Cloud Creek, 5/24; Saturday Poetic Typo Quote

It's been a few years since I hit Cloud.  Each year I tell myself I will get back, but water, weather, and work conditions conspire against.    With  a dry spell on, I figured the creek would be wadable, and with nothing demanding urgent attention Thursday night, I made the  drive out.

A lot had changed since my last visit (3? 4 years ago??), most obviously the number of deadfallen trees in the water.  At least half a dozen logs blocked the first 100 or  so yards of stream, as opposed to teh single one I could remember.  More trees were leaning in toward the river, likely to fall at some point in the future.  And of course, trees holding their ground were larger, their tops further crowding the stream channel.  All of which made for tougher wading and casting.

I waded down for an hour or so with my trusty OWB--usually a sure thing there, but I caught nothing Thursday.  Same story working back up with a large dry Borcher's drake.  I was able to cover water better with the dry, since I was fishing up and not trying to retrieve,  but drys have rarely done well for me there.  All that wood in the water means more trout habitat, of course, but much of it is near impossible to reach with a fly.  I'm seriously considering breaking out the old spinning rod and trying it some morning next week. 

Around 9:30 I made it back to the bridge where I'd accessed the creek, and a few largish mayflies were gathering overhead.   From their silhouettes I'd have guessed grey drake, but when a few dropped to eye level I could see they were a buttery yellow--golden drakes.  I rarely see these on trout waters up north, though I know they're common on the Huron.    I probably could have roughly matched them with a grey drake or large rusty spinner, though I didn't get the opportunity to try.  I waited until 10:00, but none made it to the water, and no rises showed.   By then I had started to wonder if the flies had dispersed, but when a truck passed over the bridge its headlights revealed a blizzard of straw-tinted flakes swirling in countless directions. 

*****

Last week while reading an outdoor discussion forum I saw one of the most poetic typos ever:  "...deer ambering through the woods."  Very apt. 

Saturday Quote, 4/21/12 (plus great story)

My watery state liked to wine (a low end cabernet franc, perhaps?):


Life in Michigan has a strong nose, with powerful mouth feel and notes of blood and dirt and salt, a sweetness that can sometimes finish bitterly as it slides down your throat and becomes a little more of who you will be when you die.

 It's from a great post on a blog I just stumbled across, Fat Guy Fishing.

Nothing quite like the events described in it has happened to me.  But given the kinds of things that do happen on my outings (usually absorbing, frequently odd), and what they've made of me (sapped most of my potential for refinement), I can perfectly relate.  There are certain motifs in the fishing life that sooner or later enter most fishermens' lives and stories.

But, as demonstrated at the head of this post, I DO know how to use a colon. 

Saturday Quotes, 7/4/09

Politically, I'm clumsy and full of rages.

--Jim Harrison

I'm there, Jimbo.

By contrast, demonstrating an utter lack of political self-awareness:

Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out.

--Sarah Palin, upon resigning Alaska's governorship.

That's a heck of a quit notice.

And one quip in response:

"[Palin] should also lead the nation's mothers to oppose mandating replacement of incandescent light bulbs with the new mercury poison gas bulbs.

--Peter Ferrara, Foxnews.com, in response to Palin's resignation.

Wonder if he supports expanding nuclear power?

The indelible idiocy of our body politic aside, happy 4th.



I'll be engaged in the pursuit of happiness up north for the next two days, trying to get in on the end of the hex hatch and fishing the Jordan river for the first time. Look for tweets under "Field Reports," a full writeup on return.

Saturday Quote, 6/27/09

How glorious it would be to feel the key turn, to be able to enter the culture of things outside us, to understand not only the what of the universe but the why. To read the slow rain of rising trout, or comprehend, really comprehend, the shocking orange of fungus, labial and exquisite, shining on the underside of a rotting log. To grasp the intent and the glory, the slow fire of life behind them.

Mark Slouka, "On the Rich Sin of Meddling"

"...the slow rain of rising trout..." How apt. Of course, I concur with the general notion here.

Saturday Quote, 6/28/08

What we are is where we have been. That is all there is, at least from where we can see. They keep trying to convince you that there is some objective reality out there, but you know in your heart how much nonsense that is. It's their way of trying to sell you on the idea that change, being an "inevitable" part of "progress"--being dropped on top of your head by some deus ex machina with a bad sense of timing--can't be fought. You can be choking on it, turning red and beginning to perspire, seeing little things float before your eyes, and they'll dismiss you. In fact, they never even bothered to ask. Look in vain for many studies on the only thing that matters, what it feels like to live in the world you live in. That's so they can take your home, the thing that made you, and shatter it piece by piece.

--Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Place You Love is Gone


I just started reading Pierson's elegant reflection on the experience of losing familiar landscapes, both wild and urban, to the varied movements of economic and historical flux--a near universal cause for mourning and disorientation in today's America. It's a remarkably unsentimental and analytical take on the process (the above quote is atypically sanguine), leavened by personal reminiscence. A review may be in order once I finish it. Figure August, at the rate I'm going.

Saturday Quote, 1/19/08

[Z]oos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.

Yann Martel, The Life of Pi

Saturday Quote, 1/12/08

There's a river somewhere that flows through the lives of everyone.

Roberta Flack

I think most of us have strayed far from its banks.

Saturday Quote, 12/29/07

[T]ime is never present; only we are. We are time wearing space as a mask, and with each breath we become smaller and smaller until finally nothing is left of us.

--Alta Ifland, "Elegy for a Fabulous World"

Some years back, reflecting on the disappearance of grayling from northern Michigan waters, it occurred to me that the trout which displaced them are like shimmering, animate tombstones, marking the spots where grayling once held. Reading Ifland's quote, I wondered if it would be more correct to say that grayling and trout (or simply the trout of different generations)that have lived in a given place are different instants of time that slipped on the same aqueous masks.

Saturday Quote, 11/3/07

"Life is wide. It might not be as long as we'd like, but it is wide."

Barbara Schneider, 11/1/07

Saturday Quote, 7/14/07

When you show someone something you've written, you hand them a sharpened stake, lie back in your coffin, and say 'Whenever you're ready.'

Davide Mitchell, Black Swan Green

Saturday Quote, 7/7/07

Bass are like beer. I don't want them unless there's nothing else around.

--Doc, in Jim Harrison's novel Farmer



That doesn't apply to me on either score, but I still got a laugh out of it.

Saturday Quote, 6/30/07

"Carpe Diem" does not mean "Fish of the Day."

From NPR's Splendid Table, 6/24/07.

I'll get something from my trip up tomorrow. Have a good weekend, folks.

Saturday Quote, 6/23/07

What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn't have any doubt - it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn't want to go anywhere else.

Hal Boyle

Does this suggest anything about people who are drawn to rivers?

Saturday Quote, 5/19/07

This week I've been reading Wild: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths. The book describes seven years of travels Griffiths made among aboriginal peoples in different corners of the world, seeking to understand how closeness with the land sustained and enriched their lives. Having undertaken them at a point when her own life seemed unsustainable and meaningless, these investigations have more than an academic significance.

I've been enjoying the book very much, and may write a longer review at some point. In passing, I'd describe it a furious book, both in the sense that it's fueled by a visceral anger at the ways western society has distanced people from intimacy with the earth, and in the way it strives breathlessly to convey the vitality of the wild places she visits and the significance they take on for those who dwell there. Sometimes I almost break a sweat reading this.

I've always been interested in continuities between natural processes and language. Here's Griffiths on the confluence of language and rivers:

Rivers flow like language--we say that someone is "fluent" in a language, their speech flows like a river. Languages, like rivers, run roughly the same course, but always change their details: you never step in the same language twice, because a meaning has shifted here, a connotation has just been formed there. Rivers and languages are both gloriously wild. Careless of their courses, rivers won't run straight. Both languages and rivers are extravagant--who cares how a river wastes its meanderings? Who asks why language wastes its windings in splendid, luxurious, uneconomic curls of meaning? And then there are rivers that double back, meet themselves returning from an aside in the conversation they were having with the land....[I]magine how in a season of fast flowing water, the river would push for a more direct route, going straight from one tine to the other....Similarly, language, finding a more rapid route to communicate, will leave unused obsolete words behind, still in the dictionary and perhaps in memory but no longer in the "currency" of the language, where the language is flowing fastest.

I wonder if at some point Griffiths readThe River Why.