Jordan River: Both Strange and Familiar

My friend Susan and I had gone to northern Michigan for her mother's funeral but, since I've always thought the key to a good life is trying to make the best of things, I brought along a couple of fly rods, just in case.

Of course there was a good chance this would be OK, because this is an old-time fishing family. Irene had died in a nursing home in Colorado in June and she'd been cremated. The funeral wasn't until August because that's when the far-flung family traditionally returned to northern Michigan anyway--and they returned then because that's when the lake fishing they do starts to get good. So, as I'd suspected, they understood, they approved (more than one relative said Susan's mother would have approved too) and Susan's cousin Paul even turned me on to a trout fishing guide on the nearby Jordan River.

His name is Bill Bellinger and when I called his answering machine it said "Wild Bill's Guide Service," which I should have expected. Any fishing guide named Bill will eventually come to be known as "Wild" Bill, either ironically or otherwise.

Anyway, after a little phone tag we connected, set a time and I got directions to his place. I drove down the next day in Susan's mother's old car, an ancient Chevy Citation that had been left out through decades of Michigan winters and looked it, but that also had only about 40,000 miles on it and actually ran pretty well, although the tires were slightly bald and when you put the automatic transmission in drive it lurched forward a foot as if it couldn't wait to get going.

Bill's directions were good: south on the highway to such-and-such road, left toward the river, cabin on the left with a green drift boat parked out front. He said I couldn't miss it. I could have, actually, but I didn't.

The Jordan is a beautiful small river, immediately recognizable as trout water, but unlike the streams we have here in Colorado. The country in that part of Michigan is flat--or I should say, only slightly tilted--so the stream is slow and lazy with gentle meanders. It's deep, cool, spring-fed, clear as a bell, sandy bottomed and, because it doesn't get scoured every spring like a mountain stream, it's jumbled with sweepers and sunken cedar logs that can last a century under water. It was pretty much unwadable. In most places you couldn't get past the maze of snags, and if you did you'd sink past your hat.

The trout streams of this size I'm used to back in the Rocky Mountains are steep and loud, and all but the biggest tree trunks get pushed out in the spring runoff, so the channels are open, the bottoms are mostly clean rock and you have to wade them gingerly and fish them aggressively. By comparison the Jordan was slow and quiet; in most places the wind and the bird songs were louder than the current. It was downright pastoral.

The woods around the river are lush and thick: mixed pine, fir, balsam, birch, and cedar with tangles of alder, carpets of ferns, and unfamiliar wildflowers in the rare clearings. Pileated woodpeckers live there. I never saw one, but I think I heard one. Most woodpeckers go rat-a-tat-tat, but the big pileated woodpeckers go thunk and take inch-long chips out of trees.

So Bill, his landlord, and I floated a good long stretch of river in Bill's Au Sable River boat. This was a lovely, hand-made wooden craft: twenty-one feet long, narrow, flat-bottomed, and a lot more stable than it looked. The hull was no more than a foot high; yet with three people in it I don't think it drew more than an inch or two of water.

It's the kind of boat that exhibits the beauty of pure function. That is, in the right hands it does one specialized job to perfection. Bill threaded it expertly down miles of river using a pole from the stern and I can only remember one unplanned bump, just a few seconds after the landlord said, "So, Bill, which side of that stump are you gonna go on?"

We caught trout more or less regularly and they were more or less in the kinds of places where you'd expect them to be. Deep holes and slots above and below logjams were good, and so were dark currents along shady banks and the deep edges of snags. In most places the forest was too tight around the banks and the river too narrow for much of a backcast, so there was a lot of roll-casting.

The trout weren't especially big (I was on a weird schedule and we were not fishing at the best time of day or, for that matter, the best time of year either) but there were plenty of them and they were happy enough to eat a #12 or #14 dry fly, even though there were few real bugs on the water. They were mostly browns, with some rainbows and a precious few brook trout, all healthy and brightly colored. Brookies are native there and not all that common, so you get excited about them, even the little ones.

I caught some fish on a St. Vrain Caddis dry--a favorite back home--but I got most of them on a local pattern Bill gave me. I forget what he called it, but basically it's a Royal Wulff body with a down wing and tail of elk hair and palmered grizzly hackle, size #12. I found the thing in my fly box a few days after I got back to Colorado. It was chewed almost beyond recognition.

Considering that I'd gone to Michigan for a funeral, I'd already gotten in quite a bit of fishing. The actual morning of the funeral I went out on Lake Michigan with three of Susan's cousins--Paul, Roger, and Parris. We were in Parris's boat, Fisker III, a flashy number with six downriggers and lots of electronics. This is the kind of deal where you set the downriggers off the depth finder, then get a cup of coffee and stand around in the cabin watching the monitor.

I'd heard about this and it always sounded a little too technological for my taste. In fact, Parris and I had spent some time in a cafe the day before discussing the pros and cons of our own styles of fishing. It was the kind of diplomatic conversation that has taken place thousands of times between thousands of bearded, middle-age fishermen:

"Nothing against electronics, but . . ."
"Nothing against fly fishing, but . . ."

When it was all said and done, I landed a seven- or eight-pound lake trout hooked in 110 feet of water on a spoon called a Kevorkian--which turned out to be a lot more fun than I'd expected.

And we made it back in time for the funeral. As I was walking into the church, another one of Susan's countless cousins stopped me, shook my hand solemnly and asked, "Do any good this morning?"

The next afternoon, I borrowed the Citation and, on a tip from yet another cousin, drove down to explore the headwaters of the Jordan. The guy said, "Take a left at the farm-implement yard and then bear right at every fork. There's a bunch of little creeks up in there."

"Up in there" turned out to be the Mackinaw State Forest, and he was right. Several little tributary streams seeped in off the low hills to the west and under the road; I drove over them on solid little one-lane wooden bridges heading for the Jordan, which I could now and then glimpse through the trees on my left. At first I was a little concerned about the family heirloom car because it sat pretty low to the ground on its elderly shocks, but the dirt roads really were dirt, as opposed to the cobbles and boulders I'm used to, so it bottomed out softly and harmlessly.

With nothing better to go on, I picked the creek with the best head of water in it, strung up a rod and hiked upstream. The woods were thick, the banks were boggy and the creek itself was slow and choked with snags, like a miniature version of the Jordan. There were no fish rising, but I tempted up some brown trout to a caddis dry. Most of them were small, a few would have been big enough to kill and eat and they didn't seem to have that cagey streak fish get after they've been pounded by anglers. For that matter, there was no trash, no trail, not so much as a broken twig or flattened grass to show anyone had been in there for a long time.

About a mile or so up in there I came to a nice beaver pond. There were no fish rising there either, but I hunkered down off to the side of the dam, worked the water I could reach with the caddis fly and caught half a dozen chunky little browns.

Then I teetered out on the dam itself so I'd have the backcast room I'd need to reach the channel at the head of the pond. I put the fly along an undercut and buggered the cast badly. The fly hit the water way too hard and then ripped down through the current, throwing a wake.

It was enough to spook the great big fish that was hiding there. It flashed out into open, shallow water, froze in confusion for a small fraction of a second and then bolted into the depths of a deadfall. I wanted to say it was a brown no less than twenty inches long, but I guess I can't swear to that. I'd been told that summer-run steelhead come up the Jordan and if that's true then they'd probably come up the bigger tributaries too. Still, though I didn't see the fish that well or for all that long, I think I made out butter-color sides and black spots in the split second it froze in the clear, shallow water in full sun.

Whatever it was, it made me take a step backward in surprise and I almost fell off the dam. I danced and waved my arms for a while, and by the time I'd gotten my balance back the memory had already begun to fade.

After that I crossed the dam and slogged to where I could see the water upstream. I ended up standing in an acre of tightly packed shoulder-high Joe Pye weeds, every last one of them in full reddish-purple flower, and actually took a minute to stop and think, Jeez, this is kinda pretty.

From that vantage point the stream above the dam looked fishy and inviting, but then I began to think maybe I should get back. At times like that--the day between the funeral and the burial--you think you should be around for moral support, even if the most good you can hope to do is not say the wrong thing.

The next morning we buried Irene, and then there was the trip to the bank to clean out the safe deposit box. Susan was pretty exhausted by then, but her sense of humor seemed OK. Out in the parking lot she said, "Well, no secret fortune in jewels."

My gear was already in the trunk, so I dropped Susan off at a cousin's house and drove down to the Jordan River to meet Bill. It was a pleasant drive in rural country, south from Charlevoix into Antrim County, through East Jordan, past the farm implement place again, and then a hand-painted sign in front of a farmhouse read "FOR SALE--MAPLE SYRUP, FIREWOOD, RABBITS."

I remember being happy to be out of town, out of the funeral clothes once and for all, floating quietly down a strange new river that still seemed somehow familiar. I guess I was just feeling the relief that rites for the dead are meant to provide for the living. You're supposed to come away feeling that most of what could be done has been done, so at least that part of the job is finished. The rest of it will have to sink in slowly, over time, but that can be left to itself. In the meantime, there's an old car no one's using and a little trout river just a few miles away.

And Bill himself was sort of a hopeful, heart-warming sight. He's a young guy--I'd say thirty, tops--living in a sweet little cabin in the woods a stone's throw from a river with a great, friendly dog named Killian and a fine boat. I got the feeling that he's exactly what he wants to be: a good-natured, competent, river-wise fishing guide. I know that some guides eventually burn out or, for better or worse, move on to other things, but, for now at least, the guy probably thinks he's died and gone to heaven. RWOL

Editor's Note: Because of the fight looming ahead regarding Antrim drilling in the Jordan Valley, and because John Gierach, unfortunately for us, rarely writes about any river east of the Mississippi, I thought it appropriate to reprint this story that first appeared in Fly Rod & Reel earlier this year, even though most of our readers probably subscribe, as they should, to this fine magazine. It has been reprinted with permission from the author, who, when I explained what was happening on the Jordan and asked if he would give me permission, replied, "I hope it helps in some small way."

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