John Pepin

Running, running, running, across the snow in a blue tint haze. Disappearing through a soft snowdrift to duck behind an aged hemlock trunk, I am searching for seclusion and deliverance.

I hear a branch snap and twist my head around fast.

I see nothing.

I listen intently for a few moments but hear nothing more.

Perhaps it’s just another traveler working his way home, like me, across this vast and unrelenting landscape.

If that’s what the sound was, I wonder if he too might have crossed the thin ice floes rolling atop the moving river or slid headfirst down the graveled sidewall of the canyon to the valley below.

Or maybe it was merely a specter, fluttering ghostly, caught in this world like a firefly trapped in a lemonade jug.

I’d have no idea how to help him get home. I wouldn’t know where to start beyond opening the lid on the top of the jug.

Though I see my breath before my face, the temperature seems too warm to create that effect. There is no music. The drumbeat I hear is my heart pounding, out of time.

I hear a crackling too, like there is a seam ripping in the scene I see before me.

The record skips and I slide forward.

I lean back against the tree and stare skyward. The sheltering branches above spread wide and help block the snow. My panting begins to slow, and my chest stops heaving.

I begin to relax and soon after that, I drift off into a deep and profound sleep with no dreams, only darkness, dead silence and stillness.

I awaken to loud squeals and splotches of noise, like someone tuning a radio with a lot of static and the signal only sporadically being picked up seems to come from somewhere far away.

It seems decidedly foreign to me somehow. Maybe even alien.

There have been whispers I’ve heard as I’ve walked, ran and crawled through these many days, weeks and months. Some of the messages sounded like tapes spun backwards with devil messages – terrible utterances from horrific scenes.

Like the Beatles white album.

Remember?

Turn me on, dead man.

Other notes have been sweet and uplifting, soft as a summertime afternoon down by the waterline, waves gently rolling over the tops of my feet.

There have been messengers too, like the black crows guiding my passage, snarling wolves and other wild dogs and it’s safe to say I’ve heard the siren’s song more than once.

There have also been warblers – black-throated greens and blues and parulas, too – arriving to sing their sweet songs just when I thought my heart was about to splatter into tough, meaty chunks.

The moon moves across the sky, reflecting light from the sun visible to us here in this fumbling and reaching world below.

So, it seems things have been for me during the past year.

The end of one year and the turn into another always seems like some strange magic trick that doesn’t make sense entirely. You’re leaving everything behind, but then you are starting over with everything you had.

I like the hopefulness that comes with a new year, kind of like a new day, a new school year, a new anything. It brings an inherent promise that things will somehow be better now and last so indefinitely.

I think that’s why a lot of people make New Year’s resolutions. The beginning of a new year with a clean slate seems so irresistible.

I often like to take notice of how long it takes until the new year seems like the last year and the year before that – not including the dreaded coronavirus time warp epoch.

For me anyway, it isn’t usually very long.

But I think, for some reason, this new year will be different.

If for no other reason, it may be that the numerals for the New Year’s Eve date read 123123 – like maybe it’s some kind of magic number or something.

On the other hand, if you add 1-2-3 twice in separate equations, you get 6-6- which is two-thirds of the way to 6-6-6, the mark of the beast, according to the Farmers’ Almanac, page 14.

Just kidding.

There have been some very rewarding days this past year and some real crummy ones, too. There have also been a good number of mediocre days packed in between gray clouds, ice-cold afternoons and times when we ran out of pie.

All those days add up to a typical year, which is likely what the year ahead will be like too, eventually.

At this time of the season, all kinds of publications put out Top 10 lists for the past year. I would not like to be the guy on the news desk trying to put together a Top 10 or even a Top 3 list of events of 2023 – especially triumphant ones.

The events this past year were so terrible I could barely watch the news, but I needed to because I wanted to keep up on what was happening.

It was like I couldn’t look away, but needed to, but couldn’t.

At some point, I decided that knowing and remaining informed was better than not knowing. I am certain some of the things I saw, heard and found out about dented or collapsed my psyche.

Among the best things I did this past year, from an outdoors perspective, was an afternoon on the water at Sault Ste. Marie on the boat tour of the Soo Locks. It was great fun to do something I hadn’t done since I was a little kid.

There is a lot to do in that part of the region and I know I’ll be back soon.

There was a trout fishing outing with my brother when we both brought home limit catches of delicious brook trout. That was a wonderful day.

I had a similar trip a couple of weeks later with my trout fishing buddy, the Coaster King, where we also both caught our limit, haunting them small creeks.

There were some fun outings over the Thanksgiving holiday with my brother and my sister-in-law visiting Fayette State Historic Park, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore and the secluded shores of Silver Lake in Marquette County.

But the top outdoor “event” for me in 2023, which occurred over back-to-back days in November – one cold, the other snowy – was shooting photos and video for the Upper Peninsula stocking of Arctic grayling to lakes in Alger and Houghton counties.

In 1993, after I first moved back to Michigan from California, I began fishing soon afterward. One of the places I went to was Ackerman Lake, located alongside M-94 in Alger County.

I was fishing for brown trout in the lake. I had walked beyond a well-used boating access site, along a muddy and grown-over angler’s path, to the far side of the lake.

Wearing waders, I walked out on big, long half-submerged tree trunks that had fallen into the water from the surrounding hardwood forest.

I caught a fish that night on a silver spinner that swam differently on the way in than I had expected. It looked different in the water, too.

When I got it to where I could reach it to pull it out of the water, I could clearly see by the large combed dorsal fin that this was an Arctic grayling.

This lake was one of the few places grayling were still living in those days, a result of prior attempts to restock the species in Michigan waters.

About a half hour or so later, I caught another one.

I released them both and caught a nice brown trout to bring home.

Being able to be part of this new release effort was very special. At the second release site, the DNR fisheries crew on the outing let me empty a couple of dip nets full of grayling into the chilly waters.

It was fantastic.

So, I won’t likely spend much more time dwelling on the past year, except to try to gather a few other good things from other parts of my life.

Beyond that, I’m ready to dust the mud off my boots, throw my poncho and canteen over my shoulders and press on.

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.