Saturday stream

Tomorrow is Saturday, and I’m planning on waking before dawn, schlepping on the rain gear and heading out to the stream just across from my house. The fish here are spooky. In fact, their spookiness is legendary. The Letort Spring Run is a limestone spring-fed creek with all sorts of natives and stockies that tend to hug the underbrush of the banks and flat-out refuse to take a fly if you, your reflection or your shadow are anywhere in sight.
A buddy of mine who’s fished this stream all his life tells me that while he’ll show up in his hip waders, he doesn’t usually enter the water at all. He fishes from the bank. He’d know. Like I said, all his life, and judging from the looks of him, I’d say that’s probably around 30 years. He actually gave me three spots on the creek that he’s had some degree of success on. One right near his grandparents’ farm, one down the road from a supermarket, and the last, near and adult video store.
I’ve not been on Letort. See, I just moved to this town from about 20 miles up the road, and there was plenty of good fishing in that neck of the woods. But who can pass up a renown stream such as this, often called “the birthplace of American flyfishing?” Not me. Five-hundred yards away, the stream runs from my front door, right near an abandoned railbed, so public access shouldn’t be a problem.
It’s one of the three places Mark told me about; but I could wade up stream to the one near the grocery store.
I’ll let you know how I do, but I’m not expecting much.
Hoping, sure, but not expecting.

Hackle up

Some of the best fly-tying I’ve done has been sitting at someone else’s kitchen table the night before a journey to a new trout stream. Or in the way back of the SUV, rushing to figure out that pattern of that rust-colored caddis or bright sulfur dun.
I’m not one of those guys who packs the tying kit into his vest or even leaves it in the SUV, but I will bring it along for a long weekend of fishing, especially in places that I haven’t fished before and mostly in odd geographies.
I remember bass fishing in a series of central Florida lakes not too long ago with my father-in-law, Tom. You could kick a pebble into the lake and these ugly lunkers would eat it, but cast a dry fly above it, and for get it. They’d nuzzle it, and not liking the tickle on their noses, turn away, one by one. I’m sure if I have a hotdog or some popcorn, I’d have been all set.
The bass, however, were eating these small dragonflies, so dark blue they were black.
So that night, knowing that we’d be back fishing the next morning, we tied a couple of these things over a couple of Samuel Adams and slices of pizza. Not much too it: Take a streamer hook, spin some black muskrat onto the thing, section off the body with black thread, leave a nice long “tail” hooking up, bead the head and tie in a couple of small black mallard wings, and poof, the perfect little dragonflies.
I thought that was pretty cool. They were astonishingly lifelike creatures and sat nicely on the table.
The next day, we went back to the lake, tied on the dragonflies, but the bass had moved on and were no longer interested in the dragonflies. First of all, we were fishing in the afternoon the day before, and you couldn’t cast without almost hitting a dragonfly. But the next morning, the dragonflies were nowhere to be found.
(We ended up using some colorful dry flies, and did OK. But I have to say it was a little disappointing to not have caught a five-pounder on a home-tied and concocted dragonfly pattern.)
Then there was the time Tom and I fished the Holston River in eastern Tennessee while the snow was still dripping off the Blue Ridge. We had a load of nymphs, and it poured rain most of the time we were there. Except one night, near the Holston Dam, as we were heading in, a man who looked like an Orvis model walked out, beaming ear to ear. Most folks were getting out of the river, and we had merely come down to see what the access was like, to return the next morning.
The man clearly was happy to be back in the river after what was probably a long winter, even for eastern Tennessee. I had to ask how he did. He said great. Then he handed me a No. 20 hook with a bead of brown thread woven around it. “I caught a few monsters on this.”
I took the gift, thanked him, jumped into my waders and sprinted for the dam.
With about a half-hour of daylight left, I made a cast, felt a tug, set the hook and pulled. The tipped snapped, and the fish took off with the gift. I tried some other small nymphs, ornately tied. Nothing.
Raging against the dying of the light and Tom waiting patiently on the bank, I felt my way back to the bank and told Tom, “Let’s go tie a bunch of these tonight.”
We ate a couple of greasy cheeseburgers, headed back to the cabin, got out the beer and the kits, and tied caviar.
That night, a cold front rolled through like a hurricane, and brought with it torrential downpours. The rain was so cold, it should have been snow. It stung our faces and numbed our hands, but there we were, back on the river waist-deep, shivering and throwing copper eggs at inactive fish.
Skunked again.
Weather changes, fish change, streams rise and fall. Sometimes they ice over, sometimes they warm up. Hatches change. Sometimes they look more brown, other times more gray. You just don’t know. Fly tiers, then, have to be prepared and willing to walk out of the river, sit down on the bank or back in the way back of the SUV, and spend a half hour or hour tying the insect du jour. Not everything exists in a fly box, although I’ve seen men with libraries in their vests.
It’s easy to catch fish on your home waters, and it’s easy when a guide points you in the right direction or a buddy has done his homework. But to be truly prepared, well, that takes the ability to shift gears and hackle up.

Anticipating the season's end

Here it is, mid August, 91 degrees, a thick haze cloaks downtown Harrisburg.
And all I can think about is winter.
Am I nuts?
I’ve often written and spoke about the seasons, how they force you to uproot routine, adapt, adjust... These are good traits to have. As a Northeasterner, you’re forced deal with uncertainty. Maybe not so much as an Alaskan or New Foundlander (although, there is a definite rhythm to their lives, because the alternative isn’t merely whether you can fish on a Saturday morning in the rain or snow, but whether you might actually live to tell about it). Spontaneity doesn’t just come from a serendipitous persona or a Picabo Street upbringing (although these things are important ingredients); you have to have an open mind and your fishing gear in a pile by the door (or better – already in the back of your SUV) so that when the thunderstorm stops, the wife takes the babies shopping with your mother-in-law on a Wednesday night, or the lawnmower won’t start on a Saturday morning, you can be in your waders, on the river, with the correct pattern all in about a half-hour.
But with the changing seasons, the weather, the type of precipitation, come changes in the way you fish, the flies you use, the rivers you chose.
Then comes winter, and, for the most part, you’re replacing the rods, waders and vest in the back of the SUV with sandbags and an emergency shovel. You start thinking more about clearing off the desk, maybe moving it back under the window so that you can gaze across the road, field, mountains in between adding a band of elk hair to a caddis or tinsel to a coachmen. There’s all the hope that comes with a new season, although it may still be months away from opening day. You’ll fish: Down South, or when you feel pent up enough to venture into the frigid streams on a balmy winter day. Your fly inventory will grow, as will your skills. Most importantly, you’ll become a better fly tier and take some time to think rather than do. Meticulously plan. Take apart ever gear in each reel. Pore through catalogs for that perfect five-weight.
You’ll think back on all those little weekend jaunts or big fishing trips. Maybe even those perfect river days with a buddy or by yourself. That huge brown, that fighting rainbow. The mountains, scent of balsam, sting of cold morning that changes so sudden into a warm summer day. The blooms that weren’t that just last weekend. The school of fish that are getting smarter, bigger, stronger.
You’ll go over your favorite spot on your favorite creek and wonder how the ice, the strong spring currents and the winter storms will change it. How you’ll adapt.
It’s a seasonal meditation, and it’s something I long for.
I used to have an old sailboat. She was a beauty – a real Yankee catboat. She was eighteen feet, eight at the beam, with the most gorgeous lines. I secretly loved the comments that I would get when I passed by fellow sailors on their gargantuan yachts or folks on the dock saying how lovely she was. I knew it. I loved her, too. It’s why I acquired her in the first place. She was art on the water. Brightwork and brass.
And I loved to sail her. To feel the spray from her bow, to smell the salt and spartina on the rivers and sounds, to hear the water lapping at her hull.
But as much as I loved sailing her, I loved sanding and stripping the boat each spring, varnishing the brightwork, polishing the brass, painting the hull, oiling the teak. Setting her slowly in the water, and she’d reflect hard.
See, the planning, the preparation, the purchasing of the right materials. Spending time on the craftsmanship of it. Improving her. Anticipating what she’d look like when the last of the bootstripe was painted on, when the great white sail was hoisted, when she cut the first wave under sail.
They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I believe this of just about anything we do. Sure, you don’t want that absence to be so long that you forget; but just long enough to allow you to appreciate what you’re missing. It’s a good discipline, and it translates well into fly fishing.
So, sure, it’s mid August, and the rivers are warm and the evening hatches are abundant. But there’s anticipation for the end of the season, and the beginning of a new one.

Puzzle pieces

I’ve mentioned a couple things about my fishing or personal ticks a time or two, but it really takes going back through a year of one’s own notes to pluck out the really consistent ones – those that, if you were popular enough to whatever group, when mocking you, they’d personify these traits.
I’ve had reporters in my newsrooms do or say “Chrisisms:” Rubbing their foreheads with two hands while pretending to edit a particularly grueling story; saying, “Here’s the thing,” as they pretend to enlighten a reporter or just stand there with their hands in their pockets aloof, as if they’re a million miles away.
You get the idea.
But back to that list of ticks. And mind you, I’m not complaining.
I like to fish alone, generally. This way, there’s no one to perch upstream of me, no one to tell me when to go home (or the converse of that), no one to think I’m nuts for wanting to wade up the river a couple of miles or camp in a den of rattlesnakes.
Then again, there’s no one to carry me out of the woods after a rattlesnake bite or to cut off my waders when they’re filling up with water… I realize this, so I tend to be more conservative out there alone.
The second tick is that I tend to not be conservative enough out there. Oh, sure, I carry a first-aid kit, don’t go chasing bear cubs or throw rocks at copperheads, but I have an odd broken compass somewhere in my mind that always seems to point “through there,” or “just up over that ridge” or, worse, “just across that deep part there.”
I’m 43 and relatively healthy. I haven’t been bitten, attacked, mulled, shot at (well, once, but that was on a mountain bike in a farmer’s field in deer season), or drowned. I have two small boys and a lovely wife, and although my life insurance payments are current, I have no plans to not enjoy a long life with them.
I’m a bit antisocial. If there are 70 miles of river, and the first 10 are shoulder-to-shoulder, I’m going to hike or drive up to find the place that I don’t see signs of people or modern life for that matter. I don’t want to see another fly rod – or worse, a bait caster – upstream, don’t want to hear road noise, if there’s a power line, I’m out of there, and God forbid if there is a No Trespassing sign.
I know this: I need therapy.
But that’s exactly why I’m out here. The wilderness of it all, a simpler time (with the cushion of knowing modern life -- which include snake-bite units at the local hospitals, Dunkin’Donuts, a warm, dry bed – is about an hour from the trout stream) is what I’m after. That and trout, and both being equal to present the result of the perfect fishing spot.
I also prefer to listen to Gordon Lightfoot or some other sort of folky old music on the way to the stream – or nothing at all. I’ve been known to drive 1,000 miles at a time without so much as looking down at the radio or thinking about popping in a CD. I couldn’t tell you what’s in my CD deck right now. That doesn’t mean I don’t like music; it’s just that I relish silence. Like to hear the wind with the windows down, feel the rush of air, even if it’s cold, blowing against my face or elbow. I like my mind to wander over mountains, above the pines, over the ridges and out to that perfect 70-foot-wide river, just below the bend, where the silt’s built up on the near bank, and under the shade of the far bank, trout sit hungry, waiting for food to come downstream or fall from the rushes above.
It’s a selfish thing, I realize, but when putting oneself in nature, you want 100 percent on that connection.
As I’ve also mentioned, I have two boys, and I can’t wait for them to be old enough to join me streamside. I don’t know what it is, but I picture the three of us loading up the truck early on a Saturday morning, driving just long enough to be “out there,” and watching with pride as my two boys reel in the big ones much better and more skilled than their dad. What the heck, I don’t think I’ll even need to fish again. I might just sit on the bank and watch them as I make a pot of coffee or snap pictures.
And then there are the occasional fishing buddies (and I hope they’ve read this far. I fear they may not call me again). Jerry, Tom, Bob, Ian, BJ, to name a few. Folks I’ve come to enjoy fishing with over time, and have left me with a trove of great memories.
There was the time Ian got stuck in mud on a South Carolina riverbank, and I thought we’d have to call the fire department to run a line across the plough mug to pull him out (we were remote, so it would have been a very long line…). Or the time Bob and I had to be heli-rescued by the Coast Guard as the skiff’s engine refused to budge and the cold, February afternoon tides were lapping at us. That also was in South Carolina. There was the day Tom and I stood for hours waist-deep in a frigid east Tennessee river in a downpour worthy of the apocalypse with not so much as a snag. There was the great hurricane week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina with Jerry, Ian and BJ, when we cast five-ounce British Sinkers and five ounces of mullet on thirty-pound test straight into a full gale.
Mind you, they weren’t all bad times – in fact, they were great. But, by and large, I had a hand in it. It was I who dragged Ian through the treacherous river banks. I who said we should leave the boat in the water rather than pulling it up on the bank (although it was Bob who left the key in the “on” position), I who said early March fishing in Tennessee would be warm enough, I who said, “screw it, let’s fish,” as the sand ripped at our clothing and stung our faces.
And maybe that’s another reason, or the whole reason, I venture off solo. Not that I mind taking grief for dragging people along on my hellish rides; that I feel guilty for doing so.
I apologize an awful lot to fishing buddies: “Sorry I dragged you through that muck; Sorry we walked all that way; Sorry I cast to your fish…”
And I’ve been doing it forever. This is the part of the story where I place blame, and it’s not at the hands of my parents. Well, my dad had an “adventurous” spirit, so it’s somewhat genetic. But it was probably my cousins, Cory and Stephen.
See, growing up, it’s not that we fished a whole lot together. But we got in trouble a lot together, and it was simply because: A. We were boys; and B. We had a lot to prove to ourselves and, mostly, each other. Stephen could climb trees higher than squirrels or ants. He’d get up so high, the tree would sway. Cory would climb down 200-foot waterfalls just to prove he was tougher than we were. I’d devise a cockamamie idea to traverse a busy two-lane road by running a rope from the top of one tree to the midsection of another across the way. Fortunately, we were busted before we could set sail…
These things tend to shape your personality, especially at such a young and impressionable age. And I realize, too, that one day, my boys are going to be padding over a small waterfalls, riding an ice slab down a half-frozen river, figuring out how to remove the expensive lure from a four-and-a-half-foot-long shark’s mouth or wondering if it’s safer to lie down flat on the ground or sprint the mile or two out of the woods to the car during the freak and powerful lightning storm (I vote run -- even in waders).
I wonder – and hope – whether they’ll want to fish with me.
But for some reason, and for all of that, my friends still want to fish with me, so maybe my kids will, too. Or maybe they’ll just feel sorry for me. Or maybe they go it’s because they know I’ll let them drink Mountain Dew and eat chocolate-chip pancakes for the breakfast that I’ll buy them, just as my dad did when I was a boy.
Jerry is one of my oldest friends, and he’s my newest fishing buddy. We were roommates in college a couple of times, and whenever we are sitting around a campfire, driving to a river, or retying tippets on the bank, I remember just how similar we are. That’s what brought me to being his roommate in the first place, thinking, “he’s kinda like the brother I never had” (without being too mushy). What I mean is that it’s like we grew up together. We had similar opinions of things, strong opinions, even. We understood the beauty of utility (although he recently bought an Audi that whenever we go fishing he regrets doing), we see through bullshit, although through different lenses: He’s a cop, I’m a journalist (and you’d think that would be a cat-dog thing, but we have a mutual respect for each other’s public service or gluttony for punishment), and, most importantly, we’re strong family guys with an enormous appetite, love and respect for the outdoors.
Which is why, while rifling through back roads between Coburn and Mifflintown, Pennsylvania as we sought the perfect – well, any good unposted – spot on Penn’s Creek, we drove a little slower as the clouds draped the Poe and Paddy ridges of the Alleghenies, took the foot off the gas pedal when we drove through a field of pre-dusk fireflies – thousands of them at chest-level, as if we were going through the time warp scene in the original “Star Wars.” Sitting around the campfire with a few ice-cold Newcastles, listening to the croakers on the pond. Staring up at the sharp ridge towering 1,000 feet straight up from Penn’s Creek, like the hand of a sundial blocking out the sun.
There were no fish that weekend. Too hot, perhaps, too something. The local fly shop owner was stumped. He told us there were something like 30,000 trout per square mile of river, square foot. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t have mattered. They weren’t interested in the array of flies I brought or bought at the shop, the array of presentations, the yellow pale morning duns landing on the water or the sulfurs hatching on the near bank.
I can’t say that it didn’t matter – it always matters. Catching fish is nothing short of opening presents under the Christmas tree. So despite all the festive lights, the snowfall, the fire in the fireplace, or the scent of fresh pastries wafting from the oven, getting a new Orvis reel is always a treat.
So is catching a brown in unfamiliar waters.
The other quality the Jerry and I share, even though we’ve never talked about it and I’m only assuming this: Fishing buddies shouldn’t be obtrusive. It’s like when someone’s trying to talk to you when you’re reading a good book or write a blog post.
I sound like a hermit, I know. The whole Man v. Nature thing is different. The rules aren’t the same. There are laws. Or maybe there aren’t, and shouldn’t be; just respect.
Respect or the peace and tranquility, for the connection. Despite all our wires and fast-food coursing through our veins, we’re as organic as the next oak or bullfrog.
So maybe they’re not really ticks at all, just, I don’t know, particles connecting like a missing puzzle piece.
You step off the bank and into the river, and the picture becomes complete.