Summer Passage

And so, it is done. Another Catskill Summer passes into memory. I watched it go as the sun sank toward the treetops, reclined on my porch with the flames in the grill crackling and a chilled Summer Ale. After supper the western sky glowed with a beautiful red fire, saluting the finest season.

As the season runs in these mountains, summer often seems to last forever. Though there are changes in the weather day by day, it is always summer for the full breadth of the season. Spring and autumn never enjoy that longevity, with winter taking as much as a month from the beginning of spring and much more from the end of autumn.

On the river I felt the crispness of autumn in the air as the afternoon breeze rose. The life of the river seemed at ease, languid in these last hours of summer. Little stirred beneath the surface for most of the afternoon.

With no flies, no rises, I made my own sacrifice to autumn, to the inevitability of winter. I knotted a soft hackle Isonychia and swung it down through the sparkling effervescence of the riffle. Just once there was a tug, growing to a strong pull with the chatter of the reel to awaken me to the gift of life at the end of my line. He surged and sent spray flying before the hook pulled free, and he became a memory like the season itself.

In the last moments of the afternoon there were flies on the water, pale olives with bodies so thin that even a thread wrapped hook would appear twice their size, and a few Isonychia. My eyes searched the wide expanse for a feeding trout, but the handful of rises which appeared were singular acts, a last taste of summer for the trout perhaps.

Summer’s passing readily invokes the realization that winter lies too close at hand. Hope looks forward to a last month of the dry fly at most. The Red Gods, and the Catskill mountain weather will have their due.

I close my eyes and picture the soft, sunny afternoons of October, the first grouse walk on the mountainside, and the dainty rises of big autumn trout in clear low water. It is a deliciously beautiful season, but brief, the mountains on fire with the last glory of the forests.