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Outdoors North: Of trucks and trout: Finding peace in U.P.

“Dear Dad, don’t get mad, what I’m asking for is by the next semester can I get another car?” — Chuck Berry

It was a rainy, cold Saturday afternoon when the engine on the old pickup turned over for its last ride into the woods.

Like it had been through much of its working life, the truck would be tested on this day with high-standing mud, water and rocks.

Finding those hidden fishing spots and other favored natural places of reflection, regeneration and replenishment often takes bucking these types of elements.

There are other challenges too, especially for a truck now nearly 20 years old, like the failing of your dashboard lights, driver’s side window and stuck gauges, an engine that spits and sputters on steep hills or the rust hanging everywhere that just makes a truck feel and look older.

Some of the old vehicle’s bones were visible now through holes eaten through the metal by that corrosive, ever-advancing agent of junk.

Beyond the rust, there are the distinctive wavy marks made by those stiff fingerlike branches of tag alders and thorn apple that had clawed and scraped across the windows and paint on the truck’s sides and roof.

Today, on this quiet and forsaken Upper Peninsula back road, the truck was a long way from that shining day when it was driven off the lot brand new — nearly a quarter of a million miles away.

A broad-winged hawk spooks from the trees along the road, while migrating birds of all sorts populate the bushes and the gray skies overhead. Windy, chilly and dark.

The truck’s brakes had been screeching and slipping for a couple of weeks, but not today. All this decay has been gradual, a little bit, one day, at a time.

The driver sees more than a little irony in the fact much of this description afforded to his truck could also be said of him, as they both head to a familiar fishing hole, swollen terribly with the recent rains.

A romantic in some forgotten sense, the driver had taken care to pack the food, drink and music that had become familiar to so many of these trips. This last ride would hope to capture the magic experienced over all those years, just one more time.

Creek water over the road is deeper than expected. The truck powers through as the driver feels apprehension at the prospect of floating.

A few miles more and the mud and water are deep and thick, like pudding. Again, the truck chugs through like it always has — through whiteout snowstorms, suffocating heat and tremendous thunderstorms, wind and bitter cold.

With the truck backed up into a well-worn parking place in the grass, the driver snaps a few pictures, inside and out, to help him remember the day and the miles.

Alongside the creek, while the truck rests in the rain, the driver teases a trout out from under a log with a shiny, spinning lure. The woods are alive, a few bugs are floating in the air and sticks litter the ground, stripped by a bank beaver.

Over the winter and spring, the high waters have choked the best fishing hole here with a thick covering of sand, while a few feet away, the scour of the fast stream has gouged a new hole into the stream bottom where one had never been before.

Everything is changing from brown to green, with marsh marigolds brightening up the banks along the water, wild strawberries are flowering back where the truck is parked, and fragments of egg shells litter the gravel surrounding a hole made by a snapping turtle, its exit tracks visible in the dirt.

Along the shoreline of a lake now, the green and yellow moss-covered ground shifts as the driver plants his foot among the rain-filled pitcher plants and little white blooms dangling from slender stalks.

Another trout, a larger one this time, is lured out from the surprising depths of the waters close to shore. The sky was darkening now with the setting sun.

That blank, aching feeling inside told the driver what he already had admitted grudgingly to himself — the day was ending, it was time to go.

Looking through the wet hanging bows of tamaracks weeping along the lakeshore, the truck sits visible across the road, rain dripping from its bumper. The driver sighs.

Back inside the truck, the heater still works, the driver is dry and out of the rain, the engine again turns over, and when the truck is put in gear, the wheels turn while the wipers slap, heading them both toward home.

Like saying good-bye to a true friend, this last ride was harder than the driver had anticipated. Back at home, the truck is parked against the curb. The driver, with his fishing rod, walks toward the house, thinking.

It can be such a tough thing letting go of something that has been there through everything — rough and right — even if it’s a truck. The driver steps into the beam of the porchlight, seeing the concrete wet and shining.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he thinks. “But not today.”

Editor’s note: Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.

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