Bad Trip, Part 3

Late June, 1991

What were my options?

I considered sleeping in the car (still that company-leased Cutlass), but dreaded trying to sleep upright, leaning against the door or a headrest that pushed the head forward. I could of course go to a motel in Seney, but having already spent money on one during this trip (and on account of negligence besides), I didn’t think I should again.

Here, I was being penny wise and trout foolish.

Aborting the trip and fleeing home would have been a waste of the money I’d spent driving up. And I didn’t know when or if I’d return that summer. Abandoning the opportunity to fish while I had it would also be a waste.

But abandon it I did. I threw tent and what luggage it contained into my trunk and turned the car around toward Seney, the bridge, and home.

I reassured myself I was making the right decision by imagining how high the river would be after the rains the storm would bring. Wading would put my life in peril, no doubt. And it might have if the rain had fallen, but none fell as I drove toward the bridge, nor did any while I dozed in my car at a pulloff just west of St. Ignace. (That arrangement was every bit as uncomfortable as I’d expected--I slept only in brief snatches and developed severe cramps in my neck and shoulder.) Day broke clearly as I left the Upper Peninsula.

I made the wrong call, but I could easily have unmade it. Since the weather looked fine, I could have bought a cheap tent and driven back to Seney, or gone to somewhere else in the UP, or for that matter the northern LP. That didn’t occur to me as I drove south, though. The bewilderment of the night before apparently scrambled my capacity for rational thought, not to mention my will to fish. I understood only later that, the real threats of the weather notwithstanding, this was a self-inflicted injury, not a loss by an act of God.

One other experience on that trip left a strong but more positive impression: catching fish whose mouths and throats were jammed with insects, in this case, beetles and ants knocked from alders by the afternoon’s punishing winds. Perhaps the most visceral inducement to learn fly fishing imaginable, literally staring me in the face.