Certain experiences get etched in your memory. Like the time
on a camping trip that a friend said he knew how to ride a dirt bike and then did
his best Superman impression when he let out the clutch and the bike sped off
leaving him suspended briefly in the air, arms outstretched. Or the time your
tippet formed the world's worst rat's nest at precisely 9:59 a.m., back when
Minnesota's trout season kicked off at 10 a.m. sharp on a Saturday in mid-April.
Or the time a friend caught his first trout, on his first trout outing, while
his fly line dragged in the river behind him while you were rambling on about
the need for stealth and accurate casting. Or that time you and your buddy
camped (for the first and last time) with two acquaintances who apparently
liked to spend their downtime wrestling.
For some reason, my memory of my first trout-fishing trip
remains a bit cloudy. Or, I should say, there are certain clear memories that
don’t quite fit together as puzzle pieces.
There's the Trout Classic Pancake Breakfast in Chatfield,
Minnesota, with trout anglers itching for the season to begin, passable
pancakes and lukewarm breakfast links you sincerely hoped were of the fully
cooked variety. And the muddy Root River blowing by at a rate that made it look
nothing like the waters in "The Orvis Guide to Reading a Trout
Stream." And that treacherous hill you scaled to get to Trout Run Creek
that, it turns out, was just upstream from easy access at the Bide-a-Wee bridge
and just downstream from the recess in the trees what would provide easy access
for years to come.
On my own, I couldn’t quite put the pieces together. So on a
trip this past summer with my accomplices, Jeff Finnamore and Eric Hjelmberg, I
brought it up to see if we could recreate the event by putting our graying
heads together. That trip was the first Minnesota trout opener for all of us. Eric had gotten
the fly fishing bug during the previous winter, and it turned contagious. So we
all bought the best cheap fly fishing gear we could find, did a bit of
research, and went out to try our hands. It was April 1993.
As we reconstructed the trip, it became clear that there was, in fact, a Root River component. Jeff recalls walking the riverbank and muttering that
it looked nothing like the trout streams his grandfather had taken him to as a
lad. And a feeder creek, in which he finally caught a few trout and put them "on
ice" using snow he found still sticking to a nearby hillside. And there
was a Trout Run wrinkle. That hill. The long walk downstream past bait
fisherman, easy access points, and water that looked a little flat and
unforgiving for novices. I also recall nearly losing hope, while Jeff, the only
real fisherman among us at that time, found a way to connect with a few willing
browns. His fish sense clearly outperformed my book learning on that and many
trips to follow.
As we talked about that trip and came up with a chain of events we
could agree was at least generally accurate, we naturally drifted out of that
current and into more ridiculous recollections from our collective past. There was the Jeep / dirt-bike
race on a gravel road that ended with a flaming cycle and subsequent crash,
followed by Jeff driving his Jeep off the opposite shoulder and into a lake.
The time we were driving down a country road and the hood of that Jeep flew
open. (Words may or may not have been said that shouldn't be repeated here.)
And the time Jeff threw a camp table onto the fire when our supply of firewood
got too low. (To the tune of Margaritaville, if memory serves.)
In the retelling of our tall but generally true tales, it
became clear that some of these stories not only got better with age, but over
time, I'd somehow come to feel I was an integral part of certain stories I'm not entirely sure I was there to experience firsthand. I guess over time, the retelling of the
stories becomes as important as, or maybe even more important than, the
experiences themselves.
I think it's time for an off-season bonfire and revisiting that conversation. Particularly because my memory of how the puzzle pieces fit together has already faded a bit since we last assembled them.
