Three of my cousins and I have headed into the woods and rivers of Northern Michigan to camp and fish for almost sixteen years now. The outing has become the lifeblood of our adventurous spirit. And while this yearly excursion lacks most frills, it works for us, and we like it that way.
The books, authors, and quotes added each year are meaningful to me, and once typed on the packing list, to my cousins as well. Below are the colorful and fragrant sentences over the last sixteen years. If any of these timeless words speak to you personally, this blog entry suddenly becomes a shared library you may want to check out and add to your “must reads.” On the cusp of heading Up North again this summer, Enjoy!
See you along The Way…
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PACKING LIST QUOTES
THROUGH THE YEARS
2008
Yikes! I’m almost afraid to type this out…after writing it in a spiral it seems like a lot, but I guess it’s not too bad when it all comes together. In other words, I’m sure it’s not a big problem to get a semi-trailer down into the campground (insert semi truck sound here while pumping your fist up and down). Dad says, (And this refers more to backpacking when you don’t have a truck to stash things in), ‘If you’re not sure you need it, leave it home’!” - Mike Rhines
2009
“Nothing in this world so enlivens my spirit and emotions as the rivers I know. They are necessities. In their clear, swift or slow, generous or coy waters, I regain my powers; I find again those parts of myself that have been lost in cities. Stillness. Patience. Green thoughts. Open eyes. Attachment. High drama. Earthiness. Wit. The Huck Finn I once was. Gentleness. ‘The life of things.’ They are my perne within the whirling gyre.”
- Nick Lyons: Full Creel
(For the Record I had to look these words up: perne=shining moments & gyre =circle)
2010
“I’ve noticed that many of the people I’ve really enjoyed fishing with over the years have turned out to be sturdy peasant stock from Michigan. I don’t know what it is about the anglers from that state, but you can spot it: some kind of casual facility with difficulty, or the belief that suffering is the only promise life keeps, so that when things go even a little bit right, it’s like a gift.”
- John Gierach: Standing in a River Waving a Stick
2011
“We ended up fishing a generous handful of small streams before we completed an uneven loop and started back. I guess it did amount to an awful long way to go for a few trout, but trips like this have nonetheless become a kind of part-time life’s work. The idea is to fish obscure headwater creeks in hopes of eventually sniffing out an underappreciated little trout creek down an unmarked dirt road. “Why” is another question. I suppose it’s partly for the fishing itself and partly to satisfy your curiosity, but mostly to sustain the belief that such things are still out there to find for those willing to look.”
“I like everything about fishing, but especially this walk in…You never know what to expect – but the goal of going fishing has already been accomplished, so the rest is the aimless, doglike happiness of being outside and off your leash.”
- John Gierach: No Shortage of Good Days
2012
“Needing Supplies, we stopped at an old, unpainted crossroads store. There was everything imaginable for sale in that store: snowshoes, shotguns and deer rifles, and even a yoke for oxen. You could buy groceries as well as brightly colored yard goods, snow packs, and bear traps. There was also merchandise more fascinating to me, such as excellent split fly rods and hand-tied trout flies which I viewed with longing.
The stream came winding toward us over and under mossy logs. It tumbled through the remains of an abandoned beaver dam, and ran like quicksilver across the beaver meadow where the meadow larks added their music to that of the water.
Other fish can fight, but there is nothing quite like a big trout for style and grace and courage – as though they drew strength from the whole wilderness.”
- Sterling North: Rascal
2013
“Outside it’s easy to abandon every convention and prejudice and get down to the messy business of being an animal, alive. When you’re rooting around in the water or the woods, miles from the nearest strip mall and office complex, nobody is likely to judge you by your clothing or your skin color or your political orientation, and if they do you don’t give a damn anyway. Fishing – or hunting or photographing birds or cutting firewood – frees you of such nonsense. If you want society, convention, comfort, and safety, stay home. If you want your life to be a joyous romp, get outside.”
- Jerry Dennis: The River Home
As the years go by we have become campers & fisherman with great equipment (or at least the equipment that gets us by) but are still minimalists to a certain extent (knowing that the experiences are what we’re after…and that we’ve pretty much gone in every type of weather over the years and have been able to enjoy it). -Mike Rhines
2014
“Everyone needs such quiet times, some solitude to recoup his sense of perspective. One does not have to be in a canoe or in some remote wilderness. I find such times at night when I do much of my reading, but to me when solitude is part of wilderness it comes more surely and with greater meaning. Since the time when man often traveled alone, hunting and foraging, all this became part of him. It is easy to slip back into the ancient grooves of experience…When I am fly-fishing for brook trout, alone on some favorite stream, the sense of hurry is gone and time seems endless…Trout fishing for me is not the taking of fish, but being at one with the stream and all the sights and sounds. The great Leonardo da Vinci said in 1512, “The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding may most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature, and the ear is the second, inasmuch as it acquires its importance from the fact it hears the things which the eye has seen.” I have often thought of that, and wondered if this most perspective of minds had ever stood in a quiet pool as I have.”
- Sigurd F. Olson: Reflections from the North Country
“When they landed, they saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread. Jesus said to them, ‘Bring some of the fish you have just caught’.”
- John 21: 9-10
2015
“Studying maps is a sure way to make yourself miserable. Those two-dimensional representations of our multidimensional world have a way of igniting wanderlust and over exciting the imagination. Follow the meandering blue line of a river into a sprawling blue maze of lakes and you can easily slip into an idealized version of the place.”
- Jerry Dennis: “From a Wooden Canoe”
“I think we’ve finally given up on the idea of the fishing trip of a life time and now see each expedition as just part of a lifetime of fishing trips.”
- John Gierach: “Standing in a River Waving a Stick”
“Simon Peter…dragged the net ashore. It was full of large fish…Jesus said to them, ‘Come and have breakfast’.”
- John 21:11-12a
2016
“The only conclusion I have ever reached is that I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.”
“The song of a river ordinarily means the tune that waters play on rock, root, and rapid.”
“The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers. These boys were ‘on their own’ in this particular sense.”
- Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac
2017
“Beyond the road and maples is the river, with its own movement and its own life. Lakesides have their charm and personality, but after living with this river for ten years I know that my personal choice is flowing water. A river comes from somewhere, flows past my wondering eyes, and goes on to some other place. It has movement, change, and there is a sense of both time and eternity in it. The river tells me that so long as there are heights and lowlands on earth, water will continue to flow and life will persist. A river, flowing water, not only has its own life – it is life. I am prejudiced about rivers, and I shall have more to say about them.”
- Hal Borland: Beyond The Doorstep
2018
“There’s a rhythm on the inside to what you see on the outside...But if you get down on your belly, crawl through the weeds to the edge, and stare deep into the water; if you get on the inside and slow down and breathe it in, then you get to know it.”
- John Luthens: Taconite Creek
“Of course there are many of us, and I am now one of them, for whom a day on a trout river is so pleasant an event, such an amiable and engaging pastime, that it feels, both going and coming back, as comfortable as an old shoe. We go for the sheer joy of it, not to put notches in our rods. We go because no day on a trout stream lacks mystery, surprise, wonder, and suspense...I like to fish water I’ve fished a hundred times before, water that shares history with me, that I see in my head, going and coming back.”
- Nick Lyons: My Secret Fishing Life
2019
“Being in nature can restore our mood, give us back our energy and vitality, refresh and rejuvenate us. We know this deep in our bones. It is like an intuition, or an instinct, a feeling that is sometimes hard to describe.”
- Dr. Qing Li: Forest Bathing
“I would rather have a body of scars and a head full of memories than a life of regrets and perfect skin.”
- Atticus: Love Her Wild
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
- A sign that used to hang over Albert Einstein’s office at Princeton University
2020
“The North grabs some people and never lets go. It doesn’t care if you were once a carpenter or a bank president, and after a while, neither do you.”
- Dennis Weidemann: This Water Goes North
“I got up and made my way upstream, stepping on wet stones and moss covered boulders, careful not to tear the moss with the rough soles of my boots. A stream boulder, with moss and other small plants and fungi growing on it, is a world unto itself-a miniature planet Earth with a rock core, a soft crust, water, vegetation, and even animal life.”
- Jim Arnosky: Nearer Nature
“I like the wild, beautiful country where trout are often found, the solitude of walking along a river and being drawn more completely into the landscape, and how the sound of a fast-flowing stream could wash away my blues.”
- Bill Barich: Crazy For Rivers
2021
“To the trout fisherman, who are always searching for the spring-fed headwaters of streams, they [logging roads] are a godsend. What devotee of the elusive speckled trout but remembers long hikes through the dewy brush of old tote roads, and who hasn’t caught a good one beneath the fallen timbers of some long-unused bridge?”
- Sigurd F. Olson: Listening Point
“During times when we’re not in physical contact with the wilderness, just knowing it is here is a comforting thought, but actually being here is what we dream about, so we try to make the most of this experience.”
- John Highlen: “Painting the Boundary Waters” (The Boundary Waters Journal - Fall 2020)
“For me, I just know in my gut that I need the solitude of the wilderness with time to reflect, be silent, and listen to my Creator. I need to exert my full body in heavy exercise and know the tiredness and sweat of true exertion. Our six-day disconnect from modern society has begun.”
- Rollie Johnson: “Plan K” (The Boundary Waters Journal - Winter 2020)
2022
“It seems a good portion of my time in the woods is spent hunkered, propped or slouched in the glow of a good fire. And it ought to be a good fire - not a raging, pep-rally bonfire, but a healthy, well conceived fire that burns with the right attitude.”
- Sam Cook: “Your Fire, My Fire.” Up North.
“But the place which you have selected for your camp, though never so rough and grim, begins at once to have its attractions, and becomes a very center of civilization to you: ‘Home is home, be it never so homely’.”
- Henry David Thoreau: “Friday, July 31.” Canoeing In The Wilderness.
“If children do not attach to the land, they will not reap the psychological and spiritual benefits they can glean from nature, nor will they feel a long term commitment to the environment, to the place…Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.”
- Richard Louv: “The Best Of Intentions.” Last Child In The Woods.
(Yup, that’s how we were raised : )
2023
“Filled with ozone, our pulses bound, and are warmed and quickened into sympathy with everything, taken back into the heart of nature, whence we came.”
- John Muir: “The Alaska Trip.” Wilderness Essays.
“The river is often used in literature as a metaphor for life, and aren’t both made richer by sharing the stories that occur along the way and isn’t that what life is about; creating and sharing memories, telling stories?”
- Don Miller: “The John Day Escape.” Life Afloat.
“It is all woven together now - the bird sounds, the forest smells, the anticipations of the coming season. Now we know to go no matter what the weather will be and that, likely as not, we’ll come across some small event worth remembering…
The North is rich with the glories of life. Sometimes you have to poke your nose in the dirt, and sometimes you have to muck around in the swamps and sometimes you have to get up with the geese.
But it’s there, awaiting discovery.”