michigan river rude Fishing?

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Remember last April, when Field & Stream Magazine’s Kirk Deeter said in a blog post that Michigan is the top state in the country for fly-fishing? And how we all called our friends and relatives in Montana and Colorado and New York, and asked them how it felt to be such a loser?



Well, Michigan landed on another Deeter list yesterday, but don’t reach for the phone just yet.



This time the blogger compiled what he calls the rudest trout rivers in America. And ranking way higher than we Michiganders might like–second only to the famous Henry’s Fork of the Snake River in Idaho–was our own Pere Marquette River.



Before I’d given the list a careful read, I took that to mean that visitors to the P.M. are likely to encounter anglers swearing at each other, ruining others’ fishing and throwing beer cans at canoeists.



Balderdash! Blasphemy! Surely Deeter isn’t disparaging the plainspoken, hard-working, god-fearing fisherfolk of the Great Lake State!



No, as a closer look at the list reveals, he isn’t. Deeter’s talking about the rivers themselves, not the people who fish them. He points to the P.M.’s fly-stealing stumps and its unpredictable insect hatches as evidence of the river’s rudeness.



As he puts it, “some rivers don’t give a rip who you are, where you’re from, how good you are, or what you paid to get there.”



Now that sounds like the Michigan I know and love, and I’ll take this as another compliment. I might even call my out-of-state friends to tell them I don’t give a rip who they are.