In and Out of Place

Around noon on the last day I stood roadside and enjoyed the warm breeze, sunshine and my good fortune. During the final three hours of fishing in the heart of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, the only vehicle to pass by my location was a single Amish buggy. This was on par with the evening before when a school bus was the only sign that at least two people lived somewhere on that particular road. One of the things I love about fishing the Driftless is that the busy areas are generally not too busy and the quiet spots are really quiet.

I’ve been poking around this landscape for a little over 15 years and every visit gives me more reasons to return, even as it changes due to its own inevitable growth and popularity among anglers. Some streams I used to visit now get passed by more often than not, and my biggest test is trying to find fish that haven’t seen a dozen or more anglers during the course of the week. It’s a little more challenging but rarely disappointing.

Part of this trip also included catching up with a friend, Dan Small, one of the more interesting people I’ve come to know over the past few years. There’s probably not a corner of Wisconsin that Dan hasn’t seen, which means he always has fascinating insight and experiences to share. Not wanting to burden the life a man who seems to be in perpetual motion, I left it to him to dictate the terms of our meeting, and after proposing several different fishing opportunities, he settled on a rendezvous with another trout enthusiast, Bruce Ristow.

Tucked away into a little valley, Bruce and his wife Sue live close to the land with a Leopoldian commitment. Sitting around the kitchen table we talked about trout and turkeys, songbirds and Brittanys, common acquaintances, neonics and macro inverts, ag subsidies, and the enduring question of conservation that begins with the words: What will it take…?

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many dedicated conservationists in my life, and here quite unexpectedly, I was once again sitting with two people who enjoyed talking about their real-life commitments and experiences with the idea of putting the land and water first in the order of urgencies.

After a while we moved the conversation outside where we talked strategy, donned our waders and gathered our gear for some end-of-day field work. Mixing fishing stories and the patience of a teacher, Bruce led Dan and me through a series of beaver ponds known to hold a few fish. A new experience for me, fishing beaver ponds for brook trout with a flyrod was more of a graduate-level course, but I was accustomed to being humbled and thrilled to watch Dan shoot spinners with his ultralight as we maneuvered between ponds and beaver punji sticks. As darkness settled in, Bruce offered some parting thoughts about my options for the next day and driving directions out of the coulee. Handshakes and smiles dominated the evening’s final goodbyes.

When I stepped around the fence on my final morning of fishing I took a moment to survey and appreciate the challenge ahead. The valley was greening up fast with a single pair of Canada geese laying claim to the field, quietly watching me with unconcerned curiosity. The first couple hundred yards of the stream would be shaded by a bluff so no worries about shadows, and a couple of rises upstream told me a dry fly would be an appropriate beginning.

I don’t know who owns this land and I wonder if they fully appreciate what it is they have and how a few hours of flipping a fly over the heads of trout can cleanse a person. The water gave up a dozen or so, including a couple of brook trout. A better angler would have caught more.

On the last evening of my visit, I showered and put on clothes suitable for respectable places and ventured out for a meal prepared by someone other than Mr. and Mrs. Kwik-Trip. The view from the window of the local supper club was wide. Wide enough to see a landscape under the leaden clouds of a passing storm; hills and trees, dairy barns, silos, and farm fields blurred by rain streaming down the glass. In the background 70s country music played softly setting a sentimental mood for the supper club generation; Sammi Smith reminding everyone that yesterday is dead and gone. Wistful nostalgia achieved.

Sipping from my muddled golden-brown elixir, I recalled last year’s excursion. Remembering as I journeyed between blue lines on a map, passing a recently abandoned dairy farm. In the backyard sat a black cat staring at the back door of the farm house. A door that stopped opening. Now sitting in the middle of an unforgiving solitude, completely free, the cat would probably dispute the idea of being abandoned. However, independence can catch up with you I thought, and as I continued down the road I imagined the circumstances and demise of a family dairy farm and felt a sadness conveyed by the plain sight of an orphaned cat. An ending not befitting the farm and maybe, too, the cat. On this trip the farm was still quiet although mowed grass suggested some hope for a new beginning.

The Wisconsin Driftless Area is a place of conflicting images. For me I mostly focus on hatches and casts, catch and release, decisions - up stream or down. The organic farms and thriving communities make me smile as do the restored spring-fed trout water and a few scattered new age homesteads. But the abandoned junk and other strewn fragments of humanity mixed among bucolic valleys and tidy farms tell another story, as does the Amish culture that sometimes includes subtle exploitation masked as devotion to a simpler way of life.

A young Amish man using a kick scooter to travel to work and seeing a buggy pulling a rubber raft on a trailer down on the shoulder of four-lane highway reminds me of how hard people can work to solve problems of their own making. Finding a distributor cap in one of my favorite fishing holes reminds me that we still have a lot of work to do. In some ways it’s a microcosm of the America I love. Conservative notions, liberal leanings, youthful expressiveness, artistic freedom, traditions and modernity, progressiveness, and most importantly, a diversity amongst people and their lives. All sloshing around in the same bucket, boiled down over time like maple syrup into a sweet organic perfection.

And when I drove past the house on the hill overlooking the North Fork of the Bad Axe River, the place where I spent my first night in this imprecise paradise over 15 years ago, I am reminded how mortal dreams can turn on a dime, putting the outcome of tomorrow into question. But when I look into the eye of a trout, a sandhill crane trumpeting in the distance under the sun of a warm spring day, a few mayflies rising from the water, I can see the cathedral of Spinoza’s God and I know I am where I’m supposed to be.