Trip Series: Introduction

As I said on New Year's day, I'm going to write about a few fishing trips I took before this blog came into being that I found significant for one reason or another, mostly ones that were important points in my angler's learning curve. These entries will be posted periodically over the winter, sometimes in serial form.

When I was a kid, trout fishing required only walking across the street. But in adulthood, I've had to travel to fish for trout. I satisfy my fishing jones in small doses of two, three, four days away in northern Michigan, sometimes with a single outing in the midst of a trip taken for some other reason. Most of the time, a trip will take on a particular tone. Sometimes a kind of theme emerges from the experiences of a given trip. Sometimes trips acquire an actual theme song, depending on what what stands out in my listening on the drive up, or while I'm driving around to fish. I tend to remember particular days on the water, individual fish I've caught, notable hatches in the context of trips, not as standout experiences themselves. So to tell the story of my fishing life, I need to look back on those brief packets of time. It is from the accretion of experiences in each, more so than from particular moments, that I've learned my most important lessons about the sport, or carried away my most potent memories of it.

Above I gave the impression that beginning these trips marked a transition in how I went about fishing. It would be more accurate, though to say that it marked a beginning, a restart of my fishing career. I took the first of these outings when I was 25, out of college for about about a year and a half, less than a year into my first "real" job, and about six or seven years since I'd last fished seriously. When I got into college, I got distracted by studies, parties, trendy music, and a set of friends for whom fishing was something either foreign or forgotten. When I wasn't absorbed by these things, my mind was set on some career to come, preferably in some large city. This in spite of the fact that I went to college in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan--one would be hard pressed to find a collegiate locale with better fishing opportunities. Many young people follow a similar course, actually, but not all recover their passion for the outdoors. It's hard to imagine what my life would be like now if I hadn't.