...as I fished a stretch of water shed I knew pretty well. So well in fact that I felt I was giving him the wrong impression that I actually knew what I was doing. I’d tell him something like “I’m going to go crouch in those ferns and get a brookie out of that pocket behind that cropping of rocks.” Then I’d do something like just about what I said, complete with the catching of the fish on the first or second cast, and move on to the next spot. It wasn’t that I was that good, not at all. I’d just fished the hell out of the place the year leading up to this and basically knew the names and addresses of most of the brook trout on the stream. Take me to the next stream down the road and I’d have been the normal bumbling idiot tripping and stumbling on slippery river bottom stones and scratching my head as to where the fish were that I usually am.
I tied on one more streamer, the same pattern, and made a few more casts. One more time I felt the tug and saw a glimpse of a hint of butter colored brown trout. But that fish wasn’t hooked solid, something I take full blame for as who could blame a trout for not hooking itself well enough? It was a quick chance meeting, more like the time it takes two people to pass each other on a side walk, and then it was over. And then I came to the realization that my fingers stung from the heat that the cold rain had removed from them, and I left the river.
He pulled up in an old gas guzzling 1970’s something car and lifted a brown metal tackle box and a cane fishing pole out of the trunk. I don’t remember what he said, I was preoccupied with doing something in the dirt. Probably playing with some toy, a matchbox car or a Star Wars figure I can only imagine. The car was big and brown, maybe green. I can see him getting out and walking to the trunk and my father sticking his shovel into the ground and walking over to the car. They talked, I played. When Johnny left my Father brought the tackle box and fishing pole over and set them on the ground. I remember him saying that Johnny said he couldn’t fish anymore and that he’d given them to us.
The same thing played out over and over for the next half hour or so. A good cast, a good drift, a rise and inspection, and a refusal by a dumb nine inch stocked brown trout. I looked closely at the small caddis imitation between my thumb and index finger several times. Each time I thought to myself that it looked real enough to me, that it should look even better to a dumb animal, and that neither one really mattered since it was the only one I had.
The stream’s last defense was the thick alders that lined it, so thick that I doubt thorn bushes could have done much better at all to keep us out. The Lost Boys had told me no waders, you’ll destroy them in there in two minutes. I left my waders behind but questioned it of course, but now I could see, I could confirm. Pushing though the undergrowth, I felt a stinging on the back of my left calf, and then the same on my right thigh as alder branches that were intertwined better than the fibers in a rope held me back as I tried to push through. They grabbed fly rods, slashed at faces, pulled hats from heads, but in the end the will of the fly fishermen was more than they could hold back, and we stood at the water’s edge.
But this morning I came across some pictures from up on the towers, and it lead to me thinking about things that I took away from my short time in that industry. Mostly fly fishing, and a pair of old friends. In the picture I’m looking down past my boots at the featureless landscape four-hundred and fifty some odd feet below. But it wasn’t the height, and it wasn’t the memory of that specific job that made the picture special. It was my boots supporting me up on the narrow, cold steel up in the wind. They’re my wading boots.
I’ve never considered myself a sappy, emotional, or sensitive person. As a matter of fact I’m pretty sure I’ve done my best through a lot of my life to be just the opposite of those things. But alone by myself on a river or stream, I’ll admit that the water, and the fish, do bring out those qualities from somewhere inside me from time to time. That’s most likely the healing factor people talk about water having. Us fly anglers just happened to stumble upon the fact that a brightly colored fly line forming loops above the moving water happens to enhance the healing power somehow. I’m not going to try and analyze it. That’s a rabbit hole for another day. On a warm, sunny day like this, I’m happy to simply accept it for what it is, take it for granted, and enjoy it.
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