8 minute read
The Last Mile
Evening was approaching as we drove through the young stands of trees and slash barrens that used to be beautiful stands of mature pines and hardwoods. One could feel the arid heat sap their body. The sand and gravel two-track gradually narrowed as we approached the small opening in the trees where we would park and begin our trek to the river. The trail was indiscernible to those who do not know the area or have not bushwhacked the wilds. So it was that my quest to fish the most remote stretches of the Mason Tract began.
The journey started over 40 years ago when I was working in the Michigan Department of Natural Resources under the leadership of Howard Tanner, whose vision established the incredible Great Lakes salmon fishery. Several of us in the Biology Section fished the Betsie, Manistee, and Pere Marquette rivers for fall-run steelhead and salmon using spinners provided by Jim Bedford, who was a chemist at the state water quality laboratory.
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William “Bill” Turney, the deputy director of environmental protection, introduced me to the world of fly tying and fishing in 1974. He was a very accomplished fly tier and fisher in his own right, having taken 20-inch trout on a size 20 fly. The allure and challenges of tying flies and fly fishing were as frustrating as they were rewarding. I was hooked. Bill taught me the basics and gave me a vise and some materials to get started. His patience was admirable. I remember showing him my first Adams and him saying, “That’s a very nice spider.” The heavily-weighted flies I tied for steelhead and salmon were laughable and probably illegal. They left welts on my head and never hooked a fish. Years passed before learning how to cast and mend line to get an unweighted fly down to the steelhead and salmon with a natural drift or swing to entice a take.
So it was that my fly fishing journey began—a trip without a path and destinations unknown. Years later, Bill, a mutual friend Jim Powers, and I would take a trip to Alaska. Their tutelage provided the opportunity to join the Upper Manistee River Association. Another fork in the road landed a young biologist doing limnological research on the Great Lakes in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Water as a senior policy advisor for market-based environmental programs. You just never know where your experiences and friends will take you!
I first fly fished the Mason Tract of the South Branch Au Sable River in the late 70s, and it was then I met Ann and Jack Schweigert. They had come to the “North Country” at a young age during the 1920s when Northern Michigan
by David Batchelor
was recovering from the exploitation of the mid-late 1800s lumbering era. Ann once said, “The area was just greening over after being cut off when we first saw it. The loggers were gone, and it was before paved roads and highways began to bring people in…what once had been the great north woods.” They said they had “seen the best days of the river” and pictures of large brook and brown trout they caught benchmarked the size of trout taken in the 1930s.
In 1949, they established Jack’s Rod and Fly Shop in Roscommon. The season opener always began there. Each trip was mixed with a long-awaited renewal of our friendship as well as a return to the river. Stocking up on Ann’s flies, Jack’s hand-tied tapered leaders, and fly dope were as much a tradition as the opener itself. They taught me how to read the river, about the fish that live there, to “leave no tracks,” and what it is to be a fly fisherman. Jack’s poem “The Fisherman” holds as much wisdom now as then:
It’s not the man that has a rod
That costs him quite a sum. It’s not the man that’s all dressed up
Or looks like a bum. It’s not the man that flips his bait
On any little spot. It’s the man that has the grateful smile,
If they’re biting, or if not.
It’s not the man the mixes up
The fishing with his beer, It’s not the man that’s loaded up
So he can’t think things clear It’s not the man the walks right through
Your favorite fishing spot, It’s the man that has a grateful smile,
If they’re biting, or if not.
That makes things so unclean, It’s not the man that hogs the fish
From morn to the setting sun, It’s the man that smiles at a half-filled creel
Because he “Fishes Just For Fun.”
Over the ensuing years, I’ve had the privilege to wade and fish almost the entire Mason Tract from Chase Bridge to Canoe Harbor, sometimes with friends, but many times alone at night during the Drake and Hex hatches or mousing. The journey that began decades earlier has taken me down dusty trails along miles of the South Branch, through majestic stands of pine, bogs, and dense cedar swamps. I had explored, waded, and fished all but about three-quarters of a mile of the most remote, difficult to access, and wild section of the Mason Tract.
For several years, I tried to learn what that part of the river was like and how to get there. I asked guides to wade the river with me—all with no luck. Josh Greenberg, the owner of Gates Au Sable Lodge, cautioned me not to go alone due to deep water, muck bogs, patches of clay, heavy timber, and the remoteness of the area. It seemed unreachable.
The most precious gift a fly fisher can give another is to share their fishing spots on the river. They are places of peace, solitude, and beauty unspoiled by the lumberman’s ax, the intrusive sounds of human activity, or the presence of others. They are cathedrals of hundred-year-old white pines that stand as sentinels along the banks, aromatic cedar swamps, and thick spruce stands that cradle the river as it is nurtured by cold life-giving springs, and places of tangled logjams holding incredibly beautiful strong, yet fragile wild trout. They are sanctuaries where one can almost touch the stars, and the Milky Way literally wraps space and time around them. They are sacred secretive stretches of river that hold big fish and are only known by a few.
Dan Atherton and I met several years ago at Daisy Bend, where we greeted each other, leaving the river well after others were gone. We shared many stories of the river and our encounters with fish that had come to net or escaped capture. It was Dan that asked me if I wanted to go where I had never been.
As we followed the obscure path to the river, I remembered the only other time I had waded a stretch of river for the first time at night. It was not a good experience, and I vowed I would never do it again. Never say never!
When the river appeared in front of us, it was like going back to the time when the North Country was still untouched. Huge white pines towered above one bank with tag alders hugging the other. The river was dark and deep, holding secrets of the past and the promises of things to come. The scent of pine resin and the river filled the air as we walked upstream on the pine needle covered path to where we entered the water across from a large logjam. Dan got in first and waded upstream a short distance to another logjam in the middle of the river, where we sat and waited for the inevitable drake hatch to occur.
Dan grew up in Roscommon and has fished this water for over 25 years. The previous night he caught five fish at the logjam and lost one over 20 inches. He described the river upstream and down, telling me of the holes, bends, logjams, and hidden timber. We watched as a beaver swam upriver within ten feet of us to a slide where it went up the bank to get a mouthful of herbaceous plants and then swam downstream to give them to its young. It repeated this process many times and later reappeared to let us know we were invading its territory.
The water level was a foot below normal, well below late summer levels, and it was still May. Winter had been mild, with snowfall three feet less than average according to some estimates. Abnormally high temperatures in the 80s and 90s with little rain had exposed the wiggler beds and raised the water temperature to a dangerously high level. This trend has been progressing over the last five to ten years, and some believe it may be affecting the spawning and survival of brook trout. One can debate the causes, but the weather patterns are definitely changing.
Fish began to rise as darkness fell upon the river. A very nice trout came up just below where we were sitting, and it was only proper that Dan make the first cast. Another fish was feeding downstream above the logjam, where we entered the river. I quietly waded into position and waited before casting a fly of Ann’s tied on Jack’s processed leader material. The first cast brought a beautiful wild brown trout to hand. So it was that my dream of one day wading and fishing the entire Mason Tract became a reality.
How many more years are left and how many new paths remain are unknown as age takes its toll. When your fishing friends are 20 to 30 years younger than you, it causes pause. One must be very grateful for the many excursions on the river, the beavers and the bears, the fish taken and those lost, and the friends made along the journey to the last mile.
