North Woods River Runner: April 2018

I love maps; love to get the boys together on a slow winter afternoon and pour over them, find places – sometimes right up the road – where none of us have ever been.

“You ever get up in here?”

“No. You?”

And that faraway look goes around the table from fisherman to fisherman.

Fly Fishing Small Streams (1989) – By John Gierach

It was after the fact when I first made the connection. I had perhaps been shown the map long before as a boy, but its relevancy failed to register at the time if indeed I had.

Almost twenty one years ago now I caught my first trout. It was during the summer of 1997, just a few months after my son was born. I had attempted to catch them several different times while growing up, but it was to no avail. For the last two decades or so I’ve been able to make up for lost time, however, and reconnect with my lineage.

The map had belonged to my Grandpa Orlo. He had hunted, and fished, and explored the Northland of Michigan when much of it was still wild in the first half of the last century. It was during a time when going “Up North” took the better part of a day or so as the roads were only two lanes. One had to travel from small town to small town back then, and if you branched off from those small state highways you most likely would work your way down to dirt roads and narrow two-tracks.

Grandpa Orlo-Around 1930

Orlo died when my own Dad was just 14 years old, but the nostalgia of him is none-the-less set deep in my mind. Black and white pictures, and stories passed down, add to his lore. The irony is that I was born just a stone’s throw from an area he often stayed at with his family and friends when he wanted to “get away” up North. But it’s his old map that haunts me. It’s not a haunting fueled by fear, or anxiousness, or uncertainty. It’s restlessness. Perhaps it’s more of a restlessness bound by the spirit of adventure. I’ve been introspective about that thread of my character, and have self analyzed it to the point of trying to understand if I feel like I have to prove something or live up to something. In my own diagnosis it’s more about making a connection to a missing piece of the puzzle; a piece of my heritage; a piece connected to the mark on that map that not too long ago I didn’t even know existed. In fact, as my other three grandparents lived well into their 90’s, it’s one of the only unknowns in my link to my past.

My Dad helped bridge that gap to Grandpa Orlo. While both my Mom and Dad invested their time in nurturing my love for the outdoors, Dad connected me to the fishing aspect. Tales of his days on the rivers and streams are likewise etched into my mind. I’ve been fortunate to have walked and fished some of those same classic waters my Dad often fished. Since then my Dad and I have even christened some of our own waters together. But even his stories are linked to a calling from the past. It all comes back to that old, faded map that he has. It’s held sacredly in a leather briefcase; a satchel for all intents and purposes.

Dad and Teddy - 1965

The map is a Michigan Road Atlas that was copy written four years after my Dad was born, in the throes of World War II. It was used I’m sure a few years after, when life and the world as a whole was a bit more grounded. It was then that the map received the mark. It’s a mark that’s hardly noticeable, written in a dull pencil, and drawn in an obscure part of the state. Orlo drew that mark; an “X” really, at the end of a trailing, twisting line that extended up from a small town in Northern Lower Michigan.

Enter my cousins and me. For the better part of ten years now we’ve met, bonded, and rooted ourselves within the North Country over a camping expedition. We camp an easy drive from the area where I was raised; out in the “sticks” and “back-country” as they say. That first year, 2008 to be exact, we explored the area’s rivers and tried to get our bearings on the best places to go; our favorite places to go. It was the last day of that first year’s outing, while out driving and exploring, that we happen chanced upon a small river that immediately captured our hearts. It was the setting. It was the waters. It was all of these parts bound together in a synergistic sort of way that hasn’t released its grip on us yet. In fact, it’s only been tightened. Each year since, we set aside a day, a holy day really, to spend alongside that snaking waterway. We arrive early, cook breakfast (sometimes even adding the area’s blueberries to our pancakes), fish, rest (sometimes after a run and swim), cook a dinner of brats, sauerkraut, and beans, and then head back to our base camp at dusk. It’s a day well spent. Fishing the sandy bottomed currents with its deep bends, for the elusive, beautifully marked trout, is only one small facet of what makes the area and excursion so enticing year after year.

Brad, Brian, Sean, and Me - The First Year: 2008

What happened was innocent enough, but while sitting and talking at my parent’s house three years ago now, the subject turned to fishing, “back home”, and maps. My Dad went downstairs and came back up with that brown, leather satchel. In it was the (now coveted) map. It instantly became the missing link when I saw the penciled mark; the “X”. The mark was located on the river of our dreams where we spend that holiest of days each year. Incredibly it was just a few bends down from the hillside ridge where we typically camp out for the day. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. After explaining to my Dad the coincidental connection between where my cousins and I fish each summer and the mark on Grandpa Orlo’s map, I quickly took a picture. I sent the picture with a text to my cousins who were equally excited. We now had a direct association with our Grandpa. He obviously must have felt a bond to the location to have placed an “X” on his map. We, his grandsons, had unknowingly discovered that same relationship to this tract of land hidden deep in the North Country.

A veil had been removed, a mystery revealed, and a piece of the puzzle put into place once we discovered the mark on that map. Fishing an out of the way, special place had been our original objective, but it has become much more than that now. Seventy years ago our Grandpa walked these same sacred banks and fished these same clear waters. Can you imagine what it looked like seventy years ago? Can you imagine if he could know that his grandsons had found this place to be equally sacred? Some of our favorite white pines line that river. It’s Michigan’s official state tree. My cousins and I have taken a bazillion pictures of those hallowed trees that were most likely small seedlings when the North Country was first lumbered off in the late 1800’s. They are considered the originals by today’s standards. Their boughs, the boughs that whisper secret stories of the past with the ridge’s easy breezes, often shade us on our excursions and meanderings on that one special day we spend there each summer. It’s a day we set aside reverently apart from our base camp on another river a few miles away. Those same pine boughs once shaded and whispered to our Grandpa Orlo as young trees. He spent that time walking the same ground and fishing the same waters. It’s holy ground now, as it was then, and more than worthy of a precious, faded, mark on an old map.

See you along The Way…

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The Picture Album