Welcome

At last I return to the river…

Feeling the cooling sensation in my legs as I wade deeper, step by step, and the caress of the morning breeze, I know that I am home once again.

There have been family things to attend to, work around the house, and then a bout of searing pain in my casting shoulder from out of nowhere. As a result, I have found just a handful of moments to be where I belong.

Stalking bright water again, I see the first soft ring in the distance, and pause to knot a tiny pale olive dry fly to my tippet. As I reach for the fly box in my shirt pocket, the wind rises behind me, and a chuckle leaves my throat: the Red Gods have bidden me good morning.

The wind grows and wipes away all trace of that cruising trout, though I grasp the fly with the box tucked tight to my chest, protected from the gusts, and knot it to my tippet. Each season there comes a run of days when luck and opportunity both seem to desert me. I have fished hard through many of those periods to no avail. Perhaps that is why I more easily accepted my time away this summer, a sense of the inevitable, the angler’s dry spell.

My spirits remain high as I let that strong, following wind buoy my advance upstream. There will be no more evidence of trout. I expect that, more or less, though I know these dry spells might end at any moment. The current one though, will not end today.

I have a good friend who keeps little patience for the ups and downs of the fishing life, his mood turning easily if trout are not quickly and easily taken. I recognized long ago that our sense of time on the river differed. I expressed the feeling thus, telling him that we must take what the river gives us, whether it’s bounty is counted in rising trout and epic battles, or in the momentary beauty of light on the water, a wading deer, or the wind coming up just in time to blow the day’s sole cast to a rising trout off target.

I rejoice in my time along bright water! I take what the river gives me… and give thanks.