On Droughts and Overdue Resolutions

This may be a rambling and overly personal diatribe. You've been warned. Should you proceed and find you don't much like what you're reading - well, I am sure you know what you can do.

You can go ... yourself.

Until three or four weeks ago, nearly one year had passed since I last wrote anything of substance for The Rusty Spinner. One year, and truth be told, I missed it. The Rusty Spinner is a chance for me to talk fishing with friends at those times I find myself removed from both friends and fish. Although, I suppose it could be said that even when I am separated from both the river and this blog - sometimes by distance, sometimes by responsibility - I am never very far away. My flies, ragged from too many drifts over too many miles in too many years, always tumble through the currents of my imagination. Always.

As I sit here at this keyboard, however, I find I cannot remember where I was for those twelve months, and it occurs to me that if I don't know where I've been, then there is a good chance I was lost. Is it possible to lose your way without ever realizing you've fallen off the edge of the map? How does a bug chucker safely wade the current when he's unsure of where he's been or where he may be going? I suppose we have a choice: upstream or downstream, with the flow or against it. We're fishermen, brothers of the long rod, so either way we're likely to find a place that reminds us of home. All we need do is pick a direction and go.  

Last season, I spent fewer days wading the river's currents than I did in only the spring of any of the previous twenty years. My waders were dry. My lines were dry, and so too was my imagination. Vanished was whatever enthusiasm I may once have had for throwing a light line over heavy fish - turned to vapors and evaporated in whatever personal drought I was experiencing. Could there be any pain more painful, any hell more hellish, than that of the dedicated bug chucker suffering through the desert? Good Lord, I hope not.

What then brings me back to The Rusty Spinner? I guess I've stepped back in the water, picked a direction, and experienced a renewal of sorts - both of interest and of spirit. Lately, I find myself daydreaming: brown trout and steelhead, bass and bluegill, pike, musky, and carp. I'm a little surprised to discover they're all still there, right where I left them, in the brightest and most colorful parts of my memory. I find I haven't been this fired up about fishing since I was in my twenties, and now I'm making plans - new year's resolutions of sorts. Long overdue resolutions.

First and foremost, I plan to reacquaint myself with my favorite trout stream. She was hard hit by Hurricane Irene in the summer of 2011, and in the seasons that followed, the fishing fell off considerably. I've come to understand that the storm changed her. How might she have remained untouched when in the span of just a few hours the river's flow increased from a seasonal norm of a few hundred cubic feet per second to over 40,000 cfs? Homes and businesses were lost, lives were changed, and for the most part, the river's trout do not hold in many of the the same riffles and runs they once did. I am going to find them; I know they're still there.

When good rivers go bad

This is also likely to be the year I return to Montana. She and I have been apart for far too long. I miss her, and fate - for once working in my favor - seems to be conspiring to make a reunion happen. An old friend recently left his job with the Orvis company in Vermont, and he has taken on a new position with Montana Fly Company in Columbia Falls, Montana. His move, combined with ridiculously low gas prices, makes the trip almost certain. I'll return to Montana a little older and wiser than when I left her, and I might have a few more tricks up my sleeve than I did when last I fished there. I can't imagine I'll be the first to use a spey rod and swung flies in the riffles and pools of the Yellowstone or Madison, but I'm fairly certain the club's membership is small.

Shawn Brillon, formerly of Orvis, now working for MFC

Of course, looking forward to the new season is near impossible to do without being reminded of seasons past, and for whatever reason I find myself looking back decades. When I was a boy, it simply wasn't possible for my friends and I to fish trout whenever we liked. The nearest trout stream was too far away from home for a reasonable bike ride, and our collective need to fish could hardly be sated by a few weekend trips  to the Battenkill with our fathers. As such, we spent the better part of our formative years fishing the Hudson River, which flowed through our diminutive hometown and offered opportunities to catch any number of warm water species. We caught thousands of smallmouth bass and the occasional largemouth. We caught buckets of bluegill and crappie. We caught carp, walleye, and every once in a while, one of us would tag a pike. Regardless of their size, the pike were always the trophies about which we bragged. They were just rare enough to be interesting but common enough to be a goal within the realm of possibility. They were strong. They were fast, and they were angry. They were waterborne dragons, and we were the knights with whom they did battle.

Thirty years down river and I find myself once more dreaming of these predators. I've already started skimming through the pages of a faded DeLorme Gazetteer and poring over Google Earth; I've marked some likely looking water, and I'm making plans. I'll revisit my old Hudson River haunts. I'll explore two lakes and three or more rivers. This season - with the help of friends and fellow fish bums - I'll rediscover those dragons I chased as a boy. With a little skill and load of luck, I'll stick pins in pike and mess with my first musky. Should the river gods be so gracious, I'll even find time for a few bowfin and gar. I'm giddy at the thought.

My final resolution has nothing to do with fish, but rather with my fellow fishermen. For years, I have been far too secretive and reclusive a bug chucker. I've been such a piscatorial hermit, in fact, that I have failed to cultivate friendships for fear of having to share "my" water with new friends. This is the year that changes. I am officially too old and too tired to isolate myself in some small corner of some small river. This year, people come first. I will offer the keys to the kingdom, an invitation to the inner sanctum, to several people who have until now been on the periphery of my fly flinging world. With luck, they'll realize the invitation is genuine. With luck, they'll share with me a piece of the river I love. With luck, they'll respect that resource as I do, and with luck, their taste in craft beer is only exceeded by the generosity of their natures.

On Amy's Legs and Using the Tools We Have

I hated - hated - high school chemistry. Ionic bonds bored me. Covalent bonds made me angry. I practically hulked out over Graham's law, and Dalton's law - who needs that kind of pressure? The teacher, Mr. DeMarco, was a former NCAA wrestler who was more chemistry than teacher, and at times seemed a strange amalgam of Randy "The Macho Man" Savage and Raymond "The Rain Man" Babbitt.



Most days, Mr. DeMarco had more patience for nitrification and titration than he did for any of the young people he was teaching. He was perpetually angry; at only 5'6" tall and 150 pounds he may have been short of temper because he was short of stature, but more likely he just didn't appreciate having to deal with chuckleheads like me. I enrolled in his class not out of intellectual curiosity but for wholly prurient reasons: Amy Salvadore and her legs.

Amy Salvadore was ground zero for every feverish, hormone induced, adolescent daydream I ever had. God help me, but I could stare at her legs for hours. She was an athlete: a soccer player who as a high school student played in two state championships and eventually went on to play at the college level; her legs told the story of that athletic prowess. They were magnificent - magnificent. Amy Salvadore was my Helen of Troy.

Liz Taylor as Helen of Troy ... look at those ... eyes.

Unfortunately, I never had the courage to try to convince Amy that I was the Paris to her Helen, the Antony to her Cleopatra, the Solo to her Leia. She was intimidating, aloof, and out of my league by any reasonable measure. My only solace was that while I was content to quietly fixate on her legs, Amy focused on her studies and soccer; she had no interest in the many boys that hovered around her like so many vultures circling a carcass.

From time to time, however, Amy would look up from her chemistry notebook and smile at me from across the classroom. Insecure as I was, I always looked away, embarrassed at having been caught staring. I should have thrown off my teenage cowardice and held her gaze if only for a moment. I should have returned her smile, and struck up a conversation after class. I should have been bold, swept her up in my arms, and carried her off to the locker room; I never did because I did not recognize those glances across the classroom for what they were - opportunities.

As I sit here at the keyboard, it occurs to me that writing The Rusty Spinner is a little like sitting in chemistry class and staring at Amy Salvadore's legs. Inspiration and opportunity are always just that close. Whether it's steelhead or trout, carp or bass, pike or musky - my next opportunity to write is never further away than a sloppy double haul. The trick is to recognize the moment when it comes, and be willing to take a chance. Sometimes everything comes together, I catch a few fish, and write something that may actually be worth the reading. Other times, not so much.

For the first time in over 20 years, I today found myself thinking of Amy Salvadore's legs as I stepped out of the shower and reached for the bath towel that hangs from the back of the bathroom door. Imagine my dismay at having discovered that someone - likely one of the three gremlins my wife and I spawned some seven years ago - absconded with my moisture wicking, Turkish cotton towel and left in its place a toddler's hooded body swab. More to the point, I was left to use this ...

Arghh Matey.

And there it was, my Amy Salvadore moment of inspiration: a diminutive caricature of an 18th Century pirate masquerading as a grown man's bath towel.

Bear in mind, that at 6' 3" tall and 300 pounds on the very best of days, I've quite a lot of surface area to cover. Anything less than an over-sized beach towel just isn't going to do the job very well. It's a simple matter of mathematics.

Needless to say, I didn't have many options. I could have swabbed myself with toilet paper, but the price of top shelf, double ply T.P. made that a cost prohibitive choice. I could have gone into my wife's cabinet, grabbed a handful of the cotton balls she keeps, and used that wad of cotton to dab the essential areas. The risk of chaffing made that an equally bad choice. I could have streaked from the bathroom to my bedroom, but as I've already said there were children in the house. With all I've done to mess with their minds over the years, I just couldn't bring myself to brand them with the indelible image of naked Big Daddy darting down the hallway. Wait for the air to do its job? Who has the time? Not this guy. I had no choice; it was the pirate towel or nothing.
  
Finally - after much rambling and digression - we come to the point, and the point is simply this: use the tools you have. How many times have we missed out on a moment because we weren't properly equipped? We show up to the river and discover that the hennies are done and the sulphurs have begun. Of course, we've left our box of sulphurs at home. Maybe we packed our waders but forgot to pack our wading boots. Perhaps we brought a 5# rod, but grabbed a reel mounted with a 7# line. We finally arrive riverside after a 40 minute drive, discover our mistake, and rather than take a chance we head back home, cursing our own stupidity along the way.

We've all been there - all of us - and while a toddler's pirate towel may not be the best tool for the job, it will still get the job done. Trust me. I know. I also know that hendrickson emergers and nymphs will continue to take fish during a sulphur hatch. Sneakers work every bit as well as our over-priced, sticky rubber, didymo resistant wading boots. Put a 7# line on that broomstick of a 5# rod, and you might discover you're casting better than ever before.

For my part, I'm going to chase muskies with an 8#. I've been putting off a muskie trip because I've convinced myself that I need a 10# before I go. Fly fishing companies must love that type of thinking, and it is just so much nonsense. No doubt the 10# is the better choice, but I'll get the job done with a lighter rod. As I see it, using the 8# may actually do more to improve my skills as a bug chucker and fly tyer than using what some folks might suggest is a more appropriate tool. So long as my line is in the water I've a chance, and a chance is all I really need.

If nothing else, I can say for sure that in twenty years I won't be looking back on this moment and wondering what could have been.

The World Has Turned

After a long and particularly equatorial summer (read: hot and wet), the world has finally turned. I first noticed it the other night as the kids and I sat around the fire, and I watched as they practiced the nuances of properly roasting marshmallows. Their initial attempts back in July reminded me of that most famous of scenes in Apocalypse Now when napalm erupts along the tree line behind Robert Duvall's character, Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," Kilgore remarks, "that gasoline smell ... it smelled like ... victory." When set ablaze, marshmallows are remarkably napalm-like; they burn every bit as hot, stick to everything they touch, and even smell faintly of a sort of seasonal victory.

As the weeks have progressed since those first forays into the realms of sugar and soot, I've been seeing fewer fire hazards outside the confines of the stone brazier but exponentially more golden-brown caramelized goodness. The kids are finally getting it. When blowing out the amber flame that caressed one particularly well roasted marshmallow - perhaps his best offering to date - my son turned to me and said, "Dad, summer's over ... isn't it?" He looked a little crestfallen, and I nodded.

Yes, indeed. The summer is over, and as I sit here at my keyboard I find myself revisiting all the hopes I had for the season; aspirations that for myriad reasons - usually family, unfishable river conditions or indecisiveness - went otherwise unfulfilled. Foremost among my grand plans was musky. Going into the summer, I was determined to boat at least one of those snaggle-toothed apex predators. I did my research, and discovered that New York was surprisingly rich in flourishing muskellunge fisheries. I charted each river's course, marking on maps the likely put-ins and portage sites. I gave the wiggle test to several 10 weights, and tied a slew of outsized flies. And then - in the most anti-climatic way possible - it just didn't happen. Work got in the way. Family got in the way. Weather got in the way. Life got in the way. Maybe next year (of course, it doesn't help my fragile angler ego any that near the end of August one of my friends managed his first musky ... on a trip I was invited to attend).

This was also going to be the summer that witnessed me catch over 100 carp in the months of July and August. Again, I failed, but I think my inability to catch so many fish owes more to the nature of carp fishing than it does to any distractions. It was nothing short of hubris to believe that in roughly sixty days I would sting so many. Even if I was on the water everyday and everyday the water was perfect for sight fishing - hindsight suggests that such a high figure is a little ridiculous. Carp are far too difficult to stalk, and honestly I just don't have that kind of mojo. I caught enough fish to keep me happy, but I've learned not to project my foolish expectations onto such an unpredictable and uncannily wary animal.

     

Of course, I was supposed to explore new water - places that for now will have to remain distant and aloof. The ghosts that swim the phantom currents of those rivers will remain safe from the sharpened reckoning of my fly boxes for at least another year.

And while I am sad to see another summer come and go, I have to say that I am genuinely looking forward to the change. I find I'm filled with the hopeful anticipation that only autumn can bring; my dreams are filled with oranges and reds, chromatic silvers and buttery yellows. Bass, carp, and even muskellunge have given way to kings and coho, brown trout and steelhead. Reports suggest that the salmon have begun their annual push, and the trout will shortly follow to gorge on eggs and flesh.

So if I've a lesson for my boy I suppose that it is this: do not mourn the summer. Instead son, be patient and remain hopeful. The summer has indeed passed, but there are still new places to explore. There are still fish to catch. At the change of the season there is always a silver dream to chase.