My return to fishing had more to do with attraction to a place than with any desire to catch a fish. I said above that I went to college in Upper Michigan, at Northern Michigan University to be precise. And I flat out loved it there. While I fell away from outdoor pursuits, I did love the place: the rugged landscape, the vastness of lake Superior, the slower pace of life, the typically pragmatic, earthy character of the people, the Finnish accents, the rustic little bars...I could go on. My friends may not have fished, but those I had later in my time in college were usually up for a road trip into some remote nook of the UP to soak up beer and local color. I regularly got out for short hikes outside Marquette, often along the lakeshore. And I started to wonder what it would be like to fish some of those swift rivers or loon-haunted lakes. By the time I graduated, I felt as if my life was inseparably meshed with that of the UP. Though I still had vague plans to seek a kind of career that the UP couldn't offer me, my time there did set my standards for what the good life was, and I left with the sense that any other life would be somehow diminished.
The life I lived immediately after graduation was deficient enough on its face. On the up side, I was living with Kristine, the first time in our relationship we hadn't resided at least 100 miles apart. However, my job hunt yielded only a series of disappointments. I went on interview after interview for positions I didn't want all that much, and blew an interview for one (as an editor at Gale Research) I did. I had next to no money, worked grim temp jobs for what little I had, and made my way around in a 78 Malibu that burned more oil than gas. Kristine and I didn't have the money to go out very often. The uniformly bland Detroit suburbs offered no vistas, trails, or rivers where I might escape the anxieties of my job hunt. I missed Marquette.
Things improved in June when I landed a position as a field rep for the college division of St. Martin's Press. I would promote their textbooks at campuses all around Michigan in parts of Indiana and Ohio. By summer's end I had a respectable salary, a company car, an expense account, and the prospect of summers off--since we sold to colleges, we worked on the academic calendar. And as I thought about how I would spend the upcoming summer, the idea of a fishing trip to the UP coalesced.
By April, near the end of the sales year the idea had utterly seized me. And I wasn't going to wait for June, when we were officially off the clock, to go fishing either. Our final duty for the year was to write an annual report of conditions in our territory and the results we attained. By the beginning of May I had no more sales visits to make. I would be free to write the report at home, but an even better situation for this task came to mind. At this time, my father had parked our old travel trailer on a permanent site in Manistee. So I decided to go up there to write the report and manage a few hours of fishing each day on the side. I had never fished for trout in northern Michigan. Taking this trip, I figured, would give me another taste of that more rustic, close-to-nature existence I'd had in the UP. I assumed I was on the verge of one of the great angling experiences of my life.
That actually was far from the truth, but my anticipation for the trip was so keen it pushed aside any thought of disappointment. I planned to leave on a Sunday night, and on the Friday before I dragged Kristine to a Dunham's in Warren and bought waders and other necessaries. I did still have the ultralight spinning rod and reel I'd used in my teens. Kristine regarded my sudden enthusiasm for fishing with the air of a confused bystander; that distraction from our relationship wasn't on the horizon when we started dating. Neither of us could have guessed where it would lead. I certainly couldn't have imagined the faltering course it would follow on the way.
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