Photo by Michael Delp - MyNorth.com
A story about more than just a fish truck, this essay was originally published in the March 2015 issue of Traverse, Northern Michigan’s Magazine . Traver’s was a Jeep. I suppose you can claim that the fishing author Robert Traver started the entire notion that owning a fish truck was an absolute requirement for any fly fisherman who claimed to share any trout fishing DNA with him. I fell into this weird spiral of fish truck psychosis years ago when, on a whim, I bought a 1952 Willys Overland. My wife saw me say, “I’ll take it,” and I thought she might need to be resuscitated when I retrieved the rig the next day and drove it home. I thought of myself as a fledgling fish bum … another craze you could probably attribute to Traver, or some would say John Gierach. I drove the Willys back and forth to Grayling for a couple of summers, blasting down Conner’s Flat Road on my way to a hex hatch. The Willys had no heater, per se, and the wipers ran off the engine vacuum, but the ’52 was made of quarter-inch steel, and I spent one summer attaching real wood to the sides so it would look more native. Then, my Willys became too much to bear, and I sold it to Rusty Gates, a former student in Grayling and the son of Cal Gates, then-owner of Gates Lodge on the Au Sable River. Source: mynorth.com
