My excursions later in the week played out more or less like that first day on Bear Creek. I tried the Little Manistee and Claybank Creek besides heading back to the Bear a few times. I probably spent as much time driving around, guided by my AAA map, investigating different access points on the streams, as I did fishing. (Surely, I thought, there had to be a spot where the fish were abundant and eager.) Tire hiking, I called it, as I still do. I think I coined the term on that trip.
I honestly can't recall if I caught a trout during the first four days of the trip. If I did, it made less of an impression on my than a steelhead that exploded from the water five feet in front of me when I put a toe into the water on a lower stretch of Bear Creek, then again a moment later thirty or forty feet upstream. That felt slightly humiliating. It was as if the river was taunting me with my quarry. I could look, but not touch.
However, the final outing of the week would put a little slime on my hands. I set out for Pine Creek near where it angled across M-55 by the town of Wellston. A rough trail leading south from the highway brought me to a pulloff overlooking a beaver pond--the first beaver pond I'd ever seen, actually. And it was the most pleasant a day I'd yet had, near sixty and sunny.
I cast a spinner across the center of the pond, letting it sink for several seconds then slowly retrieving. No luck. I waded in and worked toward the pond's inlet, which looked very promising: a narrow chute, knee deep, guarded by overhanging alder limbs and sunken brush along its margins. I pitched my lure into the top of the chute and about a second after I clicked the bail I felt a shaking on the end of my line. Not a throb that nearly pulled the rod from my hands or made my drag scream, but resistance enough to give me ten or twelve ecstatic seconds before gold flashed in the water before me. I whipped out my new net (the fish didn't actually require it, but I'd be damned if I didn't get some use out of it)
and scooped up a brook trout. Laying it on the bank, I measured it at a hair over ten inches.
Maybe that was a moment I should have savored, but I quickly unhooked and released the trout and cast into the chute again. I had a lot of fishless hours to make up for. The second cast brought another strike and another brook trout, this one a little smaller. I continued fishing the chute and managed one more strike but no fish that stayed one the line. I waded upstream from the pond, working under the alders and along tangles of brush. I took a third trout quickly, but then fished for over an hour before another came. The last two were actually quite small, six or seven inches, though I did fight for them. Above the pond the creek was no more than ten feet wide. Many of my "casts" amounted to popping the spinner through a small gap in the alders, and I didn't wade so much as I ducked and crawled though the brush, sometimes in the stream and sometimes along its banks.
With my luck waning and the confines of the creek tightening I called it quits on Pine Creek, and on the week. I would be leaving that night, and I needed time to pack my bags and shut down the trailer. And trying elsewhere else and getting skunked (an all-too-likely prospect) might have erased my already fading satisfaction in the day. Driving back to Manistee I felt ambivalent. Catching those trout did bring back a measure of the hope I'd felt as I set out on the trip, but they still were a small payoff (in more than one sense) for a week of fishing well-regarded trout waters. I thought the unthinkable: maybe I really wasn't cut out to be a fisherman. Or at least, maybe I'd be happier sticking to pursuits that didn't involve persuading someone to accept a dubious offering ( a suspicion that came to me often during my years as a sales rep). Maybe I ought to stick to hiking, which required only looking at the scenery. I knew that fishing was about more than catching fish, but I wanted the fish to be more than anomalies the process.
I'm prone to quitting things too soon, to fixing on the mote of failure in my successes.
I really did consider hanging up the rod, but that decision wasn't for then and there. I was taking that trip to the UP regardless.
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