I remember meeting Enok Olson at his home at 4 a.m. on a summer day in the 1980s. We were going brook trout fishing.
I can't tell you where we went. I promised Enok I wouldn't tell. He was 89 when we fished together that day. He has long since gone to the brook trout stream in the sky. But a deal is a deal.
Brook trout anglers, a dying breed, are among the most secretive of anglers, primarily because the fish inhabit tiny streams. Populations could easily be decimated by overfishing.
I remember Enok telling me a story about another secret brookie spot of his that day.
"I fished it a lot," he said with his thick accent. "It was a really good spot."
His brother was an ardent brookie angler, too. His brother wanted Enok to take him to the spot. For a long time, perhaps years, Enok refused. His brother kept pestering him. Finally, Enok relented. The two brothers loaded their gear in Enok's car, and off they went.
"When we got dere," Enok recalled later, "my brudder says, 'Oh, I been here lots of times.' "
I got a great kick out of that story. It told me that a lot of our "secret" places may be other anglers' secret places, too. Everything's fine as long as nobody else is there when we're there.
A few of us were discussing the concept of secret spots around a campfire recently. Someone told a story about a couple of guys he knew who devised a plan to learn a friend's secret fishing lake. They decided to ply him with liquor one evening to see if he'd loosen his tongue.
The next day, my buddy asked how that had worked out. As it turned out, the liquor had worked equally well on all parties present, and his friends couldn't remember any details of the conversation the next morning.
The secret lake remained a secret.
Once, after writing a brook trout story about a remarkably successful trip to a North Shore stream, a fellow I knew who then worked for St. Louis County called me over to his office. He said he wanted to visit. I knew he was an ardent trout fisherman. When I got there, he was standing at a stack of bound topographic maps of Northeastern Minnesota.
"You don't have to tell me the stream," he said. "Just tell me when I come to the map it's on."
Most brookie anglers wouldn't be that brazen. And, no, I didn't tell him when he flipped to the right map. Then, or ever.
The late Bob Cary, an Ely outdoorsman and writer, once told me about trying find brookie waters in the Finland area. Cary was still new to the north woods at the time, having moved up from Illinois. He stopped in at the local bait shop in Finland, told the owner he was just exploring the area's trout streams and wondered if the proprietor had any good stream suggestions for him.
Well, yes, the man did. He told Cary where this particular stream crossed the road, and what Cary should do was bushwhack upstream quite a distance, where he would find some excellent pools that held nice fish.
Brimming with confidence, Cary thanked the owner and set out. For several hours, he said, he trudged upstream. All he found was a trickle of water and heavy brush. He crashed along, sure he would arrive soon at the hallowed pools. Finally, he sat down on a rock, sweaty and scratched and beaten. He realized he'd been had by the man at the bait shop.
But here is the beauty of it: Cary wasn't mad. Instead, he had nothing but respect for the bait shop owner.
"He was a real trout fisherman," Cary said.
No real trout fisherman would give up his secret spots that easily.
