For my cousins and me it was a pipe dream really, but one we have often considered and held in high regard. To achieve that wish, this particular summer would have to be unprecedented during our annual camping trip in Northern Lower Michigan. Still, it was a wish whispered softly on a slight breeze just beyond the outskirts of Sparr, one of the area’s smallest little towns; a perfect setting to allow that wish to play itself out.
We started the morning well before first light thanks to the booming calls of a barred owl in the tree branches above us. The deep, muffled call was thundering in its stark contrast to the silence of the night. So clear was it that you could tell when it turned it’s head and replied to an answering owl somewhere further up the valley. Despite the darkness, and being at least a mile from a lake, a loon then laughed out loud once; perhaps sounding the warbling cry to remind everyone willing to listen as to who was the true bird of the North.
CLICK BELOW FOR A VIDEO OF A
BARRED OWL BOOMING ABOVE MY TENT AT NIGHT
(TWO SEPARATE CALLS)
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Up early, my cousins went through their traditional coffee routines. I myself jumped in with a cup of hot chocolate. Topped off with some apple slices, we hit the trails along the area’s ridges to run a few miles; apparently figuring that by burning energy early we’d settle into the day and the hypnotic rhythms of the woodlands. We revived afterwards with a quick dip in the cold river, followed by a breakfast of eggs and sausage.
Adding in a much needed nap to help us catch up from the end of the week and traveling, the early afternoon found us primed and ready as we assembled our gear and drove out to a small creek that runs through a nearby swamp. With the four of us fishing together, and the flowing water little more than 10 to 12 feet across in a narrow, shallow channel, we simply took turns. This type of fishing takes patience and sometimes it’s difficult to feel as if you’ve gotten into any flow and connection, but you also get to share the experience together and be present for any action, scenery, or humorous one-liners.
After having been cousins for a lifetime and on this particular trip for 14 years in a row now, it truly is about the commoradary at this point. Which is probably why we don’t mind coming to this particular stretch of water to fish for trout. You don’t come here to catch and register trophies. Heck, you don’t even come here for nice sized native brook trout that tend to be on the smaller side of either the trout or salmon family anyways. You come to this creek knowing full well that the trout are little, but the setting has backwoods adventure written all over it.
The hike in was tedious, but then again, every place we’ve ever fished requires some trudging; either to get to it, or to walk back from it. Of course that doesn’t count the effort spent walking in a river with waders and pushing against the current. In addition, there is the sound of small, shy birds and water gurgling around submerged logs and stumps. Bordered by spruce, balsam, white cedars, tamaracks, white pines and the ever present tag alder, as well as birches, red pines, and the clumping red maples with their ruby colored petiole stems, the locality conveys an impenetrable swamp if it weren’t for occasional small glades of smooth sawgrass; the result of old beaver ponds now filled in with silt and sediments. Standing in the creek, surrounded by that scene, and enveloped alongside all of those varieties of trees, you felt loved and comforted as if wrapped in one of those soft, weighted blankets you see advertised.
The Hike In
Within that setting, each of us caught and released a couple of brook trout. Only one or two were at the length of nine inches, and most averaged eight. In other words, the brookies were small, but they were beautiful. Once you had wet your hand in the moving water and slid it up under them you realized just how soft and smooth they really were.
After we started catching a few, the dream took hold. We each elected to keep one fish. Just one. Upon having one brook trout apiece, we hiked back into a grove of tamaracks. It was poetic, since tammaracks themselves have some of the softest clusters of needles of any pine, being a deciduous conifer that actually loses its needles in a splendidly golden display each fall. Grabbing a few dead, dry cedar branches I started a small fire while the others cut and stripped off the leaves of some tender alder shoots. We slipped the brook trout onto the sticks and held them over the heat from the flames; no butter, no breading, no spices. Just the trout, cooked on and over the very nutrients they had been living in.
CLICK BELOW FOR A VIDEO OF
MY COUSINS AND ME
COOKING TROUT DEEP IN A SWAMP
It didn’t really take too long for the fish to cook. Once they were deemed finished, we ate them whole right from the stick; skin, fins, and meat. All that was left was the bony structure and even that returned to Mother Earth as ashes. There would be no waste.
And so just like that our dream was fulfilled. Deep in the swampy shadows of Sparr, we were able to submerse ourselves within the environs that each of us cousins hold sacred. Once the very roots of my existence, this Northwoods territory is one we long to return to each year. Held in such high regard, it humbly honored our wishes and provided us with the opportunity to catch, cook, and eat trout all in the tight confines of the lowland woods. With thankfulness we then started the long hike out, knowing full well that we had been blessed in so many ways.
Love your blogs. Mike. Love to you and your family
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