river memories

The rivers I fish speak to me of many different things, all of which combined make up a part of my being; my most fond, and most painful, memories that always return me to the environs surrounding the moving water. The faint aroma of burning leaves takes me back to smoky campfire mornings along it's banks; the gray days of fall return lost friends to hunt with me one final time in the surrounding hills and valleys.

A week of hot, humid weather has led me to the river's edge to fish its hatch of tricos. The sun is just starting to appear over the wooded hilltops as I make my way up-stream. Unidentified perfumes fill the wet, cool air, threatening to overtake my senses. Illuminated by the early morning light, the ancient river meanders on the course it has held since the giant elk and the wooly rhinoceros wandered across Wisconsin at the end of the Pliocene, when the last of the great ice sheets retreated from the Midwest. Leaving behind a cracked and tortured landscape, broken from the great weight of the ice flows, the river valleys and coulees are the evidence we see of their passing.

I pause at a likely looking spot, a gravel bar that leads into the river to become a riffle. Transported from the far north, the stones have been tumbled and ground into the gravel and sand deposits we now find along the stream. Closer inspection will lead the lucky finder to red and gray-striped banded-iron formations from northern Minnesota, beautiful agates from Lake Superior, and even a rare amethyst crystal from the Canadian Shield. An interesting paradox of area geology: curly-cued snail impressions of Cambrian gastropods found next to Cretaceous petrified wood exposed out of Pliocene glacial deposits; each in it's turn formed millions of geological years apart from the other.

Wading across the stream stirs up sediments that at once reek of foul, secret things long dead, of sweet new life, of cold winter nights giving way to bright sunny days. Amid the raising trout, a bright green leaf falls into the current, gradually sinking to the bottom, adding itself to the nutrients already there. The leaf is rendered into the surrounding sediments by the nibblers and the shredders of the stream: mayfly nymphs, caddis larvae, scuds. These deposits in turn swirl in the current, gradually mixing their way further down the stream. Eventually the sediments make their way to a larger river, which in turn eventually reach the largest of all: truly, a river of life.

The trout continue to feed on something invisible: five steps to the right and a different angle of view reveal a golden cloud of Tricorythodes minutus, illuminated now by a shaft of early morning sunlight filtering through the trees, hovering over the surface of the water. From time to time a black-and-white female descends to the water to deposit her single green egg sack. The black male, his mission accomplished hours before, is swept as a lifeless spinner downstream.

As it happens sometimes with heavy hatches, it seems as if every fish in the stream is gorging itself on the surface. A little experimentation and a trimmed poly-winged spinner pattern is selected. In the mayhem of feeding trout, indiscriminate casting results in only a very few strikes. By picking a fish, timing it's movements, and then casting to it specifically, my success increases substantially.

On cue from one of the intangible forces, the clouds of mayflies disappear, and the trout sink back into the depths of the stream. I am left to revel in its coolness for a few last moments. Hundreds of previously unseen spider webs, heavy and dripping with dew left by the swirling morning mists, show the only traces left from the morning's frenzy. These traces, too, will shortly disappear, as the web's inhabitants make short work of the entrapped mayflies. Unseen currents in the air whip and swirl the mists above the water until finally, as the sun reaches with it's full force into the river valley, they disappear. The shrill "eeeeeeent" of a tree frog rings through the woods, and the cool, wet morning transforms within minutes into a thick, hot day as the river returns to its quiet meandering ways. (August, 2001)