. Whatever patterns I take are stuck on my hat, a couple spools of tippet, and my small net. I don’t worry about running out anymore. I don’t think it’s that I’ve become such a proficient angler that I never lose flies in trees or break off fish, because I still do those things frequently enough to say I’m still fairly good at them. I do it because it’s just simpler, not carrying all the extra crap with me on a creek.
I stood at the Jeep, a fly box on the hood opened up displaying my tools to the fishing gods while I struggled to tie on a size 16 scud. A red squirrel sat on a rotten limb leaning against the base of a tree, watching me with indifference as it rolled something over and over in its paws, gnawing away feverishly and filling its cheeks. If the truth was told, we were probably both in the same frame of mind. Better get this done now while we still can. A forty-five degree day in December is nothing to take for granted. I rig up a fly rod. The squirrels search out and store away more food. We all have our priorities.
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.
I knew I only had one larger streamer in my fly box, so I moved my hands slowly up to my chest pack and began the task of snipping off the crayfish pattern and tying on the five inch streamer tied entirely of flash. No deer air. No Hackles. No marabou or even fake craft fur from the craft store. Nothing but flash. A black back, a blue mid-section, and a silver belly. I made a short cast just above it and out in the current, and as it sunk it passed the fish on the bottom at about its eleven o’clock. The fish turned to face it and stare it down like a top predator does. I gave a twitch.
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.
I was pretty sure my brother had caught a couple certified pigs from this stretch a couple years ago, or at least this general area. He’d shown me pictures, huge twenty-plus inch fat browns, and assured me he’d released them, but never did come clean as to where he actually was. Just somewhere on the creek, and my suspicions told me somewhere around here, simply because he was living and working close by at the time. Of course, I wouldn’t have put it past him to rent a house and get a job close to a specific part of the creek just to throw everyone off as to where he was fishing. Nope, I wouldn’t put it past him at all. I never pressured him for the spot and he never volunteered it.
As the wind rattles the windows of my writing room I sit here and consider possibilities. That downstream on the creek, closer to its mouth where it enters the Mohawk, where the banks are all ten feet tall and cut out of the sand of the Oriskany Flats, that there, the wind is most likely screaming by over the tops of the trees, easily sixty feet, far above where the loops of my line would take shape. Or that standing below the face of Delta Dam, where the top of the dam and the rim of earth and trees surrounding me would be an easy hundred-plus feet above me, that there as I could usually find it, it would be calm enough to the cast the fly rod. A bubble for anglers to practice their art inside of on some of the windiest days. As I sit and search my memories for other places that could work on a day like today the house shakes for a second like a train traveling over an old trestle and leaves pass the windows at a high rate of speed, making it look as though for a few seconds the house is moving at a good clip. Holly speaks up from the living room as if reading my mind, there’s no way you could go fishing in this.
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