This past weekend I took my nephew Jacob (he's 11, but kept telling me he'll be 12 in a few days) up to the Au Sable for the annual river clean up put on by the Angler's of the Au Sable. I wanted to expose him a bit to our obsession and see if he might not have an interest in it.
We fished one evening at Daisy Bend on the South Branch of the Au Sable. I tried to get a brookie to sacrifice himself but no-such-luck. He had never fished before...period.
We went out looking for deer one evening and I lost a bet that we would see 20 deer between the Lodge and Lovell's. When he was at the counter getting his candy bar he told the ladies behind the counter how he had won it. They told him that, "On any given night young man your uncle would of won that bet!" We saw 29 in all by the time we made it back to the Lodge.
He waded and helped clean up a heavily canoed section from Chase Bridge to Forest Rest on the South Branch. This is the beginning of the Mason Tract. We found shoes, water bottles, beer bottles, plastic lighters, a nearly in perfect shape cassette tape, "The Greatest Hits of Roger Whittaker" (Who knew?), and some weird thing that looked like a homemade spearing rig.
On Sunday I decided to show him his uncle's other obsession birding. We visited the Mason Tract, the north side of Higgins Lake State park, the Houghton Lake Flooding, the Dead Stream Flooding & Reedsburg Dam, and finally the Maple River Wildlife Area!
He was a little confused with the "Life Bird" concept and kept asking me, when we spotted something new, "Is that a life bird?" I told him that since he's grown up in the city that pretty much every bird's a life bird to him...Write it down! We saw over the weekend wild turkey, kingfishers, great blue herons, great egrets, sand hill cranes, spotted sandpipers, ringed-billed gulls, pied-billed grebes, a pair of trumpeter swans, an American bittern, and his first ever male woody (wood duck)! Not bad, eh!
At Higgins Lake, a place I used to sneak in to with a friend back when I was 16 and sleep down on the beach, I stood him in front of a White Pine that they estimate started it's life there in 1854...I leaned down and said, "And you think 12's something!"
I was surprised on how well he hung with the old man and he didn't fall out until we were somewhere between Lansing & Detroit and he finally slept...I deposited him home around 8 pm.
The "old-timers" really got a kick out of having some youth on the river and the waitresses in my favorite dining places, the Grayling Restaurant & Julie Gates' at the Lodge spoiled him rotten! You would of thought that the "Little Prince" had arrived! I never get any extra fries when I'm through with mine!? :)
Spence
"Even when my best efforts fail it's a satisfying challenge, and that, after all, is the essence of fly fishing." -Chauncy Lively
"Envy not the man who lives beside the river, but the man the river flows through." Joseph T Heywood