When I was 15 (before I had a driver’s license and a cute blonde girlfriend wearing my class ring on a chain around her neck), I used to ride my black English racer several miles over to the Little Munoscong River, which is in the easternmost extreme of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The "Little M" empties into Munoscong Bay of the St. Mary’s River, which connects Lakes Superior and Huron. Munoscong is an Ojibwa (Chippewa/Anishabe) word that means something like “place of the reeds.”

The meandering upper reaches of the Little M back then had a sand and gravel bottom and relatively clear tea-colored water, lots of fallen logs, a few rocks, high banks overgrown with tag alder and ironwood thickets, deer runs, bear trails with hairy curls of ursine scat, and the scent of pines and hemlock.

There were trout in the Little M, but in those days I had no inkling that there were different kinds of trout. What I knew was that when I crept along the tangled banks, I saw smoky ghosts finning gracefully in the edges of the current, and I wanted nothing more than to feel the rod bend to their fight. I had no idea that there were things called waders or fly rods, or that water temperature and alkalinity affected the fish. I knew only that I never saw another fisherman along my stretch of the Little M and that the graceful, smoke-colored shadows below were all mine.
I rarely caught fish at the start of my self-education, but this wasn’t really an issue. All that mattered was the chance to try. In any event, I almost always saw the fish, usually behind rocks or in little scallops in the sand under sweepers and jams.

Once I saw and counted more than two dozen 7- and 8-inch trout near a nice dark hole. They were suspended on the edges of the deeper water, shallow, finning in the bright sun, all of them facing upstream like charcoal-gray torpedoes. I spent an entire afternoon trying to inveigle a strike and got only a half-baked sunburn, which in its own right was an unusual feat at that latitude. This see-em good, no-catch-em pattern has often repeated itself since that day, but now, as then, not catching fish is still not a deterrent to spending a few hours in or near the moving water.
The Little M was my trouting school, and I was its faculty and class of one. The lessons were hard learned, but enduring.

Through trout fishing, I came to understand the true meaning of trial and error and more than a little about how to actually see and understand what I saw, which is maybe the hardest thing any human ever has to learn in any context. Most of us tend to see only what we want to see. I learned not to repeat my mistakes, to stay focused on the job and to persist no matter what happened. You can probably learn these same things in classrooms, but seldom with the same dramatic impact and never with the same scenery.

My most vivid memory of School Along the Little M is still with me. I had spotted a single fish at the tail of a small run and was dapping a spoon into a small opening in the foliage. By then, I had done a fair amount of experimentation and had learned to let the spoon flutter down the drop-offs like a maple wing to where the fish were, but this one had a good spot just beyond my drop-and-dap range. So I found a good thick cedar that angled out over the creak bed, balanced my chest against it, and made a sort of swinging, underhanded, circus move under the trunk while I watched the lure’s arc increase.

When I got the arc I wanted, I let the cast go, waited for the spoon to sink, and started slowly reeling with my arms still girdling the tree and the rod and reel underneath. The strike surprised me because I could still see the targeted fish finning quietly where I had first seen it. When I jerked the rod tip, the fish jerked back and charged upstream. I knew right off that this was not one of my usual small fish, and I pulled hard to bring him back so that I could slide down one side or the other of my tree. But just as the fish turned and started back, it did a sharp one-eighty, and I had to throw myself firmly and chest-first against the tree trunk for purchase. That was when I felt a pain in my chest like I had never before experienced. I let loose a blood-curdling yelp.

If this story was being told by one of the men or women of the August Anglers Roundtable, you would no doubt hear how they ignored their pain and concentrated on reeling in the fish. What I did was fling the rod away and pitch myself backward, away from the pain.

To no avail.

From a cushion of tag alders, I gingerly examined my left pectoral (I had them back then) and saw fresh blood from two of the three points of the treble hook on one of my spare spoons. Jamming myself against the tree had impaled me on my spares, which I always carried loose in my shirt pocket. I had hooked me and hooked me good, pushing the hook points deep into my flesh. The blood was warm and sticky. Bluebottle flies buzzed in anticipation of a summer snack.

I needed the hook out, which meant I had to look at the wound, and I was not sure I wanted to do that. Had anybody ever died of a treble hook to the heart? Did I dare go home with my hook in my chest when my mom didn’t know I had gone off alone to fish? Not a capital idea. I used my pocketknife to slit the shirt; once I got the wound exposed, I simply ripped the hooks loose and got in the cold water to cool the damage. My chest hurt far less than my pride.

Having gotten into the stream, it was relatively easy to retrieve my rod. The Daredevle was still connected, and the flopping fish long gone, but it reoccurred to me that since I was in the water and already wet, there was no point in getting out. I found that, down in the stream, I could see better and there was a lot more room to cast, so I resumed fishing upstream.

I don’t remember the story I concocted to cover the torn shirt, and I don’t think there was any unusual fuss over it, but I recall that day because there is a faded little scar as a reminder, and it sat clear in my mind then, as it does now, that I had taken a not-so-great moment and turned it into something positive. The implications beyond fishing were evident even then.

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This nature essay is an excerpt from Joseph Heywood’s novel, “Covered Waters: Diary of a Nomadic Trouter."