Fly Fishing the Au Sable

Somewhere in the inner pocket of a fisherman’s vest in a cardboard box in an under-the-stairs closet, beneath a pair of waders, is a disposable camera.  If one was to develop the film, one might find a picture of me, wearing a floppy hat, said vest, similar waders, standing waste deep in the Au Sable River, holding a brook trout that looks just like this in a hand which looks just like my hand:

Last spring, I spent three days in the barely above 40 degree May weather on the Au Sable River, just outside of Grayling, Michigan.  We stayed at Gates Au Sable Lodge, where my father-in-law has been going to fly fish for more than thirty years.  It’s a small place on the Au Sable River, with a pro fishing shop where fishermen gather quietly to talk about water, temperature, holes, flies, nymphs, caddis, emergers, stonefly.  They wear their waders, but leave their poles outside.  The air is quiet and peaceful.  Nobody is in a rush.

The fly fishing was excellent but a little anticlimactic.  Fishing is its own reward, which I’m not sure I entirely appreciate, and I’m a little too much of a PETA-sympathizer to completely enjoy catching fish, even though the fiction that the fish survive the repeated hookings through their mouths is the ruling and pervasive rationale.

And to be absolutely honest, while the fish are stunningly beautiful, each shimmering spot and rich color a rich contrast to the uniform see through haze of the Au Sable, I did wish for longer, bigger fish.  Fish that I need two hands to bring in, fish about which I could, well, brag.  Here, it was about subtlety, which, like fly fishing, is its own reward, but an enormous trout would have been pretty terrific, too.  There are fabulous places around the world to fly fish.  Maybe one day I’ll try New Zealand.  I want to go there anyway, and, according to the New York Times, this is one of the best places in the world for fly fishing.

But for me, one of the most fascinating aspects of fly fishing is the devotion shown to it by writers.  John McPhee is probably the most famous writer to adore fly fishing….

Below the Lambertville-New Hope bridge that evening, I was using a shad dart of my own malting. A small metallic cone, it trailed bucktail tied on in a vise. Its body was chartreuse. Its base was dark green. It was coated with clear gloss. Extending with the bucktail from the tip of the cone, its No. 2 hook was black and chemically sharpened. Because the hook shaft includes a right angle and the eye emerges from the side of the cone, a shad dart is hydrodynamically hapless. It flips and flops and buzzes around like a fly that needs killing. If it snags, you’re likely to lose it. Snags happen often. Held in the water column by the driving current, my dart was out about seventy feet.

I can’t remember the name of the writer who was stocked in the bedside table of the Gates Au Sable Lodge instead of a Gideon Bible, but reading that every night fueled me for the next day, even if his stories took place in the hot summer in an old world very different from ours.  I’ll get back to you on that.

And that’s ultimately the thing about fishing, even if you’re standing there in high tech waders and an expensive rod, professionally tied flies, and a forty dollar wooden net.  It’s peaceful, it’s primitive, it’s simple, it’s satisfying.  Eight hours standing in a river floats away with the current.  And even though I had a flask of rye in one of the expansive pockets of my vest, that was just a tool of warming, in a place where peace was just everywhere.