Side Dish - End of Season

Sporting trips are not only about sport, as many other experiences are discovered alongside. And my trip to Lakewood Camps in Maine was certainly just that.

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Hunger pangs set in on my drive from the Portland, Maine, airport toward Lakewood Camps. While the navigation system showed the mileage was just at 100 miles, my drive time was closer to three hours than two. A lobster roll from Rocket Ron's food truck was an exciting find. A lobster roll that not only was fresh but housed in a bun full of decadence and butter, exotic to a Midwesterner, miles from the coast, cruising a two-lane somewhere near Oxford, Maine.

A stroll along the Carry Road near Lower Dam, I viewed a memorial to Carrie Stevens, obscurely hidden near the river, tucked away in the Maine woods, a tribute to the region's historical significance. Stevens, a historic fly dresser, called the Rangeley region and the Rapid River her home waters, its flows and trout the impetus for her classic streamer patterns including the Gray Ghost. Not to mention the boat ride up Lower Richardson Lake to arrive at Lakewood Camps, a Maine sporting camp since 1853. What I will remember most is the brightness of the stars in the night once the camp went dark, the colors of the autumn hardwoods throughout Maine's Rangeley district, but most of all, the color of the rivers we probed, and the fish we found. The Rapid, Magalloway and Kennebago were each distinct, and in two days, permanently etched in my mind.