Sorry, this is turning into a photo/river tripping blog. When in Michigan…
This is me on the Upper Peninsula’s Two-Hearted River, a twisty tea-colored little woodland stream that finally slips through a gauntlet of dunes and dumps into Lake Superior, which, as you know, is like God’s own birdbath. The Two-Hearted is the nominal setting of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Big Two-Hearted River,” which is collected in The Nick Adams Stories.
My friend Fred Maxwell says that he read on Wikipedia that it’s thought that Hemingway, like a true stingy-ass honey-hole-hiding fisherman, was actually describing the UP’s Fox River in his story, but gave it the Two-Hearted’s name, perhaps to throw off tourists and poachers, or maybe because Two-Hearted is just such a goddamn beautiful name for a river. I haven’t bothered to look it up. I’m not sure it matters to me.
I spent two days and one night on it, maybe 24 miles’ worth, the first day portaging 13 unstable logjams and the second day blissing the fuck out.
When I put in there was a guy walking down the bank fishing. About halfway downriver at the state campground where I camped there was another guy with an RV and an ATV who left in the morning to fish for steelhead. The night before he came over and looked at my anemic little sock-drying campfire and offered to let me borrow his chainsaw. I thanked him but no. I asked and he explained to me why there are salmon out there nowhere near the sea. It’s because they were imported to the Great Lakes purposefully to eat a smaller fish that was imported to the Great Lakes accidentally, and they started spawning up these little tea-colored woodland streams. More or less. They’re stocked as sport fish as well.
I threw a spinner out from the sand ramp for a while but I have yet to discover the finer joys of fishing, though I’m not through looking.
I did take lots of what came out looking like portraits of trees, among other things, and posted the better ones to flickr. The one at top links to Part 1. The one below links to Part 2.
Last weekend I traveled with my fellow fellows to northern Michigan, in the neighborhood of Boyne City and Lake Charlevoix, for some quality time with the leaves. I stayed over on Sunday and paddled about four blustery hours down the Jordan River, Michigan’s first-designated Wild and Scenic such. Spectacular.
Went out on Argo Pond today, the pond just downstream from Barton Pond, on the Huron River here through Ann Arbor. Argo is the one they’re talking about draining by removing Argo Dam. You see bumper stickers and yard signs saying “Save Argo Pond.” The pond is lousy with crew practice, and I gather crew teams and the people who love them are the primary opposition to taking the dam out. Why anyone would want to sit backwards in a rowboat and get yelled at I do not know, but to each his or her own.
I was there trying out a new paddle I bought for myself as an early birthday present. Actually I just bought it because I wanted it, but I do have a birthday coming up, so fair enough. It’s a narrow beavertail blade, a shape I’ve never paddled before, and it’s made of oiled black walnut. A company in Maine called Shaw & Tenney makes it. Lord it’s a lovely paddle. Everybody has at least nine paddles, right?
I was also trying out a new 10-20 mm wide-angle lens I bought myself because I’ve got a birthday coming up.
It seems I’m going to take a lot of pictures of these ponds. I’ll try to limit myself to the goodish ones.
So my place in Ann Arbor is a 13-minute walk down a two-lane blacktop road that dead-ends into something called Bird Hills Nature Area, a couple of hours worth of forest trails. I’ve been walking down there for an hour or so every morning, but it’s too dark in there to take pictures then. Today I slept late so I got my walk in this afternoon and there was a bit of nice light filtering in.
I noticed this mushroom on my walk the other day, though I wasn’t sure it wasn’t some sort of discarded ball until I got up close to it. When I got home I looked it up in the Falcon Guide to North American Mushrooms and found out it’s a Calvatia booniana, or Western Giant Puffball. It doesn’t seem to belong where I found it, according to the habitat description, but there it is. Apparently it’s edible, having been “collected and eaten since pioneer days.” I can’t see my way to taking it, though. I haven’t seen any others out there, and it’s pretty magnificent, about the size of a small bowling ball. That, and this whole shroom-identifying thing is about three days old, and if the ID seems close to unmistakable, early overconfidence is a long habit, and I’d just as soon not start my way up the learning curve by poisoning myself.
I took a different trail through the woods today, but I doubled back to see if I could find this thing. When I did, it had a rare shred of glow on it for just the amount of time it took to snap about four pictures, of which this one turned out the best.
I’ve been in Ann Arbor a week tonight. I went out on Barton Pond for the second time today. It’s dam-slacked water on the Huron River, and I can get my canoe on it in about 10 minutes flat, from garage to glide. It’s pretty nice. Two days ago I went downstream and back about an hour all told to Barton Dam, the little generator spillway that holds it back. Today I put in at the same little railroad bridge and went upstream, about an hour to where the current started running too riverlike to want to work against it, then turned around. I took some pictures. I’ve been thinking about putting together a series called “floaters,” of stuff floating on water, and the feather will definitely be in it.
I haven’t posted in while. I’ve been gearing up for a move from Austin to Ann Arbor. Now I’m in a Super 8 motel in Terre Haute, Indiana, reading the manual for my fancy new camera, which I’ve not a clue yet how to use. I expect to land in what everybody insists on referring to as A2 tomorrow evening.
This is the rig I seem to getting used to getting poured on at my granny’s house outside of Whitehouse,Texas.
This is one of the best pictures ever taken of Lady, age 13, owing nothing to the fancy new camera and everything to finally catching her with her slinky head up.
This is Pancho, also 13, wanting in. He pretty much always looks like this. I promise not to post any more pictures of dogs.
I’m not much of a fisherman. I mean I was raised fishing, crappie and bass in lakes Conroe and Tyler, a little bit of coastal stuff with my dad, catfish anywhere we might find them, which was almost anywhere. My maternal grandfather was briefly a shrimp boat captain on Dauphin Island, Alabama, and I remember one trip with him where I spent hours catching little sharks and throwing up over the side. I went to southeast Alaska a few springs back and caught a 90-pound halibut in Chatham Strait, which felt like hauling a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood through 300 feet of water, but it was my buddy Brandon who actually set the hook and gaffed it. Then again, a 90-pound fish is a two-man job.
Even when I lived in Montana for five years I never learned to fly-fish. Which is not to say I never fly-fished. I did, once, with a borrowed rod beneath a bluff called Sunset Cliff about halfway down the Smith River. My friend G.O. loaned me the rig and showed me what to do with it. I landed a little brown trout right off and let it go. The sun was setting and I was three days into a new river and the bluff was glowing and two hawks were riding the thermals and I’d just caught my first trout on a fly. It was one of those unimprovable moments, so I gathered up my gear and left it at that.
But learning to fly-fish is a different thing, and learning to fly-fish in Montana is like learning to say the rosary in the Vatican. It’s intimidating.
I wrote a column in the new Texas Observer about trash fish, and fishing literature, and a less successful fishing trip. YOU CAN READ IT HERE. If you like it, or hate it, I’m sure the good Observer folks would welcome any comments. Here’s an excerpt:
The granddaddy of them all, the ultimate bigger-than-yours fishing tale, The Old Man and the Sea, ought truly be titled The Old Man and the Marlin. I just read it again. It’s still pretty plain. It’s still really depressing. It remains a remarkably humble disguise for a pompous treatise in defense of just keeping on, with sadness galore and a little bit of honor, by a writer who offed himself in his bathrobe just seven years after winning the Nobel Prize.
Even when you catch the fish, the fish isn’t necessarily yours to keep.
Speaking of trash fish, here’s a video, just for shits and cringes, of two self-congratulatory doorknobs murdering a dinosaur.
The Texas Observer’s Summer Books issue, the last one of these I’ll have the pleasure of editing, has been on the stands for a few weeks now, so I thought I’d GO AHEAD AND PUT IT UP HERE.
(If you’re coming to this late and the above link takes you to a subsequent issue of the Observer, HIT THIS LINK INSTEAD to go straight to the archived Summer Books.
I didn’t write anything for this one except THE INTRO, but there’s lots of great stuff on the inside. Check it out.
Right now this is my favorite photo from my recent canoe trip on the North Fork of the Flathead River in northwest Montana, even though it’s one of the few that wasn’t taken from the boat.
This is from the drive up, where the pavement stops, looking across the North Fork into Glacier National Park, maybe 20 miles south of Polebridge, which is about 16 miles south of the Canadian border, which is where we put the boats in.
“It can be argued, then, that a book stops being unknown as soon as it enters our perceptual field, and that to know almost nothing about it should be no obstacle to imagining or discussing it. To a cultivated or curious person, even the slightest glance at a book’s title or cover calls up a series of images and impressions quick to coalesce into an initial opinion, facilitated by the whole set of books represented in the culture at large. For the non-reader, therefore, even the most fleeting encounter with a book may be the beginning of an authentic personal appropriation, and any unknown book we come across becomes a known book in that instant.” —Pierre Bayard, “How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read”
Went out on Argo Pond today, the pond just downstream from Barton Pond, on the Huron River here through Ann Arbor. Argo is the one they’re talking about draining by removing Argo Dam. You see bumper stickers and yard signs saying “Save Argo Pond.” The pond is lousy with crew practice, and I gather crew teams and the people who love them are the primary opposition to taking the dam out. Why anyone would want to sit backwards in a rowboat and get yelled at I do not know, but to each his or her own.
I noticed this mushroom on my walk the other day, though I wasn’t sure it wasn’t some sort of discarded ball until I got up close to it. When I got home I looked it up in the Falcon Guide to North American Mushrooms and found out it’s a Calvatia booniana, or Western Giant Puffball. It doesn’t seem to belong where I found it, according to the habitat description, but there it is. Apparently it’s edible, having been “collected and eaten since pioneer days.” I can’t see my way to taking it, though. I haven’t seen any others out there, and it’s pretty magnificent, about the size of a small bowling ball. That, and this whole shroom-identifying thing is about three days old, and if the ID seems close to unmistakable, early overconfidence is a long habit, and I’d just as soon not start my way up the learning curve by poisoning myself.
set the hook and gaffed it. Then again, a 90-pound fish is a two-man job.
But learning to fly-fish is a different thing, and learning to fly-fish in Montana is like learning to say the rosary in the Vatican. It’s intimidating.
The Texas Observer’s Summer Books issue, the last one of these I’ll have the pleasure of editing, has been on the stands for a few weeks now, so I thought I’d 
