Strolling along a beach after a morning of casting
to bait-busting seatrout, the sun warms my neck and I squint into the sun sans
shades, trying hard to even out a harsh sunglasses tan. It’s hardly 9 o’ clock, and even as the wind
whips through my loose clothing, the temperature rivals that of a Virginia
summer. One thing is clear—Southwest
Florida is a far shot from Virginia in almost every aspect.
Over the past week, I have saved several such
moments in my mind. Still frames
standing and casting to fish in backcountry mangroves from my kayak; pushing over
oyster beds and through tight cuts of water miles from the big bordering city;
jumping tarpon and unhappy alligators; slicing patterns in the sky, casting to
fish amid calm blue water crowned with a fiery sunrise, fighting fog and
darkness—all are cataloged with thankfulness for the experience.
The past two months have provided me with even
more treasured memories. Memories of
gurgling Catskills trout streams at dusk, leaping salmon of magnificent
proportions, casting dry flies after dark to skinny-water brown trout in
“Pennsylvania’s Grand Canyon,” guiding a kayak through the Okefenokee Swamp
dodging alligators and cypress trees, of lifelong friends made—all leave me
humble and anxious to return.
But here I am, on the front end of Virginia’s
firearms deer season; in the middle of the trout’s fall feeding frenzy, when
the brook trout dress up in their most colorful garments and flaunt them about
the state’s most beautiful waterways, when an elderly New Yorker approaches me
on a beach and inquires about the Rapidan—undoubtedly the most well-known stream
in Shenandoah for President Hoover’s appreciation of it.
“It is a wonderful stream,” I replied. “But there are many more like it, if you’re
willing to look.”
And it was then that I began to daydream, of the
miles of wild trout streams of the Blue Ridge and of my beloved brook trout, of
the way the almost-gone leaves look on the trees and how the crisp chill in the
air brings out the fragrances of the forest and the mountains, of the humanity
and sense of closure that November cold brings to the Piedmont, when we go to
the woods and the water bundled.
With that, I found myself eager to revisit those
cherished back-home memories, all the more appreciative of the varied sporting
opportunities Virginia has to offer.
Originally published in the Rural Virginian
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