All Fishermen Are Liars (4 page)

Buzz teetered out on the beaver dam, while Mark and I cast side by side, trying a dozen fly patterns between us with no luck: midge pupae, mayfly nymphs, beetles, ants, backswimmers, damselflies. Buzz hooked a big trout on a little grasshopper pattern, but it took him into the weeds and broke him off. I finally hooked a heavy fish on a size 20 soft hackle. It made a good run, peeling off line, then did an about-face and swam straight back at me. It was the kind of maneuver that makes you suspect that the fish not only comprehends the nature of his problem, but is also considerably smarter than you are. By the time I recovered my slack line, the barbless hook had come loose and the commotion had spooked the pond.

Buzz went back to work, and Mark and I drove to the freestone creek, where we lounged in the pickup eating leftover fried chicken and listening to grasshoppers clicking in the hay meadow. The stream was a pretty little thing meandering widely across the meadow, taking its own sweet time before it emptied into the river. There was a deep undercut bank at the outside of every bend and we caught fat brown trout and one cuttbow in most of the spots where you’d expect them to be. There were no refusal rises. The trout ate our hoppers as if they’d been waiting for them all morning, which in fact they probably had. This didn’t look like what you’d call a rich stream, and fish of that size probably weren’t residents but trout that had moved up
out of the river to gorge on grasshoppers in the late summer. They wouldn’t have been here in the spring, and they’d probably be gone back to the river by the middle of next month when the hopper supply ran out.

I’ve always wondered how fish know to do things like that. Do they understand their environment to the extent that they can formulate a plan? We fishermen constantly overestimate the intelligence of fish so that matching wits with them doesn’t seem too ridiculous, but at the risk of selling the fish short, that seems doubtful. I think trout are more like your average fisherman: They snoop around because it’s in their nature and they’re just smart enough to know when they’ve stumbled into something good.

4

COASTERS

I came to know about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula through the writing of Ernest Hemingway, John Voelker (a.k.a. Robert Traver) and later Jim Harrison and others. It may be a coincidence that many of the writers I like have a connection to this northernmost landmass of Michigan that, until the completion of the Mackinac Bridge in 1957, was so isolated it could be reached from the rest of the state only by boat. Or maybe it’s that the region naturally produces stories filled with tea-colored trout streams, beaver ponds hidden in swamps and
small towns where rules are gracefully bent by those with the right intentions. Whatever the reason, the UP is enshrined alongside the Serengeti, the Yukon Territory and Paris as a place made romantic by virtue of appearing in books. Which is to say, I am an innocent victim of literature.

I’m less sure where I first heard about coasters, the adfluvial brook trout that spawn in streams and then use Lake Superior to feed and grow the way anadromous fish like salmon use an ocean. They’re an item of local knowledge, not something you’d expect to hear about out here in Colorado. If you’re a fisherman living in any of the three U.S. states and one Canadian province bordering Lake Superior, there’s a good chance you know what a coaster is. Otherwise, you’ll probably think it’s the thing your mother makes you put under your glass of iced tea.

These fish were said to be elusive, coming and going mysteriously in the largest, deepest and coldest of the Great Lakes, and they could get big. The world-record brook trout—the fourteen-pound, eight-ounce slab caught in 1917—was a coaster that had fattened up in Lake Superior before returning to the Nipigon River in Ontario. Of course a world record is an impossible standard—especially one that was caught almost a century ago—but word is that even in these benighted times a twenty-inch-plus fish might not be out of the question. And then there
is
that photo of a more recently caught coaster brookie that’s going around the Internet. It’s a big, sloppy hog of a fish that wasn’t weighed before it was released but that the length-and-girth formula suggests would have come in at a stupefying sixteen pounds. Or so the story goes.

So when Bill Bellinger called to ask if I wanted to meet him in the UP in early June to fish, I asked the same question I’d asked several other friends in the area: “Do you know anything about coasters?” Instead of the usual, “I’ve heard of ’em, but have never caught ’em,”
Bill said, “Oh, sure. I got into ’em the same time last year on size 12 flying ants.”

I booked a flight to Marquette. I tied no less than a dozen size 12 flying ants. You know how it is.

I’d met Bill fifteen years ago when I was in Charlevoix, Michigan, for a funeral. In the course of things, I ended up with a few free days, and it was suggested I go fishing, possibly to get me out from underfoot so cooler heads could deal with the adult business. When I asked around about a guide, everyone steered me toward Bill, or “Wild Bill,” as he was known then.

He turned out to be a competent young guy with a little house on the river, a bulldog named Killian (after a brand of beer) and a beautiful wooden Au Sable River boat. We floated the Jordan River and I caught some fish. The next day I borrowed a car and followed Bill’s detailed directions to some beaver ponds, where I caught more fish and didn’t see another person all day. I won’t go so far as to say that everything was suddenly okay. Death isn’t just a big deal; it’s
the
big deal. Still, life does go on.

I didn’t see Bill again until I got off the plane in Marquette. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize him, but there he was, looking not much older and standing next to a teenager he introduced as Sam Black—known as “Sammy”—who’d be fishing with us. Sammy was a compact, broad-shouldered, sixteen-year-old hockey player and avid fisherman: the son of a neighbor whose father was “out of the picture” for the usual complicated reasons. In the kind of rural volunteerism that still exists in northern Michigan, Bill had stepped in to take up some of the slack.

It was better than an hour’s drive to the borrowed cabin where we’d be staying, so there was time to catch up. (Aside from having fished together, Bill and I are connected by a web of common acquaintances that fall just short of shirttail relations.) It turned out
that everyone was doing either okay or as well as could be expected under the circumstances.

Bill himself was no longer Wild Bill the single fishing guide, but a married housepainter. That didn’t seem to have changed him much, although there
is
a prenuptial agreement stating that Bill can come and go as he pleases as long as he’s fishing or hunting, but he can’t walk into a bar without his wife on his arm.

We’d planned to go out in the sixteen-foot boat Bill had trailered up, but it was windy and rainy and Superior was too rough. So we parked the boat at the cabin and threaded our way down a muddy two-track to a point about 150 feet above the lake. The shoreline for miles along here is mostly sheer sandstone cliffs right down to the water, but in this one spot you can pick your way down to the water and cast from a convenient boulder pile.

I felt good about the whole deal. This was where Bill had caught fish a year ago, and the guy at the sporting goods store in the small town of Big Bay had allowed as how it was as good a place as any for coasters. Beyond that we’d hit the usual cagey stonewall where the local fisherman sniffs out what the out-of-towners already know and then leads them to believe that that’s pretty much the whole story.

I was glad we hadn’t tried to go out in the boat. The waves were high enough along this shore that the crests would break at our feet, splashing our boots, and the troughs would reveal ten feet of bare rock below us. I left the flying ants in the box—figuring no fish would rise in such heavy seas—and tied on a large streamer. I quickly figured out that I could add a dozen feet to my longest throw by casting as a wave broke and then feeding line as it receded.

In the end, Bill and I cast until our arms hurt without so much as a bump, while Sammy, fishing a worm and bobber on a spinning rod, landed and released a whitefish and a small coaster. I congratulated him and Bill proudly clapped him on the shoulder. Sammy didn’t seem to know what to do with all this praise.

The weather that week was the way it can be on the south shore of Lake Superior. There were none of the epic storms known locally as “Canadian crap hammers,” but there was a steady parade of rainy, windy squalls that would either keep us off the big lake altogether or make us leery about going around the western point of the bay toward the mouth of the Salmon Trout River. As we got close to the point some days, we could see the shear line where the waves got much bigger than the ones we were already bobbing in, which were plenty big enough, thank you. We were in a sixteen-foot open boat and the water temperature was around forty degrees. Sometimes I think I’ve grown overly cautious as I’ve gotten older. Other times I think that’s
how
I’ve gotten older.

None of us knew a lot about coasters, but we did know a few things through common wisdom. One was that the Salmon Trout was the last remaining coaster river in the UP. Another was that once the fish move out into Lake Superior, they stick tight to the coast—hence the name—in relatively shallow water over a rubble rock bottom where your odds of catching them aren’t all that good. Casey Huckins, a biology professor at Michigan Tech who has studied this population, told me that there are no more than 150 Salmon Trout coasters in the lake at any one time and that they can spread out over roughly fifty miles of shoreline. That would work out to about three fish per mile if they were distributed evenly, which of course they’re not.

We developed the ritual of standing in front of our cabin in the mornings drinking coffee and studying the cliffs across the bay that we wanted to fish. They were two miles away, but when the wind was up, we could see the uneven white line of waves breaking against them and knew we’d be off to the Yellow Dog River until the weather cleared, or maybe to a pretty beaver pond Bill swore wasn’t private, even though getting on it involved climbing through a convenient hole in a chain-link fence.

We got out on the big lake in fits and starts—a morning here, an afternoon there, as storms and waves allowed. Bill and Sammy had the procedure at the boat launch down to a science, so I was left with the simple job of stuffing the two-dollar launch fee in the envelope provided and filling in the blanks. Date: June something. Make of vehicle: Chevy. Name: Bellinger. And Bill’s license number, which was easy to remember:
4ZTROUT.

The fishing was what you’d call methodical. We’d slow-troll along the cliffs, casting streamers toward shore and stripping them back. Takes were few and far between, so I concentrated on my casting: the unhurried drift on the back cast, the smooth punch and haul on the forward stroke, with a glance at the deck to see if I was standing on my loose line. It became obvious that this was another one of those fish-of-a-thousand-casts deals, so the job was to make clean throws one after another and not to be asleep at the wheel from monotony when the strike finally came.

We did our best when we could tuck our flies right up against the cliffs in shallow water, but that wasn’t always possible. Some days the rollers were high enough that you could lose depth in a trough and tick the uneven bottom with the skeg if you got in too close. These same waves could also put you on the rocks in minutes if the outboard stalled, and Bill’s outboard, though serviceable, wasn’t above overheating and stalling from time to time. So we stayed in deeper water and lobbed streamers as far as we could reach into the shallows. Bill explained all this to Sammy, who eagerly soaked it up. Whatever was or wasn’t going on at home, this was a kid who wouldn’t have to try to piece together the fine points of fishing from magazines and instructional DVDs.

The fish we hooked and got to the boat were recognizable early summer coasters: strong and chunky, mostly sixteen or seventeen inches long and a pale grayish-silver in color. The typical brook trout markings were all there, and later in the year as spawning
approached, they’d color up like small stream brookies, but now they looked washed-out, overexposed.

Professor Huckins said these early-season fish look too much like splake for their own good and are sometimes mistakenly kept by fishermen who aren’t paying close attention. (“Know your fish,” the state fishing regulations implore.) The limit on coasters is one fish no less than twenty inches long. In the waters we were fishing, splake can be kept at fifteen inches and you can string up three. Huckins isn’t a fan of splake. He said that even without the chronic case of mistaken identity, it doesn’t make sense to pollute the gene pool by stocking a fertile hybrid of lake trout and brook trout in a fishery that already has spawning populations of both fish.

The coasters’ original range isn’t precisely known, but the best guess is that most of the three hundred–plus rivers and streams feeding Lake Superior once had healthy spawning populations. Using the fifty-mile range of the Salmon Trout fish as a rule of thumb, it’s easy to picture them in the early 1800s spread out along the lake’s entire 2,726 miles of coast, plus inshore shoals and islands.

By the turn of the last century, much of the coaster habitat had been or was about to be degraded or destroyed outright by road and railway construction, mining, logging and hydroelectric dams, but even before that they were hit hard by fishermen. Commercial fishing began early and the haul can only be guessed at. Records either weren’t kept or haven’t survived, and even when they do exist, lakers and coasters were often lumped together under the single heading of “trout.”

The extent of the hook-and-line catch is also unknown, but the evidence is everywhere in old mounts of large brook trout and sepia-tone photos of grinning dudes from Detroit or Chicago posing with obscene piles of big, dead fish. It’s hard not to envy those guys, not so much for the fishing they had, but for their innocence. When you bring a coaster to the boat today, you know you’re looking at a
member of a remnant population and you can’t help feeling something short of guilt, but a little past nostalgia.

And the threats to the coasters’ habitat aren’t all in the past. The Kennecott Minerals Company is currently digging a copper mine in the headwaters of the Salmon Trout River—the last coaster river in Michigan, remember—which, according to the opposition, could destroy the fishery through siltation and the introduction of sulfuric acid, both unavoidable byproducts of sulfide mining. According to the company, the proper environmental safeguards are in place and everything will be fine. The environmentalists counter that, to date, there has never been a sulfide copper mine near a river where pollution didn’t occur. And so on.

We got an earful about this from Gene and Carla, our neighbors in the next cabin down the shore. They’d moved to the UP when they retired, but their plans for a quiet life of fishing, kayaking and snowshoeing had been sidetracked by unexpected new careers as unpaid environmental activists. It was a familiar story: a small group of underfunded locals who were long on outrage and short on strategy up against a multinational corporation with the kind of lawyers who, as someone once said, could get a sodomy charge reduced to tailgating. As you might expect, things hadn’t gone well. The opposition was not only outgunned and underfunded, but Michigan has a long history of being sympathetic to extractive industries and careless of the environment. If nothing else, you know what you’re up against when the local newspaper is called the
Mining Journal
.