Two weeks to the opening of this year's trout season. By now, most years, my impatience to be on the stream takes the form of a pulsing restlessness, taking over my thoughts when it comes, leaving me listless, longing when it goes. Sometimes when it comes, it provokes a spate of neurotic activity, and that can be productive. Yesterday I sorted and repaired my leaders, took care of a bunch of financial matters, graded a ream of papers, all with visions of trout in my head, but all with dispatch. Sad to say, the fishing passion was swamping meditations on the Passion of Our Lord yesterday. One of the spiritual perils of a late Easter.
In 1998, Easter weekend also fell two weeks before the trout opener. That year, on another sunny, mild weekend, that restlessness drove me on a quest across much of west-central Michigan that qualifies as one of my more unique trout trips, albeit one that included no fishing.
With the spring of 98 came my fifth sixth season of fly fishing. Up to that point I'd been fishing with an 8' St. Croix Imperial 5/6 wt. rod, good enough to learn on but a little too heavy, I thought, for dry fly fishing. I decided the time had come to expand my arsenal. Though I was still in school then, my wife and I agreed we could spare about $400 (which at that time would bring you pretty close to the top end of the better makes). So I began shopping. I've never enjoyed shopping for its own sake, not even for sporting goods, but that spring I immersed myself in the pursuit of a new rod, and was in no hurry to surface.
I lived near the M. Chance Orvis shop in Okemos (now Nomad Anglers), and tested nearly every suitable model they sold. At least once. But I didn't want to settle on one without sampling the offerings of other makers, so I decided to do some shopping during a trip we'd planned to the Detroit area to see a singer we knew who was performing on Good Friday night. I went to a shop in Farmington (now defunct, I think) and tried several varieties of Sages. I remember in particular a 7'9" 4 wt. LL model, which remains one of the sweetest rods I've ever cast. But I had doubts about its capacities for big-water situations (which I seek from time to time), and I certainly hadn't sated my curiosity about high end flygear, so I moved on without a purchase.
I wasn't very busy the following Saturday, and I convinced my wife to let me drive over to Grand Rapids to visit other fly shops. At Great Lakes Fly Fishing I cast some Sages and Winstons and left uncertain and agitated. I still liked the Sage LLs, and GLFF offered them in more lengths and weights. But were they better than the Orvis rods I'd casted?
Common sense would have dictated driving home to cast the rod at M. Chance again, but an extravagant idea came over me and pushed common sense into the ditch. There were several fly shops, including an Orvis shop, in Baldwin, only 75 miles north, and on the banks of the Pere Marquette river. It was early afternoon, and nothing demanded I be elsewhere.
I visited two of the shops, cast some rods, but as I drew close to Baldwin, the venture had ceased to be a shopping trip; the river and the woods seized my attention. I walked in to a couple of access points on the PM I hadn't seen before. Some steelheaders were out, but I was more interested in small caddis already fluttering along the water. I hiked along the North Country Trail south of town, pausing to watch fish of some kind rising in a lake, augurs, I hoped, of what awaited me when I took to the water with my new rod. The evening was still, and the twilight caught clouds of gnats jiggling in the dusty air over a pine-lined two track. After my hike I drove back to Baldwin and ate my first hamburger in Edie's Log Bar. A short detour on the way home gave me a look at the stream I would fish on the opener.
Back at the apartment I felt a little guilty for pissing away the hours and the gas money. I can't say I bought off my restlessness by the ramble, either. If anything, it heightened my anticipation of opening day. Stockerfest works on me much the same way. But, as I said above, the restless energy of the pre-opener weeks sometimes brings positive results. A footloose day in the woods isn't quite the same as writing an article or washing the car, but it is a good thing too scarce in my life. Dreams of fishing can scatter or dilute other ambitions (buying a fishing rod among them), but on occasion they leave behind something besides time lost. The time I spent shopping and sauntering in Lake County that Saturday clearly has never gotten away.
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