FENCEROWS...Breath of a Trout Stream
By John Luthens
I should have been tired, but I could smell it in the air and it smelled like life. I was more awake than I’d been in a long time. The long miles into the heart of Douglas County never shrink. The fuel prices don’t either. I go because I can’t help it. It is a place where a trout stream breathes.
Eventually there may come a point where I can’t afford the drive. Oil drives the wallets of the great and powerful people. I am not one of them. The water of the stream and a truck that has seen better days are the only threads I have left. I guess when the truck dies, or when I can’t afford the gas, I’ll have to steal a horse and start heading north under the covers of darkness.
There are closer places; Lakes and rivers, all with higher fishing odds and easier access. But they wouldn’t be the place. They wouldn’t be the place where economic concerns, health insurance issues piling higher than the Washington, D.C. skyline and world politics spin onto the backburner.
This is a place where a smart phone, despite marketing strategy and unlimited access, and despite brilliant touch screen applications, just can’t seem to find signal enough to make a go of it.
This is a place to go back to the basics of life, to catch your breath, and to breathe in something else. Breathe in the essence of a trout stream that is far-removed and buried in brush tangles.
Fishing below a floating garden.
A place that gets me talking horse thievery and rambling on like a counter-culture radical is a simple place. Lay all social graces aside, put down the high-tech silverware and reach for a long and beat up pole, a simple spool of line, and a worm dangling on the end of a bare shank hook.
I’ve come for countless years. It is an annual pilgrimage that I take once a season, ever since my grandfather first dropped me off so long ago, pointed down a deer trail one morning and showed me the way to the stream, telling me to try and catch a brook trout for breakfast. I’ve moved into the mainstream of life since, cutting a living, often in the concrete jungles of city life. But in my mind, the stream never changes. It still breathes with the memories of past years.
That’s not to say the dynamics of the water remain unchanged. A trout stream such as this one can parallel life itself. Brush holes and fallen logs come and go. A heavy spring rain can cut the banks clean. A dry summer may suck the spring-fed creek down to a thin string, and in those years you can leap across it like a bounding deer. I have to go every year to see for myself, otherwise, it’s like running into a childhood friend after many years. You recognize each other, but the lost years have wrought mysterious changes.
The trout always remain. This is their environment, and a fisherman who fights his way through tight pillars of alders and high grasses of stinging nettle, and who breathes in swarms of mosquitoes to get here; that fisherman is a rare guest. That fisherman is just a blink in time passing through this place, but he will forever remember passing through.
Brook trout from a small stream in Douglas County.
The fish take some doing. Some years, they just take more doing than others. Brush-fishing forces you to breathe patience. No frantic rushing and jumping from hole to hole. Twisting snags, branches of fallen pine, thorns, and all manners of undercurrent stick monsters are waiting with spears around every bend.
If your waders don’t leak, you have never been here. There are times when you simply need to get into the stream to move further, ducking beneath the branches and squishing through the sucking sand and clay. The spring water cuts through you on the hottest of days, one slow and cold step at a time to the next impossible trout ambush.
I caught the first brook trout while spread on my belly in bog grass shot through with purple and white flowers. It flopped up onto the floating flower garden. It was a small fish that I released back into the cold run. I took several more small ones in new places and old places. The size of the fish took nothing away from the beauty.
Downstream, I poked my rod through a parting in the alders and drifted line beneath a green tunnel. The best spots are always under the overhung junk where the fish sit and laugh at you. The holes are hard enough to get into, with the real trouble starting when you hook into a fighter. I didn’t see the fish when it hit, but the dancing rod told the story.
There was no way to avoid splashing through the brush and spilling myself into the hole. The good ones will break you off in a heartbeat. I was tangled over and around three different branches above, and the fish was tangled around a good pile below. I netted the fish with my rod flung into the shadows along the bank. A fine square-tailed brook trout flopped to the wet leaves alongside. The battle was over in a hurry but the untangling process took a lot longer.
I climbed above the jungle to a pine bank to sit and collect myself. It was only one trout, but the butterfly feeling of pulling them in like that never gets old. You can’t rush it. You need to sit and compose yourself, watch the stream go by below and breathe it all in.
Only then do you realize how one small stream of water, how one rushing trout coming out to grab hold, becomes much more important-for a moment in time-than anything else the world can throw at you.
Only then can you climb back down into the current of life to see what is waiting around the next bend.