I’m back in the shop today after a week in Michigan, our annual spring break destination. Most people tend to migrate to the warmer regions of the globe for spring break but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Sure it was grey and cold and dreary for the majority of the time we were there but I’ll trade sunshine and hot weather any day for the once a year opportunity to reconnect with friends and family back HOME.

You Can Never Go Home Again!

We’ve all heard it said many times that you can’t go home and there’s nothing like a homecoming to prove the point. In some respects you really can’t go home but it doesn’t take long to discover that home is not so much a place as it is our existence in that place. It’s the collective of the people, the relationships and the experiences we’ve had in some geographic location. Take away those things and you are left with a physical place upon which our existence, or lack thereof makes not a shred of difference.

Places consist of landscapes and structures to which we may grow very attached but the reality is these things in and of themselves are not our homes and once we leave them behind the only connections we have with them are the ones in our minds. We are the essential component of the thing we call HOME.

Most of my trips back to Michigan over these past several years have been an emotional roller coaster, a case study in existential angst. There are places we’ve returned to because it seemed like the right thing to do only to find that these places held no special magic. After repeated attempts with the same results I concluded this time around that it’s ok to close the book on some of those chapters.

Thankfully there is still plenty of HOME left. Family and friends  (and rivers) still remain and we will return time and again to experience HOME in new ways, creating new memories and riding the waves of emotion. It’s fun to be there and hard to leave and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So this is home in 2017…

A Huge Thank You to Mike Batcke at Stealthcraft Boats for the use of a boat on my beloved Pere Marquette River and as always a big thanks to Brad Turner aka The PM Angler for sacrificing a day of income to row me down the river.

It feels great to be back in Montana and despite my assertion that landscapes have no hold on us the mountains and rivers   have been calling  for as long as I can remember and while I cherish EVERYTHING that makes up my collective home, there is no place I’ve been  that feels as much like home as this.

Now back to fishing the MO’.  Up to date fishing report coming very soon.