“Here’s the key to your room, but the doors aren’t locked, and you don’t need to lock it either.”
That’s not the usual advice you get when you check into a hotel or motel, but Rusty Gates wasn’t the usual motel operator. Calvin (Rusty) Gates operated the Gates Au Sable Lodge for many years, a combination fly shop, motel and restaurant on the banks of the Au Sable River in northern Michigan. But then Rusty Gates was an unusual person.
I met Rusty when my friend, Charley Storms of Evansville, Indiana, and I got together for a week of fishing after last summer’s outdoor writers conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Charley had stayed at the lodge previously, and considered it an achievement to get a reservation during the late June “Hex hatch,” the annual emergence of giant mayflies synonymous with the Au Sable River.
Rusty Gates was also synonymous with the Au Sable River. He grew up fishing on the river. In 1970, his father, Cal, Sr., quit his job as a high school band director to buy the lodge, then called the Canoe Inn. Young Rusty turned the river into his vocation, tying flies and guiding, then taking over the business when his father died in 1983.
Rusty was a moving force in a campaign to establish ‘catch and release’ rules on a stretch of the main stem of the Au Sable River, a piece of river often called, “The Holy Water.” It was an issue that was divisive, to say the least. Various chapters of Trout Unlimited took diametrically opposed positions on the issue. Rusty formed a new organization, Anglers of the Au Sable, and served as its president for many years, eventually winning increased support of the no-kill policy. His new organization took on other issues, such as oil and gas exploration, chemical pollution, and a major expansion in nearby Camp Grayling, Michigan’s National Guard training camp.
For those efforts, Fly Rod & Reel magazine named Rusty Gates as its “Angler of the Year,” for 1995.
Meeting Rusty behind the counter of his fly shop was an opportunity to meet a living legend of flyfishing. Unfortunately, Rusty was involved in another struggle at the time. While he didn’t talk about it unless asked, he was going through treatment for lung cancer, making regular trips to a cancer treatment facility in Chicago. When he did talk about it, it was with a note of confidence—he was the veteran of many battles and didn’t intend to lose this one.
Rusty lost that fight, at age 54, on December 19, 2009.
Tributes to Gates include this from Eric Sharp of the Detroit Free Press: “If you want to experience Rusty Gates’ legacy, drive this winter to the Mason Tract on the South Branch of the Au Sable River and snowshoe or ski through the snowy, hushed woods to the banks of one of the least despoiled streams in Michigan.
“Listen to the wind sighing through the pines, the occasional soft ‘plop’ of a clump of snow falling from a high branch…Then listen to what you don’t hear. Drink in the silence when the wind dies…and absorb a solitude than can be experienced in few places in a state with 10 million people…And know that the reason you won’t hear the ‘tunk, tunk, tunk’ of an oil well or smell its rotten-egg odor is largely because of Calvin Gates Jr., a valiant defender of the Au Sable River system…”
Tom Rosenbauer, an author and marketing director for the Orvis Company said, “Of all the strong conservationists in our world, Rusty was one of the toughest. He was tireless, and he was like a missile in his precision and deadly accuracy. Yet he never, ever, wanted credit for anything—just for the various groups he worked with, especially the Anglers of the Au Sable.”
Glen Sheppard, an editor of a Michigan conservation newspaper wrote, “Rusty proved that people don’t fill their gas tank to fill their fry pan. They put on their waders to nourish their soul.”
Requiescat in pace, Rusty. And don’t worry about having to ask St. Peter for a key.
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