A good angler doesn’t need patience. They need persistence. This is a guiding theme I've taken up, not just on the water, but in everyday life. The distinction between the two states of patience and persistence is a maxim that carries over, well beyond the river. In...
I was about thirteen when it first happened. Dad and I had fished all morning and afternoon before walking back to camp to meet my uncle. His weather-worn pop up camper sat thirty feet off a seldom used dirt road. It made us a home among the wet leaves from the...
The bank at the outside bend had briers and stiff brush at its border, and it took some time to poke my rod and leader through the maze. Tippet, forceps, nippers and more dangled from my vest and reached for the nearest branch, so I hugged them close to my chest,...
**Note** This December 2014 story is revisited here. Enjoy. I guess I was about ten years old when I started pushing past the boundaries of my parents' twelve acres of hills and trees. I easily remember the day that I walked into the damp valley and past the tiny...
I guess I’ve been searching for something . . .
For months now, I’ve spent my limited opportunities on the water fishing progressively more remote locations. Turning down offers to float and cast over abundant wild brown trout on our major rivers, I thought I was looking for solitude. What I’ve found is a companion so powerful it cannot be passed off as simple memory. It’s my own history, and I’ve felt it so presently that it seems at times my flat shadow may take form and rise from the leafy ground to start a conversation.
Rich had cancer, and it was spreading fast. We both knew this was our last trip together and that a dear friendship was coming to a close.
We fished a long morning, and eventually, I worked upstream toward my friend. From thirty yards, I could see the exhaustion in his face. Rich stood where a long riffle dumped into his favorite glassy pool. He breathed a long breath and gazed at the cloudy sky. Reeling in his line and breaking down his rod, he looked at me, and we smiled. We each knew we were at the end of something . . .
I walked around the bend and saw his blue truck, but I couldn’t see Gabe until the lean man sat up. He stretched and slid slowly off the tailgate, onto his feet and into his sandals. The climbing sun made the blue paint of his pickup bed too hot, and when the shadows were gone, the dirty fisherman’s rest was finished.
Gabe leaned back on the hot paint again and grabbed the duffel that he used for a pillow. The faded bag was stuffed with clothes: some stained, some clean, and most half-worn-out. He pulled a thin, long-sleeved shirt from the bag and changed, tossing his wet t-shirt toward a damp pile of gear by the truck tires. The long sleeves were his sunscreen; the beard protected his face; the frayed hat covered his head, and the amber sunglasses filled the gap in between.
Gabe was a trout bum. Not the shiny magazine-ad version of a trout bum either, but the true embodiment of John Geirach’s term: authentic, dirty, and dedicated to a lifestyle without even thinking much about it. He fished on his own terms. He was a part-time fishing guide for the family business and a part-time waiter. We never talked much about work, though. I just know that Gabe’s life was fishing, and everything else was a cursory, minor distraction.
As much as I try to keep things simple for myself, I’m too often lured in by the latest, greatest, next-best-thing-ever streamer pattern to come around. And I while I do believe that reasonably sized, natural streamers catch more good trout than huge streamers, I catch myself looking at a simple #8 Bugger these days and thinking, “Oh, that’s not nearly good enough.”
** Note: This February 2016 story is revised and revisited here today. Sawyer skidded the truck sideways a little and pulled the e-brake as we lurched to a stop in the fly shop parking lot. He looked at me and grinned. "Be right back," he yelled, and he jogged up the...
Winter is a quiet ghost.
When he days are dark and at their coldest, the woods are barren — void of life, save for the chickadees and a few eager squirrels. Most of the mammals hunker down in burrows, inside hollowed out trees and underneath hemlock bows. You might miss all this if you don’t slow down, find a log and just sit for a while to listen to the silence. It’s different.
The forest is a widow in the winter wind.