In 1986, I enrolled in a one-day fly fishing clinic staged by the Mershon Chapter of Trout Unlimited in Saginaw and fell in love with casting a fly. There was something about dropping a dry fly onto a moving river that intrigued me, something I never experienced while chucking a lure or a worm on a hook. I quickly purchased my first fly rod--a Fenwick five-weight--and when I was confident enough that not every one of my back casts would result in my fly dangling just out of reach in a tree, I purchased a copy of Gerth Hendrickson's Twelve Classic Trout Streams in Michigan and headed up north to explore them.
Twenty years later University of Michigan Press asked if I would be interested in updating the classic fishing guide. Gerth had died years earlier and now I was being handed his book, 300 pages of personal observations about coldwater streams, the festy nature of a wild brookies and the joys of watching a trout rise to take a well placed fly.
I never met Gerth but through his words, analyzing them one by one, I know him well. He was an avid fly angler but also a hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey who surveyed many of the great trout streams in the Lower Peninsula. Gerth was a researcher, a man of science, so he could never say the stream is two to three feet deep but always had to add a "usually" or "generally" or "most of the time" in front of such a statement. He loved wild trout, was suspicious of salmon that were introduced in the Great Lakes, and while he himself had long ago given up bait and spinners, choosing to fish only with flies, he never looked down on anybody who tossed a worm into a stream in search of a brookie.
I would explore an access site, the same one that Gerth had explored almost 30 years earlier, and marvel at the fact that so little had changed. The gravel bottom that Gerth so carefully surveyed was still there so were the muddy banks that he described in his text or the brushy alder that he warned would snag wayward flies. Most of all, the trout were still there, rising to the same afternoon hatches that Gerth experienced. There is something reassuring about that, knowing that long after I have hung up my waders for the last time others can follow and find these streams exactly as Gerth and I did. In the end I discovered it wasn't the fish that makes a trout stream a classic but being able to transcend generations.
Jim DuFresne is author of the forthcoming fully revised edition of Twelve Classic Trout Streams in Michigan: A Handbook for Fly Anglers.
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