At a stoplight in the suburbs of Minneapolis, a glance in the side-view mirror shows oily black smoke pouring from under the truck bed. It collects and seems to solidify between the tailgate and the front of the trailer like a dark specter waiting for the right moment to pounce and possibly, quite possibly, steal away the joy and checkbooks of all those it touches.
We’ve been on the road for eight months, we have four more to go to complete our Big Year Fly Fishing trip — a self-designed and self-supported trip around the United States fishing for every major game fish that can be caught on a fly rod. At this point we’ve fished for bull trout, rainbows, browns, steelhead, Lahontan cutthroat while standing on ladders at the infamous Pyramid Lake, redfish, sea trout, barracuda, bone fish, tarpon, sharks, large and small mouth bass and host of other species. Minneapolis was a short stopover on our way up to Hayward, Wisconsin where we planned to spend three weeks fishing for muskie before heading to New England for the false albacore run. As Gus, our 15-month-old son, wails to be let down from his car seat and the traffic begins to pile up behind us, the smoke threatens to derail those plans.
We started having problems with the truck, a 13-year-old Ford F350, in Wyoming when we’d taken it in to a local mechanic for some regular maintenance and he suggested the rear wheel bearings needed to be replaced and repacked. The job was botched, and we’d been forced to take the truck into three other mechanics along our route hoping for a fix. What should have been a relatively straightforward, couple hundred dollar job had turned into an almost $1200 headache that had me questioning whether we should just end the trip, sell everything to the highest bidder, and fly back to Colorado to start unpacking our storage unit and regular life.