Getting Back, Part 6

It wouldn't be that long before I set it up again, so instead of folding and packing the tent I wadded it into the car's trunk. I stowed the rest of my gear into whatever free spaces I could find there or in the seats, then motored out of the park and down to Newberry as fast as the state or the pocked asphalt allowed.

My ultimate destination was the Fox river near Seney, but before I could get back on the water I would have to either buy a new reel or have mine fixed, and the latter I figured was an unlikely prospect in those parts. But as I reached the outskirts of Newberry, an ad for a sporting goods store there came onto the radio, and among its offerings was fishing reel repair. The store wasn't hard to find (there isn't much room in Newberry for anything to hide), and after spending five minutes and two dollars there, I was Seney bound.

During the time I was a student at Northern Michigan, I passed over the Fox on M-28 often. Usually when I did, I thought idly of fishing there sometime, despite the fact my tackle had been gathering dust for a few years. It was, after all, the river Ernest Hemingway had actually fished on the trip that inspired the story "Big Two-Hearted River," which for an English major was enticement enough. I remember now too that I was reading the novel Laughing Whitefish by Robert Traver, the celebrated UP author and fisherman, on that trip. That book is itself set in the UP; I guess that in more than one sense I was putting myself in a storied landscape, though literary history was of peripheral concern on that trip. I was there to catch trout, the more the better.

At the state forest campground on the east branch of the Fox, I set up my camp within sight of the river. On the side of my tent opposite the river, maybe a hundred feet off, a flowing well spouted away. So on that part of the trip, whether I was fishing or in camp, I was almost never away from the sound of moving water. That was something of a comfort while I wrestled with my tent, an old nylon two-man model by Camel. It had steel poles at either end that were barely stouter than a radio antenna and I could almost never keep one of them erect while trying to set the other. Once I had them in place, I would stake the lines as tight as I could, though that was never enough to keep the tent from sagging. If I'd known what I was doing then, I'd have tied lines to trees in front of and behind the tent to hold it taut. Some mornings I awoke with not quite enough headroom in the tent to sit up. I was fortunate no rain fell during that week, sparing me any long confinement in the Camel.