In a moment—a flash in time—a decision was made. A portion
of the cobblestone streambed broke free, sprouted fiery wings, and, in a
twinkling second of serendipity, broke the water’s surface and engulfed the
disheveled form of an olive-bodied Elk Hair Caddis that had fallen out of my
vice the night before.
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| Photo by Matt Reilly. |
I look back on that moment often, never embellished, but as
it happened on a favorite, medium-sized native brook trout stream in the Blue
Ridge Mountains. The water was running low and slow through a thick August
afternoon in Virginia. I could not have been older than 13, but a devoted and
starry-eyed fly tyer and fishermen thrilled to have taken my first fish on a
self-tied fly.
I have since (as I would advise all to do) made many more
new memories on this favorite stream—casted to familiar rocks and plunge pools,
and even found familiar fish in homey haunts. But as they say, “a man never
steps into the same river twice,” for he is a changed man for the experience;
and I never did.
Rivers change, too—constantly. High water and flood events,
and even the daily coursing of normal water flows, alter the streambed—moving
gravel, debris, stones, and sweepers. Bedrock and boulders are eroded. The
Grand Canyon itself is the life’s work of the once-strong Colorado River. It is
the nature of flowing water.
When I look back upon that treasured memory, I can vividly
recall the physical geography and divine design of the pool where it occurred. It
sits at the foot of a steep bank, just a small pebble’s throw from a cobblestone
trail. An oak tree towers over the pool’s middle, its sprawling roots creating
an undercut bank that sits three feet above the water’s regular height—a
product of springs, rainfall, and runoff.
The pool begins as many do in the Appalachians, with two
stones that split a current into four seams—the first of which runs along the
steep bank, while the other splits the pool long-ways. The two run a good
distance—maybe 20 feet—before converging in the tail and spilling over into the
next. It is best approached across from the steep bank, on a gravel bar
inhabited by sycamore saplings and mountain daisies.
That image stays fresh in my mind because the scene is
revisited at least once every year, and while the rocks and the bank and the
oak and sycamore trees are all still in their place--as I am when I return--the
river is, alas, different. The water that grazed the flanks of that five-inch
brook trout when it rose to my poorly-presented fly, and that swirled around my
ankles as I released it, was fleeting.
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| Photo by Matt Reilly. |
In a flick of the trout’s tail, the river water escaped with
the moment, downstream, to mix with warmer water and brine, and flush the gills
of smallmouth and striped bass and mackerel, leaving its gentle impression
wherever it roamed.
The impression it left on me is romantic, inspiring, and
all-consuming. It inspired a musing that found its way with words, which
eventually served as a springboard for a writing career and a growing passion
for fly fishing that have together carted me all over the East Coast in search
of a similar high.
Today, I have been blessed to have fished a variety of
waters in locations near and far, including many places I call “home,” where I
often share the passing of time--and the riffles, runs, and eddies about my
feet—with the riverbed and cobble stones. And while I continue to spout words
of fish and rivers and wildernesses, the river has etched its own words into
the rocks as part of the continuation of the story of creation and nature.
For that very reason, one of the places I have visited on
this ongoing adventure, the Catskills Fly Fishing Center in the Catskills
Forest of New York, features a path paved with stones from visitors’ home
waters as a celebration of such journeys through water and time; for all of us
that have known the romantic relationship with rivers and fish have a story to
tell much like this one.
This summer, one of the stones from that favorite stream of
mine in the Blue Ridge made its way into the Catskills to gather with others to
tell a story. Such a story is not to be read, but comprehended through an
intimate relationship with nature. And in that it will be known that part of
that story is our own, written on our souls by the very same current patterns
that touched the rocks in a moment shared on a freestone mountain stream where
it all began.
*Originally published in the Rural Virginian
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