In the Kiddie Pool

Fished the Huron again yesterday morning. Lots of fish, all very small. Not much else to say.

I did snap this photo of the view from within the Cedar Bend nature preserve. Back in there, you could almost think you're miles from the nearest city. Assuming, of course, that you can block out a lot of traffic noise and overlook the occasional towering construction crane. Urban fishing comes with sights and sounds as distinctive as those of high mountain creeks.



This will be all from me for a while. Kristine and I are going away next week, and in the meantime I need to get prepared. I won't manage much more than one morning of fishing on this trip, but as little time as I've had for trout this summer, that will be welcome. We're making our first venture into canoe camping this time, floating from Grayling to Alcona Dam. Pics and stories--happy ones, I hope--will follow our return.

Huron River, 7/27

Went down to the Huron at Island Park for an hour before dark last night. Fished olive and black wooly buggers and got only nips. Switched to a brown streamer with yellow rubber legs and a copper conehead and caught 4 10-12" smallmouth in 5 casts, plus some smaller ones and a 7" rock bass. My best rockie to date out of the Huron.

Was a little harried when I got to the river last night--it had been a busy afternoon and I got to the water later than I wanted to. I rigged in a grim haste and waded into the river with all the expansive attentiveness that jogging on a treadmill demands. I didn't notice until I first changed flies what a perfect night it was to be outdoors--still, neither hot nor cool, a canzon of birdsong animating the catalpas and mulberries lining the river, the air thick with the fecund-sweet smell of the Huron. (Some nights the river's surface doesn't seem like a sharp boundary--the stream simply fades as it gets farther from its bed.) As these things registered, a calm began spreading through my body like sunlight inching its way across a lake at dawn, and all thoughts of distant things ceased. I was ready for the fish that would come.

Saturday Quote, 7/26/08

A whole poem, actually.

"Resting Places," Douglas Haynes

The meat tasted like wild ginger.
It was my only religion.
In the woods an hour later,
the setting sun back-lit
the hackles of a fox
caught in the crotch of a locust:
treed by dogs and starved
or trapped and strung up
by a person.

In a week, I went back
to see the fox's head
sunk and blackened
against a burning sky
like the girl's face
engulfed in flames
in my friend's painting
that my friend says
she painted in her room
before she knew
that a girld died there in a fire.

I bought the painting
to remember the mystery.
I returned again
and again to see the fox
hanging in effigy like my hand
lifting that dark medallion
of deer loin to my teeth.

Last Weekend

I've been slow getting up my report about last weekend, though my field reports gave the skeleton outline. I'll just flesh those out with some pictures.

Our first stop was the Loud Creek trail system near Mio. Nothing spectacular about it: just a nice rolling woodland trail. We did run into several wood lilies along the way



Near the end, the trail crossed a small stream near an abandoned beaver dam. A meadow had filled in the old pond some time ago.



We picked some blueberries along this trail to put on our cereal the next morning. Unfortunately, I left the container we put them in on top of our car when we drove off. It had taken us a while to get a couple of cups, too. Berries were sparse everywhere we went.

When I hit the North Branch Au Sable the next morning, a heavy fog lay over the river. It lifted slowly.



I should have taken pics of some of the brookies I caught, but the flies were out and fish were rising. It's hard to remember to break out the camera in those conditions. Or almost any time after I've caught a fish.

Saturday afternoon we took a hike around Wakely lake, east of Grayling. We got poured on during the last half mile of the walk, but it was pleasant going at first.



I was glad we'd stayed in a motel this time, as it rained off and on throughout the weekend.

When I got into the river at Dam 4 Saturday morning, I'd seen a flyer advertising the annual "Beaver Stew, Beer and Banjo" festival, a gathering to benefit the Lovells historical society. It sounded like an interesting way to pass a damp Saturday night, so we drove up to the Lovells tavern around suppertime. We assumed that the featured dish didn't really include beaver, but when I asked the waitress at the tavern about it, she confirmed that Castor Canadensis was indeed the chief ingredient. Kristine and I exchanged a "What the Hell?" glance and ordered it. It was actually good--like beef stew, as I said in the field report. If you got a larger chunk of meat, you could taste a little rankness, but not enough to put any but the most delicately constituted off their feed.



Before heading home Sunday, Kristine and I canoed the upper Au Sable. We passed through a light rain, then a protracted heavy one. Not good photo conditions.

Plans are in the works for another bowl of beaver stew. Kristine and I are talking about spending this week--the week before the big canoe marathon--in and around Grayling next year and chasing the race once again. That could become an anniversary tradition. This year, we'll settle for going to the annual Michigan Beer Festival.

Do Not Forget Forsake Me...

A classified ad in the newest issue of Harper's...


Need a Prayer Answered?
**** Enterprises can critique and edit your manuscript at affordable prices! Other services too.


Maybe my entreaties for large trout and a better job go ungranted because of a few sentence fragments or passive verbs? Or maybe because I haven't committed them to paper. My spiritual life may need extensive revisions.



Kristine and I are headed to Grayling tomorrow for a long weekend. I should manage a couple mornings on the water, and I'll file a few field reports while I'm up there.

Piscene Politics

Americans since the founding of the republic have denounced their politicians as swine, but in recent years, they commonly liken them to fish. The politicians themselves can't resist this comparison either, at least when discussing their opponents. Should their foes express the slightest deviance from an earlier position, they quickly slap their rival with a label implying all the dignity and resolve of caught fish in a net: "flip-flopppers." From the earliest primaries to the eve of the general election, they level this charge tirelessly. Gleefully. Reflexively. And it seems more and more to me, witlessly.

(flashback: sometime in the 90s a senatorial candidate in some eastern state had a press event at a Waffle House to emphasize her opponent's waffling on issues. Asked by a reporter what issues he had waffled on, the candidate said she would have to check.)

I don't know if I'm on record anywhere as demanding perfect consistency from elected officials, but if I am and this statement represents a flip-flop, so be it: I hereby grant blanket amnesty to candidates who change their views on a subject during a campaign or, for that matter, at any point during their career. These reversals in themselves will not affect my decision whether or not to vote for them.

I don't think that shifting stances are unimportant or that they don't call into question a candidate's credibility and allegiances. But I don't think in all cases they fatally undermine these either. I would like to think that occasionally, leaders or would-be leaders change their minds because they believe they were mistaken in the past and believe the good of the country demands a different course of action. (Of course, they can will themselves to believe this when they change their minds for political convenience, but that's another matter). In matters like the environment, civil rights, consumer protection, etc., the country did benefit from officeholders changing their minds.

I won't deny it has suffered for the same reason, or that quite often, candidates change their minds out of sheer political expediency. The former is almost a given, which is one reason why the charges and countercharges of flip-flopping represent lazy politics. Any candidate can find a contradiction in his or her opponents' statements. They can find one for every news cycle if they look hard enough and use them to hammer their rivals into tinfoil scraps ready to be carried off by the next puff wind. That's much easier than carefully explaining one's proposals for taxes, the environment, foreign policy, health care, etc., being clear about what they will cost, who they will benefit, what vision of the country they are intended to support, and what uncertainties come with them. Easier too that taking a hard look at the country's problems and how their prior actions in office, or for that matter the actions of Joe Citizen, might have contributed to them.

I don't think that American voters are naive enough to believe that no politician will change his or her views to keep step with political fashion. My hope is that they would come to shrug off the media-aided fixation on political flip-flops. My fear is that candidates will so dread branding with the flip flopper label that they will be afraid to rethink their views for reasons of substance. That rigidity is more troubling to me than the occasional change of mind. Better a candidate be slippery as a fish than dumb as a post.

Happy Birthday TU!

Trout Unlimited was founded 49 years ago today in Grayling, MI. Thanks to them for all they've done, and are doing. On Saturday, when I float by the house where the inaugural meeting took place, I believe I will raise a can in celebration.

*********

The hooker/dry fly story will likely appear next week...

Back to the 'Zoo

Speaking of things Kalamazoo, as I was yesterday, I'm leaving shortly for a wedding there. Perhaps I ought to swing by a few bits of "old" Kalamazoo while I still can.

But thinking more about the "old days" in the 'Zoo, I recalled that a lot of things about them weren't so good. If much of the city, especially downtown, had more character, if it was grittier, quirkier, less homogenized, less managed, it had more troubles too. Two large malls had opened west of town in the late 60s-early 70s (one of which was the reason my family moved there: my father managed the Montgomery Ward store there. That mall, by the way, has its own page on Vanished Kalamazoo now...) which drew business away from downtown, putting many establishments there out of business, and leaving the survivors in a more or less continuous struggle to carry on.
And few people went there after dark. Some beautiful older neighborhoods turned seedy. Court ordered school integration flared racial tensions. And the shaky Michigan economy of the 70s and early 80s left many people wondering just when their job would disappear with the next plant or mill closing (that's one aspect of the old days that's reemerging).

Today, information and technology based businesses have revived the economy, and downtown buildings that stood empty during much of my childhood have been renovated to host office space or luxury condos. Some of the older neighborhoods have been polished up. Some of the rougher blocks around the central city have been leveled for an expansion of Bronson hospital. There's a new nightclub in the old Shakespeare fishing tackle plant. And people come downtown at night for festivals, clubs, restaurants. Chicago it isn't but it does have vigor it lacked when I lived there. Of course, strip malls and big boxes sprawl further and further beyond the borders of the city, but where don't they?

Across the Kalamazoo of 30 or so years ago fell some shadows that have retreated a long way. Reflecting on this brings to mind a story of when one unexpectedly fell across me. It involves dry flies and a prostitute. I'll tell it next week.

Vanished Landscape

Musings on the loss, or potential loss, of some wild piece of woods or water appear frequently at FTR. But this week I've been spending some time at a site documenting a different kind of vanished landscape, one especially close to my heart. I'm talking about vanishedkalamazoo.com. It's an amateurish production, but to its core audience that's irrelevant (I offer myself in evidence). The site gives these visitors something more valuable than a dazzling graphic experience: it gives them themselves.

Vanished Kalamazoo collects photographs and reminiscences of parts of Kalamazoo, Mich.--my hometown---that time and the vicissitudes of economics and public taste have driven into nonexistence. The site memorializes some of the economic and physical landmarks of the city, such as Checker Motors, the paper mills, the open-air downtown mall, but many more--small shops, restaurants, gas stations, bars and--that were of no great consequence. Unless of course, you happened to grow up around and in them.

Surfing through the site gives me the impression of riding around town with my parents in our Plymouth Valiant or LTD station wagon, past the Koffee Kup or the Reid (on the site, Rickman) Hotel, the Chocolate Shop, R.M. Jones Gifts (a 19th century brick box standing monolithically amid multilane arteries slicing in and out of downtown), and any number of small and obscure or large and historic places. For the first time in decades, I see the Valley Inn, where my family stayed after we first move to Kalamazoo, and Schensul's cafeteria, where we ate a few times during that encampment. I remember the sticky floor, the ripped seats, and the popcorn machine encrusted with burned grease in the Capitol (Majestic) Theatre, where I went to see Song of the South just before the place closed. I also caught one of the last shows (I think it was The Thing with Kurt Russel) at the Douglas Drive In.



Greater cultural losses, at least in my eyes, were Flipside and Boogie records, where I explored the world of music beyond Top 40 radio. Boogie's phone number was one digit off from my family's so we often got calls for them.

Certain establishments furnished legend and rumor that reliably titillated our respectable citizens, and the contemporary, gentrified city likely has no equivalents. Club Zorba, a bar on the north edge of downtown, was reputedly a den of all sorts of vices that my preteen mind couldn't quite grasp, though my sisters and I always traded dark innuendos about it if we drove past. A murder actually happened there once. The building that housed it was knocked down some years back, and the spot now hosts a community college branch. Gone too are some of the dive bars where I whiled away too much of the extremely unhappy year after I turned 21.

Any other city could engender a similar repository of images and memories. This just happens to be mine. And in a way, what I see at Vanished Kalamazoo happens to be me. In the book I'm reading by Melissa Holbrook Pierson, which I mentioned below, she discusses the notion of "cognitive maps," the mental picture of the world that we all construct. These, according to the psychologists and cultural geographers who developed the concept, help us define who we are since they position us in relation to our surrounding: there has to be an "us" to connect with the world surrounding us. When something is wiped off our cognitive map, our sense of self is altered and diminished. This allegedly explains why people mourn losing familiar landscapes, or parts of them.

I don't think what I feel looking at the site is nostalgia, at least in the technical sense. I don't particularly wish I could return to the time when I lived in Kalamazoo. But the photos and stories do bring back that time in a surprisingly vivid way. This includes not only defining moments, but the everyday textures and settings of it; the routines and all feelings attending them. Put simply, going there made me feel a little bigger, returning to consciousness a base layer of my life. Maybe we can't go home again, though home sometimes comes back to us.

So where would you go, what would you have to see, to bring another time in your life into the now?

The Summer I Didn't

Warning--whining of a merely personal nature ahead.

This seems to be going down as the summer I didn't do some-thing-or-other-I-meant-to.

For starters, I haven't fished this little during a summer in years. This summer's rains have something to do with that. I cancelled a hex outing a couple weeks back due to forecasts of heavy rain, and locally, the Huron has been too high for comfortable wading for much of the summer. It is now, actually, and I'd figured to get out a few nights this week. Kristine and I are taking a weekend trip to Grayling in a couple weeks, and I should squeeze in a couple mornings on the water then. Otherwise...I might not chase trout again until September. That puts a bit of a crimp on a fishing-oriented blog.

When I do get out, I often forget my camera, or don't bother to take pictures if I do. Also not good for the blog.

I meant to write a killer application letter for a renewed job search later this year. I've done some background research, but no real sketching of the letter.

I have rarely even gone outside except to work in the yard.

What have I done? Mostly, I've sat behind the computer, or in libraries, plotting out some courses I'm developing for fall. And progressing slower than I'd ever have imagined. So much for getting "summer off." Last spring, my chair proffered these teaching opportunities with some gravity and circumspection--maybe she had a better idea than I did of the effort I'd need to invest getting those together. All I'd thought of was the chance to do more work with my environmental interests , but as the poet says, In dreams begin responsibilities.

I'm going to Kalamazoo this weekend for a niece's wedding, and that's starting to sound like a dream trip.

I'll close with something from a time this summer when I DID--did go fishing and did take my camera along. This shot of the Tippy Dam backwaters is probably one of the better photos I've snapped this year. I took it from my campsite during my June trip to Manistee.



Disappointing as that trip was, at the moment I'd take another like it in a heartbeat.

Gym Observations, 7/2/08

While I was on the eliptical trainer yesterday, an elderly man two machines down from me began singing "The Ride of the Valkyries" loudly as he worked out. It was hard not to stare. If it happens again, would it be impolite to harmonize?

The rec center is running some kind of day camp for kids now. The lower gym is filled with young children in matching T-shirts, with different colors for different age levels, each imprinted with "Happy Camper" across the back. I imagined that when these kids get to college, some of them would write brooding essays about how wrong that designation was, and how much they still resent it.

Some people take their fitness seriously. A seventyish lady in front of me matched my 30 minutes on the eliptical, then went straight for the rowing machine. I do that sometimes, but I wanted to leave earlier yesterday to pick up a case of 3 Buck Chuck on my way to a doctor's appointment.

Gull Lake, 7/1/08

On the spur of the moment Monday, I called my dad to see how he was feeling and whether he might want to try to fish this week. Yesterday looked good, so I went over in the afternoon and we tried our luck on Gull Lake, where we often fished when I was growing up.

It was a beautiful day--warm but not too hot, clear, a pleasant breeze that let up shortly into the evening, the water a pure electric blue. Traffic on the often busy lake was minimal.

I don't know if I've enjoyed a day outside this summer as much as I did yesterday. Sometimes "just being out there" really is enough, though we did catch a few good sized panfish. When we left the lake a little after 9, I was surprised at how light it still was, which told me just how little time I've spent outdoors this summer.

I was pleased to see my father looking strong. You'd never guess he was a day over 69.

Filling Out Back There

Speaking of weeds and ways of conceiving outdoor space, it's time, or past time, for a post about the meadow . The "meadow" I refer to is the strip at the end of my backyard that I converted to a native grass/wildflower plot four years--or five growing seasons--ago. Being something of a "native landscape enthusiast" myself, I was excited at the prospect of returning a small piece of southeast Michigan to "what it was," by which I meant in some imagined past before to the arrival of white people, or at least of intensive agricultural use and housing development. What I've accomplished remains a good register of what this locality is--a place where where cultivated grasses and opportunistic weeds quickly move out from their strongholds (some of which take the form of my neighbor's well-maintained lawns, some of untended fencerows and the yards of my fellow lawn slackers)to claim any piece of open soil within reach. It's also something of a self-portrait. I'm basically indifferent to weeds in my yard, which means I'm going to battle them continuously out in the meadow. Probably no patch of presettlement meadow in Michigan contained the assortment of plants mine does. Over the years, I've transplanted found or purchased plants and sprinkled seeds I picked up on outings across the state with minimal regard for how all the plants would look or fit together. As a result I've got tall plants dwarfing short one, sun-loving species struggling to exist in the shade of honeysuckles, or plants I would usually see spaced widely across fields jammed together. All of which says that I began this venture eagerly but underinformed, as a great many nature lovers do in a great many undertakings. But I'm learning.

My haphazard efforts notwithstanding, the meadow appears nothing short of robust this year. In the sunnier spots at least, there are few open spaces, and spreading native plants are efficiently forcing out the weeds which in past years I doggedly plucked and dug throughout the summer. Here's a shot of it from yesterday:



This is nearly the same location two years ago:



Here's a closeup of some milkweeds I seeded three years ago. They're crowded by blackeyed susans, woodland sunflowers, bergamots...hidden in there are spiderworts and foxgloves too.



I took these shots in the same area two years ago:





I am hoping the day we move out of this house is not too many years off. When it comes, the thing I think I will miss most is this meadow. It hurts to think some future owner might rip out these "weeds" to reinstate bluegrass and fescue.