A friend recently asked me to read a piece he’s submitting to a writing contest geared towards flyfishers, and I’ve since been thinking again about why I flyfish.
There are soft memories of fishing on the coast of Georgia, standing in the surf casting for bluefish, sea trout or more likely, mullet, my dad doing the same a few feet away, chest high in the warm green Atlantic, letting ourselves push and pull over the fine sandy bottom in the pulse of the surf. That was where and how I learned to fish.
There also are the muggy afternoons swinging a bobber from a cane pole into the molasseses water of the Ogeechee on my grandparents farm, swinging the line long and parallel across the water to slot in beneath heavy low branches, down into the deep shadowed water that the bass prefer, the lowing of cows murmuring through the heat, pecan trees that ran wild to the river’s edge. Up in the branches were cottonmouths sometimes. A cottonmouth can kill a child or old person. There with Cabbage, who helped my grandfather run the river mill, and who watched for us when we visited, and who let me drive the farm truck in the back pasture until sunset one night. Cabbage lived in a two room cabin with a tin roof the same color as the red dirt road that ran past his front porch. He smelled like sweat and the cornmeal he ground at the mill with my grandfather; I don’t know why he was named Cabbage.
There is the little river canyon in Colorado where I learned how to flyfish. Not to cast, or tie a fly, but to fish for fish. That steep canyon with the tailwater creek and its moody browns and brookies, and that winter day that I fished a long section of the creek hard, ice in my guides and nothing, nothing, until with a nymph I pulled a rainbow from a deep pocket on the far side of an unapproachable torrent, and the way that fish fought for just a minute but, slow with winter, became a metal glint at my feet and then in my hands this sparkling vibrant creature, just for a moment, and how for weeks the color of that fish emerged where ever I looked.
Recently, stepping over the edge of the steep canyon formed etched the Deschutes, broader than that little Colorado canyon but narrower than further downriver, and how many ages each descending step crossed, there etched in the sandstone and basalt column formations for us to decipher. I camped on the lip of the canyon and well after midnight tucked into a moonshadow beneath a ledge and at some point a great gray owl began to call into the canyon from just above me, where it had alighted onto the crown of a thin old pine long dead, weathered to the color of bone. The owl called for a long, long time, its low rhythmic resonant hoot vibrating in my ears until I shifted with the cold and it floated into the moonlight. How many times had this happened before? I awoke in the morning, moments later it seemed, to see the moon set full over Three Sisters and a cliff swallow in the owl’s night perch.
There is the river, standing in the vein of cold water, its coolness arching into the air. The calm the river sifting through the chinks of my being, its relentlessness siphoning from my mind and body what I brought to it but doesn’t belong. There is the imprint of the river, sound that fills you and goes with you when you have to leave. There is always the river.
