I call them North Creek, South Creek, East Creek, West Creek. Better Still: Nowhere Creek at all. I refuse to call them by their actual names out of a sense of intimacy so deep and personal it’s almost embarrassing to admit even as it causes me to hesitate over this sentence for a minute or two, maybe even a loving raindrop of always. Because I keep falling in love with them every time I fish their delicate braids and trembling seams that have bathed and moved my soul for years even when the ambient temperature is in the twenties with a cold wind socking in from the north.
BY Robert Vivian
But I must come clean: this essay is contaminated with self-interest because I don’t want others to know about these obscure, out-of-the-way trout streams in Northern Michigan. I want them for myself, which is an awful thing to admit. But even this isn’t the whole picture or the faintest brush stroke of gloaming in a William Turner painting. No, I can’t name these streams because by doing so I would betray them, which no doubt I already have by trying to write about them in the first place, an impulse I have tried to fend off at least a hundred times before succumbing here in these few scant pages.
These streams are hard to get to and they’re on that spectrum of fly-fishing difficulty called technical, which is just another way of saying you have to make precise and stealthy casts and presentations because you’ll be in very tight quarters that are completely merciless in their responses to any sudden noise or commotion, as they should be. In perhaps the only sense that matters, this is one of the reasons why they’re so sacred. Your wading has to be uber careful on the verge of reverence for the closeness of these environs that seem to be leaning into you as if they are listening to your very heartbeat for what you truly desire, which can’t be faked or feigned once you are knee-deep inside their trembling embrace; one clumsy or noisy step and you’ll scare all the brook trout away for a football field or so, probably even farther than that. And baby can’t have that kind of fallout.
Where else is a footstep so holy except in paradise?
And there’s nothing quite as deflating than to see the darting shadows of ten-inch fish vanishing before you with the full knowledge that you and only you were the catalyst behind their terrified and headlong Vamos, which always leaves you feeling empty and bereft and as clumsy as an old circus bear. But even this carries its own kind of preciousness because you know for a brief and incontrovertible fact that they’re there and thriving as only truly wild creatures can. To this very living hour I do not understand why these beautiful little fish move me so much, or why I am so compelled to go out and try to catch them, though they do and I am, every single blessed and headlong time after crackers and hot piping soup from an old deli in Grayling wolfed down from a Styrofoam container while listening to sports talk radio in the truck before hitting the stream.
There should be a word for this kind of anticipation, and so I’ll venture on making one up here that tries to distill the gnawing, relentless nature of it: pis-derium, a shortened combination of the Latin words piscis for fish and desiderium for yearning. Fish yearning. Nor does this even exhaust the full nature of this yearning because even the word stream packs the most loving and feeling of all punches, so many quiet, still, absurd, profound, suspenseful, prayerful, clumsy, awkward, beatific, graceful, haunting, risky, and lyrical moments they are like gleaming pearls on a never-ending necklace worn by the most beautiful princess in the world whose body is made of moving water so transparent and clear it’s almost like you can see through her all the way to forever, which carries not the least trace of hyperbole.
“Nowhere Creek is teeming with brook trout and the odd large brown or two…
When you bear such personal witness to such tiny and out-of-the-way waters, you are bound to leave your proper wits behind. Some other and almost delirious peace takes over, the kind of peace that you can sometimes believe can even save the utterly out-of-control and spiraling nature of the early 21st century, Blake’s own beast slouching toward Bethlehem and getting ever closer with such world-changing speed. Such encounters with the intimacies of nature turns everyone into a poet or at least poem-minded, as in W.S. Merwin’s lines from his poem “For The Anniversary Of My Death: “Surprised at the earth. And the love of one woman. And the shamelessness of men. As today after three days of rain. Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease. And bowing not knowing to what.”
The casts in such water can be tricky because invariably you’ll have trees and brush behind you as well as on both sides of the creek, which can sometimes narrow down to the width of a staircase or even narrower. At a bare minimum you have to be able to roll cast, and in tighter spots you may have to resort to a bow and arrow cast, which is exactly how you would picture it in your head even if you’ve never seen it before. Working such tiny streams can be exhausting (the good kind an angler almost aches for) in the sense that you are hyper aware of not making any sudden movements or sounds and keeping your shadow off the water as best you can (there’s no camo for shadow in all of the created world), and even stepping over a log can be an exercise in a weird kind of Kabuki theatre replete with absurd costume of beat-up baseball hat, polarized sunglasses, and a sling across your back where you keep your fishing gear pared down to the essentials. But make no mistake: Nowhere Creek is teeming with brook trout and the odd large brown or two, and these are trout who are mostly left alone and probably fished to by only you and handful of other paranoid sports who encounter each other once or twice a season hoping to never see each other ever again.
“Scale and perspective are perhaps what’s needed most at this time in history…”
I rarely keep any fish anymore unless my eighty-two-year-old dad is visiting from Colorado, which is usually preceded by a kind of wistful and somewhat indirect though also pointed comment: “Boy, I sure would like to taste a brook trout again like I did as a kid growing up,” as my grandfather used to bring all manner of wild game home to eat in Muskegon, quail, deer, rabbit, pheasant and, of course, brook trout. I never usually answer my dad directly when he makes such suggestive comments, though you can be sure I am already planning how to catch them and keep them as fresh as possible to present to him wrapped up and frozen in tin foil like little corpses the next time he’s in Michigan. I’m the only one of his five children who doesn’t have kids, so I try to give him brook trout instead, which could be fodder for many a therapist though I no longer give a damn one way or the other. I fish and write and teach in the fall and winter living with my best friend and wife whom I swear without reservation keeps getting hotter every year and maybe every minute, and the combination of these powerful blessings are why I keep getting up in the morning with a few pebbles of hope intact, though it’s also true this same hope seems on the very of getting pulverized every time I watch or read the news.
In case you haven’t tried any, brook trout are delicious and delicate and easy to clean: you basically just split them open stem to stern and then pull out their guts before using your thumbnail to wipe out all the blood before you slowly peel away their spines. Then they’re ready for the pan with a little salt and pepper and lemon juice with perhaps a sprig or two of dill. I can’t imagine a better fish to eat. Once every few years or so I’ll keep a couple just to remind myself how holy wild food can be, or how holy it is to catch and eat such glorious little creatures. Scale and perspective are perhaps what’s needed most at this time in history, or maybe it’s just to know deep inside your bones that such wild places still exist, largely untouched by human hands and left to their own natural rhythms that can heal you of almost any personal crisis or dire awareness of impending doom. The world is indeed our garden, but I also like to think of it as our playground where we can become wondering children again who are still eager to explore what’s around the next bend. I can no longer conceive of my own life without these hand-touched experiences and reverberations, the true ripple effects that connect the electromagnetic forcefield of the earth with my own beating heart. No one could ask for anything more. And I don’t. But trout opener is still two weeks away, and I have miles to go before I fish even as the memories of cherished streams keeping orbiting around somewhere in my own private noosphere, tugging gently but insistently in the blood flow of my veins toward some greater and deeper awareness of what’s real and lasting and sacred, these skinny and threadbare creeks bright and glistening with so many polished and water-born stones.
