Fencerows: “Steely Rites of Spring”
By John Luthens
Another spring season glistens along the steelhead runs of Wisconsin.
Spring wades gingerly up the steelhead backbones of Wisconsin’s Great Lakes tributaries. She is a temperamental lady and it is a chancy effort. The sun might push the thermometer to 70 degrees inland, but water rushes cold and the shoreline winds are raw. Clouds rush in heavy and low, cracking open like rotten Easter eggs to deliver stinging rain. It could still snow, but damn I hope not.
For me, the spring steelhead run is like opening day in baseball. New hope stretches into the coming glow of summer and anything seems possible. No river is too deep to wade, no fish too full of fighting vinegar to land. Spring steel-heading is a singing mermaid daring me to crash inland through the lake shore rocks.
I prepare religiously, knotting leaders heavy enough to winch a monster truck out of a frost boil and tying egg flies for the anticipated run with the careful wraps of a needlework craftsman. I test each one for proper balance, inhaling the splendor of waterproof nail polish on the threads, tasting the yarn and rubber eggs on the hook and willing them into actual spawn sacs. I remember picking night crawlers for opening trout day with the same fevered pitch. So what if I tasted the worms? I never ate paste in grade school. Everyone has their own private hang-ups.
Regardless of preparation, timing and chance play instrumental parts in steelhead fishing, as they do in every outdoor chase. There are windows – October and November for chasing the big bucks in the crazy time, April and May for the strutting gobblers. If one could disappear into the fields and stream – living within the land and watching the exact swing of nature’s pendulum – then one would never be a week too early or a week too late.
The windswept reaches of late March and the early splashes of April are about right. Clouds and rain are ideal, but busy schedules and busy lives have a way of trumping the weather reports. No matter. A wise fisherman from the trout reaches of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula once put it this way: “The best time to go fishing is when you can get away.” The solemn runs of my steelhead kingdom fit that proverb perfectly.
This year wasn’t much different. I fussed over gear for hours at a crack, missing the early run because of work obligations. By the time I finally waded out, the sun was shining and the breeze smelled like budding trees and flowers. I trekked into the springtime tributaries anyway, limbering up my casting arm and hardening my wading legs into knots of muscle-spasm steel. I got away.
I held heart-to-heart conversations with birds and deer along the stream ways and saw the first wildflowers blooming above the banks. I smelled the heady breezes of springtime and felt alive. I spent a heartwarming moment of comradeship with a group of other anglers who’d struck steelhead gold a scant week previous. They claimed the run was about over. I nodded wisely and sympathetically. When they rounded the next bend and were well out of hearing distance, I jealously cursed them for living beneath the shadowed currents of nature’s pendulum. Two bright days of steelhead splendor, and I failed to strike a single fish.
Steelhead fishing is preparation and timing, but it is also perseverance. It finally paid off in the gurgling shadows of a steep valley on the final night The wind switched and the sky grew ominous There was a splash of rain on the water...then a splash from the tail of a rocky pool…then an actual tail rose out of the pool.
I kneeled in the shallows as the entire run exploded with rolling silver, snapping off my first fly on a steelhead that that resembled a crimson-spotted log in the gloom. I tried for a smaller log with the same result. The fish took a leap that spanned half the stream. Snarled line and leader flew into the brush.
It looked as if a school of whales were romping in the wavelets of a kiddy pool. Fish after fish broke off. Slowly, the sinking realization set in that the run was too fast and shallow. There was no room in the rocky glide to play a fish out. Hook a slab of rolling thunder and let it boom around in a wave-pool riffle. I would have had trouble holding those monsters with a harpoon and a rope.
Darkness and rain helped me climb the valley banks to close another chapter in my endless book of steelhead dreams. I could have returned the next morning. Maybe I could have landed one. Likely, they would have drifted back into the rocky shadows and back down to the waiting expanse of the lake. I’d witnessed another year of nature’s magic. That was the most important thing.
Steelhead fishing is a rite of spring. It’s man versus fish, but it’s also man versus the endless tide of the seasons. When I can no longer trek the steelhead runs of another year, bury me quickly with my wading boots on and move on to the next pool, because the fish will keep moving. I’ll leave you my fly rod in my last will and testament, but you’ll need to find your own egg flies. I’m fresh out.
John Luthens is a freelance writer from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com or by contacting the author at Luthens@hotmail.com