40 Rivers To Freedom

The worst part of the drive home is the stretch from Albany to Buffalo. Its an area of the earth where time slows down, and you either sleep or deal with the boredom. The sun was in my face, so I dealt by daydreaming about the days ahead. Most people think that they go back to places not because of the new memories they’ll make, but because some stupid part of them thinks that the same thing will happen again. As we drove westward on I-90, I knew that lightning wasn’t going to strike twice. As I approach my 29th birthday, I’ve realized this, and have begun to appreciate just knowing that I’m somewhere that lightning was.

Instead of following the south shore of Lake Erie, we crossed into Canada.

What’s a kilo-meter, eh?

West shore of Lake Ontario

It a weird place, that Canada. Except if someone held out two handfuls of dirt in front of me, one Canadian, and one American- I don’t think I could tell the difference. Not to mention, all of their shopping centers are filled with the same boring mega-chains that ours are. Yet from the second you enter, till you come back to the U.S. through customs in Port Huron, you can always sense that something isn’t right.

During the few days leading up to the trip, I developed a craving for brook trout fried in butter with fresh morels. the next morning when we woke up, my son and I hit the road to one of my favorite morel spots. Along the way we stopped at a small party store to get something to drink. Standing behind the counter was an old friend from high school. He had just moved back to the area after failing to make it down in San Antonio, Texas. When I asked him what it was like down there, all he could muster was that there were a lot of Mexicans. I set two pops on the counter and asked for $10 in gas on pump 2.

We stopped at another gas station up the road before heading into the Pigeon River Country State Forest. The Pigeon is a big ass chunk of northern Michigan laced with a maze of gas well roads and logging trails. 20 minutes into the woods, we pulled off to an excellent squirrel hunting spot, and sprayed each other down with bug dope. Instead of walking through the woods with our eyes on the canopy, our eyes were focused on the ground. I was starting to think we weren’t going to find any after seeing how dry the area was, but we did manage to find a handful of shrooms, and a small patch of wild leeks. We also ran into a small herd of cow elk.

Can you count how many elk are in this picture?

I talked the boy into driving over to check out a few of the Pigeon’s trout streams

Let me preface my naming of rivers by saying that-

1.) No outdoorsmen in Michigan doesn’t know about the three main rivers flowing through the Pigeon: the Sturgeon River, the Black River, and the Pigeon River. Each is about 30-50 miles long, and for the most part, average about 20-50 feet in width.

2.) 11 months ago, a small dam privately operated by a yoga retreat, The Song of the Morning Ranch, “accidentally” was opened wide up. This released a massive plume of sediment that pretty much wiped out what was a thriving, blue ribbon, brookie and brown trout stream. This is the second time this has happened. The last was like 30 years ago.

Did any of you outside of Michigan hear about this?

While I lived in northern Michigan, I was involved with the local chapter of Trout Unlimited. One of the things that was happening at the time was an effort by TU and the MIDNR to have the dam federally regulated since Song of the Morning was operating it in a peaking mode instead of a “run of the river” mode. Basically, they’d let a bunch of water out every night, then reduce flows to a trickle during the day. This is bad for fish, bad for bugs, bad for the whole ecosystem.

Did any of you outside of northern Michigan hear about this?

FERC refused to regulate the dam, despite the fact that it met several of the criteria listed in the Federal Power Act. Had the dam been regulated, the latest fish kill probably wouldn’t have happened.

Yeah, some streams need to be kept secret, but the three main streams flowing through the Pigeon River State Forest- an area with rampant oil and natural gas exploration, constant logging operations, and dam owning yoga hippies aren’t one of them. (I have nothing against them, they just suck at operating their damn dam)

If you read this report, or any other report, and you’re inspired to go fish an area or a river for the first time- go there and treat that river like it was one of your own homewaters. Be there to fight for it, tooth and nail, should it ever need people to stand up for it- the same way you would if your own local stream was threatened.

We drove over to the tourist water on the Black River.

Then we headed over to the Pigeon River to see how she is healing.

After scanning the water upstream, and then down for several minutes, my son asked,

“Dad, how come there are no rising fish?”

He passed out in the back seat on the way to the next spot. Feeling a little tired myself, we headed back to my in-laws’ house for a nap before heading out with my father-in-law for northern pike.