothers to oppose mandating replacement of incandescent light bulbs with the new mercury poison gas bulbs.

--Peter Ferrara, Foxnews.com, in response to Palin's resignation.

Wonder if he supports expanding nuclear power?

The indelible idiocy of our body politic aside, happy 4th.



I'll be engaged in the pursuit of happiness up north for the next two days, trying to get in on the end of the hex hatch and fishing the Jordan river for the first time. Look for tweets under "Field Reports," a full writeup on return.

This Land is Your Land (or WAS, at any rate)

A subject I've taken up here from time to time is the preservation of public lands. The recent passage of Michigan House Bill 5050 brings the issue once again to the fore.

The bill authorizes the sale of 475 acres of state forest in Iosco county to a golf course developer who already has several courses in the area. The logic behind this, of course, is to attract more upscale tourists and generate (mostly seasonal) jobs in what is admittedly a depressed area. If you've read this blog for a while, you can probably guess what I think of this.

I'll just make a couple of comments. First, I fear the precedent it sets. An evaluation of the property finds it currently hosts "hiking, berry picking, and very light hunting activity by local residents." This could describe many parcels of state land. And since blueberries or after-work hunting will never generate the dollars that golf courses (or amusement parks, or water parks, or Executive Conference Retreats)will, can we expect the state to liquidate more comparable acreage to patch gaps in its budget?

Secondly, this is a blatant transfer of wealth from the public to the private sphere (scarcely a unique event during the last 30 years, and the one redistributive scheme conservatives never protest). Real estate reverse Robin Hood. Yes, the state will be paid "fair market value" for the land, but that doesn't reimburse the loss to those who currently use the land and will in the future. The windfall for the state is a one-time occurrence--the loss to the public will be ongoing.

"Michigan needs to do more to attract high income tourists from out of state. Primitive camping, small town diners, and low-impact recreation won't do that." So say the proponents of this land sale. This gives me the feeling I'm being written out of Michigan's cultural script.

Saturday Quote, 6/27/09

How glorious it would be to feel the key turn, to be able to enter the culture of things outside us, to understand not only the what of the universe but the why. To read the slow rain of rising trout, or comprehend, really comprehend, the shocking orange of fungus, labial and exquisite, shining on the underside of a rotting log. To grasp the intent and the glory, the slow fire of life behind them.

Mark Slouka, "On the Rich Sin of Meddling"

"...the slow rain of rising trout..." How apt. Of course, I concur with the general notion here.

The Swollen-Shrunken Creek

Fish always get bigger in memory, they say, and for me it doesn't stop there: streams also grow in size after I've been away from them for a while. There have been occasions when I've gone to streams I haven't fished in years and found them to be about half as large as I remember them. Two years ago while driving back from Traverse City, I stopped at the Middle Branch in Osceola county, a stream I hadn't fished since '93. I remembered it being 20-25 feet wide, with lots of open runs. But that night I found it rarely stretched more than 15 feet across. Alders and protruding branches of oak and aspen pressed in on those "open runs" I remembered. Of course, the last time I'd been there I'd been spin fishing, and hadn't been too concerned about casting room. I'm not saying the Middle Branch couldn't be fly fished up in its troutiest parts, but it would take more strategy than I had energy for that night.

I wanted to get out of the house last night, so I gathered my gear and drove to a favorite spot on the Huron. I expected it would still be high from last week's rains, and it was. Places usually knee-deep in midsummer would have reached to my shoulders. One alternative was to drive home, get my boat, and go to a lake, but thoughts of assembling it in temperatures still close to 90 nixed that.

Another option was to find a small stream, since they recover from rainfall more quickly than large ones, but there are few such streams worth fishing around here. Cloud Creek, one hour away, would be an option in drier times, but having been outfitted as an agricultural drain, it recedes more slowly than streams three times its size. There was, however, a stream near Flint, stocked with brown trout, that I'd done very well at the few times I fished it. I lived in the area during my first year at Michigan State, and had been pleasantly surprised to find this resource so close to home. Unfortunately, I discovered it only about a month before I moved to Lansing. That would have been the summer of '96. Since then I've thought of going back a few times, but wasn't sure the drive would be worth it, especially with good smallmouth fishing close by on the Huron. Last night, I had no reason to stay close, so by a little before 7, I was northward bound.

When I got to the creek, I found the bottom was visible (in spite of the stream still spilling into the woods at points). Encouraging. Unfortunately, a large willow spread completely across the creek just in front of a bridge, covering a run I remember being productive. I knew there was a tree there, but didn't remember it sprawling that way. True, the last time I saw it was 13 years ago, but the heavy limbs out over the water would have been there the last time I was. And most of the creek couldn't have been more than 12 feet across. In my mind I envisioned it at closer to 20.

I remember quartering wet flies in front of the bridge, casting down and across the stream without any particular difficulty, but last night the best I could manage was a short flick that passed my fly below the large willow and above the box elder next to it. I put the fly in the trees about half the time. There is a nice riffle a little ways up from the bridge, and I seem to recall laying dry flies up into its seems with careful overhand casts. I still could--if ideally positioned slightly left of center at the bottom of the riffle. Then, I was good for a cast up to ten feet, with a cast going in the trees from time to time. That might well have been the case thirteen years ago, come to think of it, but that's not the memory that stands out.

I ended up lobbing streamers along some of the timber, getting a quick bump at one point. It didn't take long to cover the fishable water. About twenty yards on either side of the bridge, brush almost completely encloses the stream. That much does fit with my recollections, but I wish it was the part of the memory I'd gotten wrong.

Lifting the Veil of Ivy...

Another good idea from The Atlantic: Shine a light into the dark recesses of the Ivory Tower.

The conventional wisdom is that you get what you pay for—that the larger the price tag, the better the product. But that’s not true in higher education. Tuition has been skyrocketing for years, with little evidence that education has improved. Universities typically favor research and publishing over teaching. And influential college rankings like the one published by U.S. News & World Report measure mostly wealth and status (alumni giving rates, school reputation, incoming students’ SAT scores); they reveal next to nothing about what students learn....

The Obama administration could be a catalyst for change. The stimulus package includes $30 billion in tuition aid, at a time when colleges are starving for money. That gives the government leverage—it should push for systematic public information on the quality of undergraduate learning, school by school. This would not only serve students; over time, it would improve the quality of our workforce and the prospects for our entire economy.


That stimulus bill certainly stimulated some thought at the Atlantic. We can hope it has the same impact elsewhere.

Taxidermy--Not Just For the Cabin Anymore

Today I discovered an extremely cool blog called Taxidermy. Check it out, but don't expect to see any of the specimens there gracing the Trophy Mountain at a Cabela's.





Not sure what these kinds of works represent--but definitely not an outdoorsman's ego trip.