A long weekend in Merritt

Cold water smells like iron and cut weed. At six in the morning the Dead Stream Flooding has both, plus a lid of fog on top and the sound of your own paddle knocking the gunwale until a pike decides otherwise. This is a three-night plan for a family, built around one house in Merritt and the water, the road, and the racetrack inside a few miles of its door. Friday in, Monday out. You will not run short on daylight.

Merritt is a crossroads — M-55 meets M-66 in eastern Missaukee County, about 15 miles east of Lake City — and there is not much to it, which is the reason to stay put and let the days run slow. Here is how three of them go.

Friday: get in, eat, do nothing else

Drop the bags at the house and let the first night be the kitchen, not a restaurant. If nobody wants to cook, the Merritt Auction House Bar and Grill sits right on E Houghton Lake Road at the crossroads, a bar and a burger and walls hung with old signs and auction memorabilia. Short drive. Eat, then sleep, because the water is better before the wind finds it.

Saturday morning: the flooding

The Reedsburg Dam went in during 1940 — Civilian Conservation Corps, an earthen dike thrown up to hold back the water coming off Houghton Lake — and the reservoir behind it is the Dead Stream Flooding, a little over 1,000 acres of stumps, channels, and dark water that the DNR keeps as a wildlife area. The Muskegon River starts about six miles upstream, at the lake. What swims in it: bluegill, pumpkinseed, largemouth and smallmouth bass, yellow perch, walleye, northern pike, bowfin. The panfish keep the kids busy. The pike keep the adult with the rod honest.

Go early. The flooding is shallow, it warms through the morning, and the fish read that clock before you do. We write the water up on its own in Fishing the Dead Stream Flooding — put-ins, what the stumps will do to a prop, the good hours. Read it before you rig up.

Saturday afternoon: the drive west

Dry off and point the car somewhere. M-55 runs west to Lake City, which sits on Lake Missaukee — about 15 miles, call it twenty minutes — a town with a public beach, a boat launch, and lunch. Cadillac is farther, roughly 25 miles west, maybe 35 minutes, worth it for a real grocery run or a hardware store that stocks more than one kind of hook. Either way the road is farm country and jack pine and the odd tamarack swamp. It is the stretch of the day where the kids fall asleep in the back and nobody argues.

Saturday night: the races, if the season is on

Merritt Speedway is a quarter-mile clay oval on E Houghton Lake Road, a few miles from the crossroads toward Lake City, and it runs Saturday nights through the summer. Time trials at 6, racing around 7:30. Late models, modifieds, pro trucks, street stocks — the clay smell carries to the parking lot and the noise carries farther. Check the calendar before you count on it. The marquee nights fill the place: the Wood Tic ran July 24 and 25, an August 8 late-model special pays $2,500 to win, and the season closes on Gene Kregar Championship Night over Labor Day weekend. Small kids want ear protection. Everybody wants cash.

Sunday: slower water, then home

Sunday is for the small water and the panfish that got the kids hooked on Saturday. Fish the flooding again from a different launch, or drop a boat on one of the county lakes — Lake Missaukee, Long Lake — and take bluegill off the dock until the bucket is full. Roll back through Merritt at midday. Let the Auction House handle lunch if the kitchen is done cooking. Then it is packing, and the long afternoon light on the drive out.

The house, and when to come

This one sits close enough to the flooding that you can be on the water before the coffee cools, and close enough to the track that a good night carries to the porch. Come between late May and early September if the races matter to you. Come in June for the bluegill, when the beds are thick and a kid can catch fish faster than you can unhook them. More on the town, and the rest of what is near it, at Merritt.

Fog sits on the flooding until the sun takes it. That is the hour you drove up for. Take it.