HAUNTED BY WATERS

I had a dream, once, of a stream I knew only by name.

Photo by Matt Reilly

    Given the statistic in hours I spend regularly pouring over, scrutinizing every faint, squiggly blue line of even hopeful consequence, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Its very form—its tributaries and bends—gave way to brown trout of beastly proportions, chasing streamers meant for the likes of them. The best part was…no one else knew about it.

    In my waking hours I put more logic to the illusion. The flow in question is a tributary to a wild trout stream heavily fished in Virginia. It’s long and runs a hollow elevated more than a half-mile above sea level. It’s stocked in a short, half-mile portion, and I had reason to believe that the water downstream, leading all the way to its mouth, remains cold year-round. All of these elements are indicators of a potentially great wild trout stream.

    So I put boots on the ground. I spent a rainy fall afternoon plying its dark corners with a meaty fly. One with enough seduction and substance to persuade the kind of fish I was after, the kind of fish I had dreamed about.

    As such fishing is, the action was slow, until, about halfway through the morning, I saw a dark, trailing figure explode on my fly as I was pulling it from the water to make another cast. There was no good hookset. No real contact. And so the fish was lost to the raindrop-stippled depths and the wondering, hopeful realm of my mind that manifests itself physically, actually, sparingly.

    But I wasn’t fuming. I didn’t smack the water in disgust. As any fisherman knows, a brush with a beast is encouraging, bordering on infectious. What was an ambitious hope was realized as a more-than-possible reality.

    But was it the only fish? Were there more shouldered wild trout cruising the creek of my personal discovery? Was it a fluke? A river has many faces. A single trip is not sufficient in defining a river. So, what, in fact, had I found?

    I’ve known and had tremendous success on other rivers like this. Rivers few others fish, but hold many fish, trophy fish, regardless.

    One such water I fished for the first time at an average streamflow, on a bluebird day in early October. Local lore fills the runs and bottomless pools with trophy brown trout—the largest brown trout, it’s sometimes said, in the state of Tennessee. I never believed it, not based on my own experiences angling it, which could be counted on a single hand. But the rumors persist, and flames don’t burn in the absence of fuel.

    Four months after my orientation on said river, a window of opportunity arose. A thick layer of snow fell in early February and covered the valley irrigated by the river. Runoff brought the river’s flow up several feet. A few days after it began to recede, I had a free afternoon.

    Figuring high, falling water would be the time for any monster brown trout in the river to show their faces, I packed my biggest stick and fly box and headed for the stretch of river I knew best. I had never caught more than a handful of average-sized fish there, but the roiling current gave me hope.

    The second cast of the afternoon roused anger in a foot-long brown, which hammered a brown Woolly Bugger swung against a hemlock-lined bank.

    In the next pool, I met the rumors. She was holding perfectly in dead-still water, affected by a limestone protrusion several feet from the near bank, nose pointed into a ripping run. When I set the hook, not much moved for several seconds. Then she surged upstream, and then down, creating long, deep pulses in my fly rod. I couldn’t chase her downstream, and when she was finally tired, I lost her to the ripping current and a hole worn in her mouth by the hook.

    The next day I returned looking for the rumor I had lost. She was nowhere to be found, but, from a deep pool, I managed to pull a half dozen wild browns over 12 inches, along with several smaller ones.

    The following day, I caught, and saw, nothing.

    On this cold, windy February afternoon, there’s little to think about but the fish I haven’t caught, and the rivers I haven’t known.  I spend hours studying my maps, guessing at the potentials of various rivers and streams. I think about the places I have fished, once, maybe twice, and what they have to offer that I haven’t seen. I think about those secrets out there, waiting to be discovered, and the ones I may never get to. And when night comes, my eyes don’t close.

    I am haunted by waters.□

*Originally published in The Rural Virginian

RIVERS I WON'T WRITE

I hate calling fly shops. It takes a remarkable quantity of suppression to overcome my do-it-yourselfing nature and query a local expert for directions to success on foreign water that they’ve come about the hard way. And yes I know that’s what they’re there for.

Photo by Matt Reilly.

    The bulk of it is that my transient identity as a writer makes the dilemma all that much worse. I regularly set people straight on my life’s priorities—I’m an outdoor writer, which means I’m an outdoorsman first, a writer second. I’ve expended a substantial number of days--relative to my age--putting boots on the ground; finding the out-of-the-way, hidden spots that fish all the better for it; putting people on fish; and going out of my way to make sure those special places remain little more than carefully-crafted vignettes reserved for close conversation. What this more or less boils down to is that I have a darn-near medical aversion to shedding light on secrets, on pieces of this beautiful Earth somehow not already run over by human meddling, and to stepping on the feet of those locals who appreciate those spots on a regular basis or make their living revealing them to others in confidence.

    But, until I make the professional leap into the pool of the latter type of individual, who I have profound respect for, I resort to making money off of words and photographs of waters. A little ironic, isn’t it?

    I have a formula.

    This summer, the destinations I’ve chosen to write about are the furthest things from secrets I could find without writing the article another writer wrote for last month’s edition. The prime locations require a good deal of footwork to access, with the hopes that those willing to invest sweat are the kind to respect and protect the resource. However, though there may be plenty of existing information, I’m almost as allergic to writing about places I haven’t experienced thoroughly as I am giving away secrets. So, I spend my working days on the water taking photographs, flipping over rocks, fishing, and taking notes on said water, and my after/off hours fishing the places nearby that don’t have established fishing pressure and that I won’t tell you about.

    So yesterday I called the fly shop. With more than ten miles of water, not including tributaries, to check out in four days, I needed a logical place I could start with some kind of confidence. I talked to the young guy on the other end of the line like I knew him, because, at least as a fly shop worker, I did.

    “Don’t tell me any secrets, but do you have any suggestions as to good water on the…?”

    The question’s prefix is a formality. Having worked in a fly shop, I can say with confidence that you don’t give away any kind of true secret to a customer unless you’re on a first-name basis with their entire living family and attended some of their late relatives’ funerals. But you have your good information that a customer can tank to the bank and finish the day with fish-slimy hands. The young guy responded in such a way.

    The positive thing about out-of-town and first-time-on-this-piece fishing pressurers is that they live the tourist effect. You know the kind. Like how Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello may be the most popular spot in all of Charlottesville, but as locals, we have our own favorite haunts. What’s more, tourists sometimes randomly happen upon local gems that even some locals didn’t know about. It’s a real grab-bag, and there’s notable room for varying first impressions that either will, or won’t draw them back.

    And so it is with rivers and fishing them for the first time, and reporting on them, as I do. One day spent on a piece of water hardly serves as an accurate representation of a fishery. In the absence of streamflow gauges, you can’t precisely discern normal flow, water clarity, or temperature, and you surely don’t know where the best fish are, but you’ll go to Monticello until you realize you can get more Charlottesville elsewhere.

    So I invest as many days as I can to get a picture of the fishery for myself (however accurate it may be), and use that picture to qualify the opinions of local experts, guides, fly shop workers. There is no room for dishonesty in journalism.

    Thus, in fishing, I resort to cherry-picking, running-and-gunning, and pausing to put my time in where I think I should. That is, for now, and you may read about those rivers. But this time tomorrow I’ll be getting off an unnamed creek I spied on my way back to camp yesterday, with a head full of stories from rivers I won’t write.□

*Originally published in the Rural Virginian

A CELEBRATION OF RIVERS: THE PASSAGE OF TIME

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.

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.

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