Before the bright glow of sunshine was hidden by the gray of winter skies, I set out for a riverwalk today. Too much time indoors this week had left my muscles tight and my joints stiff, and I sought to remedy that.
I felt but a little of that sun’s warmth. With a cold crosswind cutting through, I pulled the hood of my down jacket up overtop the wool baseball cap.
The walk along the river is my therapy during the long Catskill winter season. It gives me some time near bright water to be alone with my thoughts, and they are often thoughts of warmer days, of dappled sunlight kissing each riffle and pool.
I can feel the cut of a cold North wind as I make the turn at the end of the public road, always wishing I had leave to continue southward, on down to Junction Pool and the beginnings of the wide Delaware. Heading back into that wind I snug the zipper on my jacket and dip my head.
I am sitting on a grassy bit of riverbank, quietly watching the pool beyond for some evidence of life out there in the lingering morning mist. There is an old rod propped against a clump of that grass, a rod much older than I. It is a Catskill rod by birth, one from the old Leonard shop to the southeast, the Mills’ family’s gift to the working man. It is a rod made to the most famous taper known along these rivers, the classic 50 DF, and with the four-weight line strung through her guides she is simply perfection.
For the past half an hour, a few gentle yellow mayflies have drifted past my watch post, no more than one every ten minutes perhaps, but that is all it takes to bring my reverie to an end and focus all of my concentration on the wide currents in the foreground. Twenty minutes on there are enough flies to count, and at last a soft but significant ring along the shade line cast by an ancient sycamore.
I walk down the bank and slip into the water so the current will carry my wavelets downstream well below that rise. I have seen that ring once more, my better vantage allowing that there is a wide, soft bulge in the surface just as the ring appears. In ten minutes, I have moved a dozen steps, and the third bulge and ring lies fifty feet away.
The line lays on the water in soft coils until the easy urging of the old rod pulls it up into the air on my back cast. One false cast aimed well downstream of the rise, a few more coils of line lifted as another back cast extends, and then line, leader and fly are willed to that certain line of drift, two feet up current from the faint trace of receding ripples that mark the trout’s lie.
At the bulge I tense, then hold for one count as the fly slips out of sight, and then the rod comes up in a terrible arc and the Hardy screams as he streaks away! If I could, I would hold that moment suspended in time, treasure it and the feeling invoked as the trout’s adrenaline becomes my own.
He is a fine brown trout, long and wide and beautiful, and he battles the straining rod with all of his wild energy. My rush of emotion grows as his slowly ebbs, until it climaxes in the folds of the net. The hook slips free, and he slides back to the cold caress of the river as the smile on my face blossoms in the sun.
Another of many days that I will feel that cutting wind upon my face as I turn toward home. Five, six months? Nature alone knows how many days will pass before I once more sit quietly in the grass and watch the silken flow of bright water in hope of a subtle ring…
Bright Waters Catskill 