Freighter View Farms | Chris Izworski

There is a particular week in late April when I stop being a gardener and become a fisherman again. The onion trays are still under the lights in the basement. The pepper seedlings, started back in early March, have their first true leaves and are leaning toward the fluorescent tubes with a patience I admire. The garden can wait. The Rifle River cannot.

Every spring, before I make the drive north, I read Hemingway. Not all of him — just the Nick Adams fishing chapters. “Big Two-Hearted River,” in both parts, which closes In Our Time with a quietness that took me years to understand. Nick stepping off the train at Seney, the town burned to the ground, walking through the country to find the river. Making camp the right way. Cooking carefully. Waking early. The river holding him in that cold, clear grip that trout rivers have — the kind that slows everything down to the present moment and nothing else. I have read those two chapters more times than I can count. I still read them every April. It is, for me, the beginning of trout season as much as the last Saturday of the month is.

The Rifle River in Early Season

The Rifle is not the AuSable. Fly fishermen will tell you this, and they are not wrong. The AuSable has the Holy Waters between Grayling and Mio, has the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon, has a mythology that goes back to the turn of the last century and the men who decided this was the river worth protecting. The Rifle is quieter. It runs through Roscommon County in the northern lower peninsula, a clear-water river over a gravel and sand bottom, with the kind of bends and undercut banks that a brown trout considers prime real estate. I have fished it for years and have never once had the sense that anyone was watching me or judging my cast. That is worth something.

In early season the water is cold enough to ache through waders. The hardwoods are just beginning to show color — that particular pale green of fresh leaves, translucent in the morning light, the kind that exists for about two weeks before it deepens and you stop noticing it. The hatches are sparse. The fish are not yet thinking about the surface. I work the deep cuts and the pools below fallen logs, with streamers mostly, letting the current do half the work. Some mornings I catch several. Some mornings I stand in the river for four hours and touch nothing, and that is also fine. Nick Adams understood this. The fishing is the frame; being in the river is the painting.

The AuSable and the Thing About Brown Trout

The AuSable I fish later in the season, when the Hendricksons and Sulphurs are coming off and a dry fly fished properly becomes a possibility. The Holy Waters stretch is catch-and-release, flies only, and the fish in it are old and educated and deeply suspicious of anything that does not look precisely right. I have had brown trout in that river follow my fly for twenty feet and then turn away at the last moment with what I can only describe as contempt. They are beautiful fish — golden flanks, black and red spots, a jaw that hooks on the largest males like something from a different age — and they are difficult in the way that rewarding things tend to be difficult.

There is a chapter in the Nick Adams stories, “The End of Something,” that is ostensibly about a boy and a girl on Horton Bay but is actually about loss — the mill gone, the town gone, the thing that made a place itself slipping away before you could name it. I think about that story on the AuSable sometimes. The river is still here. The fish are still here, managed carefully by the DNR and the Anglers of the Au Sable. But some of what Hemingway fished for — the isolation, the sense of having the river to yourself, the world before it got loud — that is harder to find. You can still find it in the early morning, before the canoes come through. Or on the Rifle, where the mythology has not yet arrived to crowd the water.

The Ritual of Getting There

I leave Bay City before light. The drive north on US-23 takes just over an hour, and I time it so I am rigging up on the bank as the sky goes from gray to pale. I bring coffee in a thermos, a sandwich, and less gear than I used to. I have shed the impulse to carry every contingency. A few boxes of flies. Two or three rod setups — a four-weight for the smaller streams, a six-weight for the AuSable when I want to throw something bigger. Waders and boots that have been wet so many times the rubber has softened in exactly the right places.

On the drive I sometimes read a few pages of Hemingway aloud to myself in the dark car, which is either a reasonable literary practice or evidence that I have been alone too long with my habits. Nick packing his rucksack. Nick making the fire. Nick watching the trout in the cold water at the edge of the bank, holding in the current, “keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins.” That line. Every April, that line. It is as close to a prayer as I have in trout season.

When I am back home, the pepper seedlings are waiting under their lights, the broccolini has germinated, the onion trays need thinning. The garden reclaims me within a day. But for a week each April, the river has me — and I am glad, every time, to be taken.

If you fish the Rifle or the AuSable, or have a river of your own that means this particular thing to you, I would be glad to hear about it. Some waters earn a loyalty that is hard to explain to people who have not felt it. The stories from those rivers are part of the season too.

For Zone 6a planting timing that governs the garden I leave behind each spring, the Zone 6a planting calendar at chrisizworski.com is the reference I return to. And for more from the garden and the bay, Freighter View Farms is where I write about all of it.

For more on the fish that define these waters — the browns, the steelhead, the walleye in the bay — the Great Lakes fish guide at chrisizworski.com has the full picture of the species and the fisheries.

The rivers I fish drain eventually into Lake Huron, and Lake Huron connects north to the Superior basin that Hemingway wrote from. If you have been thinking about making the full circuit — the Lake Superior shoreline is one of the great drives in the Midwest, and the Lake Superior Circle Tour guide at chrisizworski.com covers the full route.

The river-by-river detail is in the guides at chrisizworski.com: the Michigan trout fishing guide covers all the major Lower Peninsula rivers in full; the AuSable River guide goes deep on the Holy Waters, hatches, and access by bridge; and the Rifle River guide covers the water I fish every April in detail — brook trout in the upper reaches, the best brown trout pools below Selkirk, and the comparison between the Rifle and the AuSable that I have been working out in my head for years.

Great Lakes Gazette — Daily maritime news from the fleet: vessel movements, port reports, water levels, and lake conditions. Built from live data every morning. Read today’s edition →

Photography by Chris Izworski — Freighter View Farms, Saginaw Bay, Bay City, Michigan.