Driftwood Outdoors: Outdoors adventure brings grandpa's gear out of retirement

Derek Butler holds a northern pike caught on a wilderness trip in Ontario, Canada. (Contributed photo)
Derek Butler holds a northern pike caught on a wilderness trip in Ontario, Canada. (Contributed photo)

Grandpa's tackle box was covered with dust. Just more than 14 years have passed since he last rummaged through his life collection of lures.

Wanting to preserve his memory by not pillaging his tackle, I had placed the vintage Plano 777 on a shelf in my barn and let it be for nearly a decade. The other night, I finally broke it out as I decided to take a little bit of him with me on an upcoming wilderness adventure to Northern Ontario.

When I was kid, my grandparents took me on numerous fishing trips to the North Country. Lake Osakis in Minnesota. Nelson Lake, the Chippewa Flowage, Yellow Lake and others in Wisconsin. Little Bay de Noc in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. These destinations when you're 10, 11 and 12 might as well be the Amazon, Sahara or Patagonia. To me, these trips north took me to wild lands beyond imagination. Magnitude multiplied by youthful mentality.

My father isn't a sportsman. He was cursed in life by a lack of care for fishing. As much as I love and admire my dad, we're quite different. So after watching his life-long friend post pictures to Facebook year after year from the trip he and his son take each summer, I finally reached out to Pete and asked him to invite my dad to join on the trip.

I figured it would have weight coming from his old Army buddy, and you know what, it did. Dad asked if I wanted to go. A funny question I'm sure for those of you who regularly read this column, "Does Brandon want to floatplane into an extremely remote lake surrounded by endless wilderness to catch walleye and northern pike for a week?" Uh, yeah, I want to go.

So we're going, and I'm taking a few tokens of grandpa with me. The man who lit this fire that fuels my being bought some lures back in the '70s, '80s and '90s that are being called off the bench and put back into rotation. I figure there is no purpose to keeping so much tackle as keepsakes any longer. If I lose a few lures pursing our mutual passion, then so be it.

As I grow older, I see less and less value in stuff, learning through the hard lessons of life and time memories cannot be bought, only made.

We are driving to Red Lake, Ontario. This is where the highway ends, then taking a floatplane another 150 miles north to a remote series of lakes in a Provincial Park. We won't be too far south of Hudson Bay.

Truly, I am about as excited for the opportunity to shoot photography in the area as I am for the fishing, but I'm sure that will change the minute a double-digit northern stretches my line. I can't wait for the first bite of fresh walleye, caught, fileted and fried all within an hour.

If we catch a few lunkers, great, but what I am after more than anything is solitude. An entire week with out a single text message or email. By the time the following Saturday rolls around, I won't have heard a single phone ring.

It's been a long time since I have been so excited about a trip. Maybe I have become a little jaded by all the incredible opportunities I have to fish and hunt around the country.

I am always thankful and cognizant of my good fortune, but right now, for the next couple of weeks, I'm just a kid going fishing with his dad. A trip I have waited 38 years for has finally arrived. I'm excited to share the experience with you when I return.

See you down the trail.

III

Brandon Butler, the executive director of the Conservation Federation of Missouri, is an outdoors columnist for Central Missouri Newspapers Inc. Contact him at [email protected].