Getting Back: Conclusion

I wouldn't have such a night again on that trip, but I did enjoy three more days of very good fishing. I stayed on the east branch between the campground and where the river crossed M-77, trying different access trails. The stretches of water I fished didn't differ a great deal from one another, and neither did the fishing they offered. Each day the wood and the shadows yielded up a dozen or two brook trout of assorted sizes (though no more 17"ers, or anything close), along with a scattering of browns, most of which registered about 12". There were slow periods. There were lost lures and snarled lines, frozen feet and sunburned arms. More than one snag or trailing root brought me to my knees midstream. But none of those things clouded my relishment of what for me is one of the rarest of feelings: joy.

I savored camp life--the evening fire, the stars overhead, fresh pan-fried trout. Waking to find frost on a June morning. Hearing grouse drumming in the distance when I'd never heard them before. A troop of rowdy boy scouts rolled into camp Friday and staged a talent show in the evening, but even they didn't ruin the mood.

Something began on that trip. What had a few weeks before been a tentative impulse prompted by memory had become a passion. I'd gotten back to the headlong excitement about fishing I'd had as a child. But beyond that, the pursuit of trout became caught up in the desire for a rich and variegated bundle of experiences, one that expands and contracts, gains and loses and regains pieces over the years: the lonely places, the campfires, wading into a river through morning fog, the chattering of kingfishers, mayflies bobbling along the surface of a river, drinking a beer on the tailgate while the moon rises and coyotes begin to howl. In short, my idea of the trout trip was born.

That week on the Two Hearted and the Fox first gave me the experience of fishing as a parallel life, complete in itself, which I mention in my bio on this blog. Not that I've sought to relive that moment. I'm not trying to step in the same river twice, and I know that you can't go home again. The life I entered there has evolved, gone into and out of different phases, just like the ordinary one. Thankfully, its end is not in sight.