Getting Back, Part 3

My first look at the east branch was encouraging. The river offered the smaller water I felt at home on, and was loaded with brush that I just knew concealed legions of brook trout. The current was gentle, but the river's channel grew deep enough in some places to nearly top my waders. I had to crawl over some logjams that spanned the river. I tried to exit the river to walk around them, but dense alders or steep, unstable banks made that impossible. When that happened I actually found myself missing the suburban stream I grew up on. If you didn't like one spot, you just moseyed across someone's smooth, open lawn to the next.

I waded upstream, fishing worms around the edges of the logs or under overhanging alders. I got a few nips, but nothing that stayed on the line. When I turned around to fish back to the bridge, I finally connected. I had several more short strikes, but three small, legal trout inhaled my nightcrawler when I let it wash beneath logjams and held on. They went in my creel.

Catching them wasn't much more of an accomplishment than landing those few trout on Pine creek on my trip to Manistee a month earlier, but the satisfaction it brought was pure and unconflicted. My slight success at the end of that outing didn't wipe out the disappointment brought by a week of lucklessly flailing the water. But this trip was just beginning. Those trout didn't leave me with much meat when I fileted them, but they were substance enough to nourish hopes for the days ahead.