Obsession
By John Luthens
Insects hummed above the greening banks and the lush smells of spring were blooming across the water when a brown trout first rose to a caddis fly in a northern river valley. He surfaced with a predators force, and nothing was left behind after he went back down but a snapped fly and the start of an obsession.
Wisconsin hides untold thousands of trout in its endless miles of water, but this one was different. Along a darkened seam beneath a bank of overhung grass that fateful spring morning, a single trout got into my head, and it came to pass that I spent the season stalking it.
A trout surfaces for a summer of obsession.
I began to chase my brown phantom for a handful of rain-soaked days in June. Currents overflowed into the aspen flats along the banks and thunder bounced from the ridge-top pines. Not even a muskrat could have squeezed between the river and the top of the old stone bridge a mile below the run.
The trout sucked frogs in the flooded grass and mist while I tried not to drown. I rolled him a single time from his nest when he rose for a half-hearted look at buck tail streamer. We watched each other across the flooded river in the glare of the lightning strikes. It was enough of a glimpse to keep feeding the obsession.
Seen through the heart-pounding lens of splashing water, it was difficult to put a value on the trout’s proportions. He was fat through the belly, his sides golden, with telltale spots like crimson pennies sparkling from gills to tail. He might have gone 14 inches, or he could have been 20. Physical measurements have surprisingly little bearing when it comes to the fins of obsession. Wily and wary, he wasn’t in any hurry to swim off for greener lies down the river. Neither was I.
Reinforcements landed in the river valley come July. A friend came to visit, a deep sea fishing guide who’d worked charter boats off the Mexican coast since he was a youngster. He’d never been to Wisconsin, and never fly-fished for trout, but he’d grown up trolling the ocean depths for monster fish and he was well-versed in the patient art of the chase. I was convinced that last thing my brown trout would be expecting was a professional ringer. I led my ship captain through the deadfall pines to the river and showed him to the bank. Moby Dick was as good as mine.
Boat captain Kalum Figy, of San Diego, plies the Wisconsin waters for rising trout.
We caught trout. Indeed, we might have landed more fish than two fishermen deserve in a lifetime of angling: Brooks, browns and rainbows; dry flies and wet flies and spinners. We cast through it all. My sea-faring friend immediately took to the trout game – was, in fact – as obsessed by it as I was. For five straight days we were up before dawn and returning wet and muddy through the alder brush in pitch darkness.
Our waders became so leaky and waterlogged that we took to smashing through the river in shorts and tennis shoes. We covered miles of water, never failing to end up the day casting over a particular run beneath a particular, grassy bank. By the end of the week we were sunburned, bug-bitten and reeking of trout and insect repellant. Unfortunately, the main target of our obsessive quest had declined to add his scent to the expedition.
We surprised him several times with small, dry flies dropped like flakes of dandruff above his lair, and he was on for a good half-minute on one of the go-rounds. The current wasn’t overly strong, and there were no log jams to tangle our leaders. The brown simply leapt high and shook our flies with practiced ease. When we finally called a halt to our blur of fly-fishing frenzy and waded our separate ways, it was a cold, hard truth that my brown trout had pinned the art of acrobatic escape down to a science.
I frittered away August mending leaders and shoring up the mundane businesses of life which a single trout had thrown into such chaotic disrepair over the past months. I pictured my nemesis thrashing alone in his river fortress, while I, myself, thrashed restlessly beneath the covers at night with visions of brown spots dancing on the bedroom ceiling.
I was fidgety and nervous, but not because I was worried that my brown would be captured by another angling adventurer in my absence. The path into the banked hidey hole was unmarked and hidden, only reached by scaling a rundown wooden fence on the edge of an abandoned homestead and following a rough deer trail through bog and mire. A canoe fisherman might be able to forge in, but the run was unassuming enough to be passed over in the single stroke of a paddle. I was fidgety and nervous because the season was drawing to a close. There would only be time enough for one more fling.
The last sunlight of September sparkled through the pines and danced along the river as I arrived for my last stand. My son made the journey down the valley behind me with the camera gear. There were no insects on the water, only the first aspen leaves of autumn curling down the run. I waded to my waist to get into position as I’d done countless times before. I resigned myself before the first cast to the reality that I wasn’t going to catch my fish. The best I could hope for was to roll some film to remember the season and learn from the folly of my obsession.
Plucking a fly from my box at random, I tied on a black creation with a long tail and fluffy hackle along the shoulder – one of those flies that defy logical representation of any insect above or below the water. I didn’t remember where it had come from. It didn’t matter. The water seemed dead. We’d get our photos and be back to the cabin before dinner.
One cast…two casts…the fly floated just below the surface and blended with the floating leaves. It swung below to tread the gentlest wake along the bank. Click went the camera, and the water erupted. It surprised me so much that I didn’t have time to set the hook. The brown came up and down in such a rush that he hooked himself.
He failed to spit the hook on the first leap, and was still firmly on the end of my leader after the second. He pulled into the current, trying to get back beneath the safety of the grassy bank that had been his home for the summer. I turned him back. I knew his tricks. I was on intimate terms with every rock and stick on the bottom. The bank hole had served as my home for the summer, too.
The elusive brown finally surrenders to the shallows after a season-long chase.
I’ve netted bigger fish, but this one was different. This trout was an obsession that had eluded me for an entire season. Maybe he knew the summer was closing around us and wanted to make amends. He was a beautiful, native brown trout just shy of 17 inches. Perhaps he had simply waited to get his portrait taken.
I could have eaten him. That might have been a fitting end. Instead, I let him swim away; figuring that the river and my imagination would likely be better served having one more trout in it to obsess about in the coming winter. It really has nothing to do with the end result, anyway. The murky truth about the waters of obsession – they never end.
John Luthens is a freelance, outdoor journalist 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