Out of touch fly fishing film full6/15/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() This is a special bag for hauling your pole. “This small fly is good for the springtime. My father talks loudly, pointing out everything in the shop. But divisions came anyway, and my brother learned to cast a fly rod while I never did I have no memory of our parents gendering my brother and I, giving him trucks and Hardy Boys books, me dolls and Little Women. We pieced together an outfit, and now I’m standing in the fishing shop wearing tight, high-wasted shorts, my mom’s Tevas, a Tigers hat, and a much-too-big shirt I found in my dad’s closet. He was happy to take me anyway, but it was clear that my urban wardrobe wouldn’t work on the river. “We actually always went in the spring,” my dad told me, and I realized that I was likely confusing my own memory with something I had read in a book. I was bored in the suburbs, and the long summer evenings and loud cicadas reminded me of when my dad would take my brother on fishing weekends. I was home visiting my parents when I decided to ask my dad if we could go fishing. I wish my hair were three-days dirty and matted to my head. Today, in this tackle shop in Northern Michigan, my hair still straight but pulled back, I feel too precious, too clean. After he’d swept away the smock, I shook it out and felt like a pony, strutting and fancy. ![]() The day before I left, my friend Ryan had blown my hair straight and dyed it blond in his hip West Loop salon. I spent the last week in Chicago, reliving my mid-20s, drinking beers at bars with Old Style beer signs out front and swimming in the cold, urban lake, the skyscrapers bobbing above me. Now it’s August, and I’m back in Michigan feeling nostalgic for my childhood. I have long since found it charming.Ī year ago, after almost three decades in Michigan and Chicago, I went east for a late-bloomer jaunt in grad school and to finally see how things felt on the mythical edges of the country. My brother and I found it mortifying as kids, melting into our seats with embarrassment. My father comments on the craftsmanship of the expansion to the man behind the counter, “Beautiful roof on that new building!” My dad is tall and loud and large, and always makes excessive small talk with the workers on the other side of a fast-food intercom or outside the car window pumping our gas. Business must be good - a second building is going up next door. The shop is built from blond-stained wood and has well-kept oak floors and handmade rockers on the front porch. It sells fishing baskets and slouchy hats, signs that say catch and release, volumes of poetry from local authors, millions of tiny hooks and feathers meant to be ordered neatly into small boxes, collected and organized taxonomically for ready response to myriad conditions. This shop does not sell florescent orange camouflage vests or mechanized crossbows. Elegant in the simplicity of its mechanism, it suggests stewardship and stalwartness. It is literary and beautiful, historic and manly. Now the tanks, the Family Dollar, and the boarded-up bow-and-arrow factory hint at the presence of another Michigan cliché - the Michigan Militia, a right-wing paramilitary group that was once rumored to be affiliated with the Oklahoma City bombing.Īs we turn off the main road into the gravel parking lot, the fishing shop stands before us in contrast to much of the rest of town. Grayling was the kind of place where you might have built the cottage. It feels ludicrous now to think that a blue-collar job could propel you so far into the middle class, particularly as we drove through the desiccated remains of the failure of that once-true promise. There was a time when the promise of the unions and the auto industry was this: You can make enough money working on the line to have a house in town, a car in the driveway, and a cottage on the lake. Michigan is a state of struggling towns, places that depend on a trickle of tourism, small farms, or a single industry. There is only one expressway that far north in Michigan, and as we approached Grayling on the two-lane highway that runs to the Upper Peninsula, tanks and camo Humvees slowed us down, too big to pass. Camp Grayling, just outside of town, is the training ground for the Michigan National Guard. We have driven three hours up the middle of the state from Lansing to Grayling, one struggling city to another. I am here with my dad, trying to finally learn to fish. The final stack of cards is for a local urologist. Each of the stacks of cards, save one, are for fishing guides, men who will take you to the good spots on the river and teach you how to cast a fly rod. In front of the cash register at the fishing shop in Grayling, Michigan, between the Trout Unlimited maps of the river and the hats that say size matters, there is a small shelf lined with business cards. Heather Radke | Longreads | June 2018 | 6,282 words (25 minutes)
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