The Perils of Wading to the Greener Grass

This article originally appeared as the Seasonable Angler column of the February 2002 issue of Fly Fisherman.

---

Over the years I've tried to put together in my mind a general formula for what makes a great angler, but the ingredients vary so much from situation to situation that I've never been able to put together even a vague set of guidelines. Usually, a good angler is someone with the skills that come with lots of practice and study, like good casting techniques or a sharp eye for aquatic bugs. In rare situations, though, an expert angler turns out to be someone with the skills that you simply can't enhance by looking at magazines and reading books.

In Key West, Florida, I've seen all the fish and excitement go to the person who was best able to function in the face of a vicious hangover. But even this skill–which is valuable and hard-earned–is nothing compared to what I consider to be the most unsung tool in an expert fisherman's bag of tricks: being able to keep your feet in a fast current.

Wading. In the drought-stricken trick­ les of the American West it's barely an issue. There, a wading hazard is a place where you might have to suffer through getting the hem of your shorts wet. But in the rain-swollen, half-frozen steelhead and salmon rivers of Michigan, an angler is made or broken by how well he can scoot around in the water. The really bad stretches of river garnish fishing with the possibility of injury or death, the same aesthetic touches that have made the so-called extreme sports so popular lately.

It's a weird sensation to pull up to a fishing spot and have your immediate attention occupied by fear instead of fish, but you can't shake the reality that a fisherman or two drowns every year in Michigan from botched ferrying attempts. But say you desperately want to get up to a stretch of the White River known locally as the A-Frame, and when you park next to Taylor Bridge at a little joint that sells worms, beer, and gasoline, you notice two things: The river's running at near flood level, and the guy on the right bank who enforces his no trespassing rule with violent rigidity is outside splitting stove wood. The left bank is fenced well into the water, and the reason you can't see that landowner is because he's probably sitting up in a tree with a crossbow, ambushing streambank trespassers.

You've come too damn far by now to turn around, so you plan a route. You'll have to climb in below the bridge, plow through the muck that accumulates around every bridge abutment in the world, then struggle upstream through a torrent that licks the tops of your waders in order to bypass a hole that's about a mile deep. Then you can cross over on a gravel bar and use some tag alders as handholds to pull yourself up on a piece of shelf ice so you can crawl over that nasty cutbank where an old maple tipped over. From there you can pretty easily avoid the deep places by doing what the Sioux refer to as ichi-pa­sisi, a very cool word meaning to travel along a river by crossing back and forth, like stitching. You hike up your neoprene waders, finding some psychological encouragement in the realization that the material is suggestive of an aquatic mammal's hide, rubbery and tight and buoyant, like a sea lion. It's only a half mile to the A-Frame.

Whatever causes a person to brave the more treacherous waters is probably the same grass-is-greener thinking that led the first Asiatic nomads across the Bering land bridge. My older brother, Matt, is an Olympic-class, school-of-hard­knocks kind of a wader (this has much to do with the fact that he's tall, broad­shouldered, and dense with muscle), and he can stand with the constitution of a bridge support in water that would float my skinny ass away like a dropped fly box. So he's usually the one that scouts new wading paths for our group of friends.

Several years ago he pioneered a wading route that could put you way out from shore in the gigantic rapids of the Saint Mary's River between Michigan and Ontario. Due to the deep, sucking currents and slick rocks, anglers stand shoulder to shoulder on the bank like a police line-up, taking casts at spawning fish that are so wised up from all the pressure that they actually move out of the way of passing flies. But by crossing out near International Bridge and going down a ways, then out more, then up a little, then back in a ways and down, we were able to get to some virgin spawning reds where pink salmon were literally stacked on top of each other. We were all very proud of this route and guarded it like some cryptic secret even though hundreds of people every year would see us use it. We weren't nearly as excited about the fish as we were about achieving the isolation from crowds that usually only comes with a very expensive plane ticket.

I try to categorize the wading hazards in terms of natural and man-made, but in Michigan that's not an easy thing to do. For instance, the salmon are introduced, which most people consider unnatural. But the rocks in the Saint Mary's get so slick in the fall because the dying salmon give a massive nutrient load that causes super-slippery algae to grow on the rocks, which seems to me like a very natural occurrence. Deep, fast water is natural. However, the Saint Mary's rapids owes much of its ferocity to the containment walls that tighten it like a thumb over a hose and make it so there are no shallow places where anglers can feel comfortable standing in the water. The containment walls are due to the locks and diversions on the river, which were built to facilitate mineral extraction, namely iron ore and copper.

That's an interesting thing about the wading hazards in Michigan: they actually give lessons about the state's history and cultural atmosphere. In the Muskegon, White, Pine, and Rogue Rivers, and in Cedar Creek, you just might snag a boot on loggers' cables and chains, or trip over pilings, or slip on one of the many slimy logs that sunk along its float route to the mills during the wholesale raping of the state's white pine forests that occurred over a hundred years ago. Then there's all the washed-out fencing that originally served no other purpose than to keep people out. Now, underwater a mile downstream, it's still trying to work.

Sixth Street Dam, on the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, has some of the scariest waters I've ever been in. Instead of wading across gravel and rocks you have to negotiate an underwater archipelago of wobbling concrete slabs pierced through and through with rusted lengths of reinforcement rod left over from old construction and demolition projects. The rods themselves are wrapped with miles of 20-pound Spider Wire, a favorite line of snaggers that doesn't deteriorate over time like normal monofilament. Add to this a scattering of discarded bicycles and a sunken washing machine and the ice flows that survive the fall from the reservoir and you can begin to appreciate why it's a rare angler who fishes the middle of this river. Somewhere out in there is a reel of mine, busted off the reel seat as I floundered for footing through a hole after slipping from my perch on a concrete slab. My stocking hat, also lost, possibly made it all the way to Lake Michigan, some 60 miles downstream.

But all the punctured waders, lost gear, and wet clothes can become, in one of those great and instant moments, totally worthwhile. I'm reminded of one day that I spent fishing steelhead below the power house and dam on the Manistique River in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. On my way out to a good piece of water I took a digger in a deep and fast channel, swamping my waders. I dried off as best as I could on a rock. Then I had a great day of fishing, but I could hardly enjoy it with the thought of crossing that channel again. Eventually it started getting dark and I had to do it. I hooked my finger through the gill of a male steelhead that I'd killed, waded to the edge of the run, and just kind of jumped in, with the fish floating next to me. Somehow, getting pushed downstream while bouncing forward with my extended toes to keep the top of my waders above water, I made it to the other side, totally dry. Back at my car, another fisherman commented to me that it's just good to get out here. I replied that it's also good to get back.

---

Steven Rinella is the host of the long-running television show MeatEater and MeatEater podcast. He is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books dealing with wildlife, hunting, fishing, and wild game cooking. He is the recipient of the Conservation Achievement Award from The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

---