Enchantment

The date is buried in time, somewhere more than three decades ago. It was later in the spring as I do recall, and the meadow grasses were closer to calf high as opposed to towering above my head as they would in high summer. I had been called there by an article in a fly-fishing periodical, one simply dedicated to Difficult Trout.

I stooped low as I neared the stream, its sparklingly clear water rushing gently over bright gravel, but it was to no avail. I had just enough of a glimpse for the image to register in my mind; half a dozen trout were finning below a low branch. Before I could think or move they were gone, vanished as if they never had been!

Over several visits, I learned to watch the stream well ahead of my own progress, to crouch and observe before ever thinking of a cast. When fortune smiled, my careful study would reveal a shudder in a patch of watercress, or a subtle movement where the overhanging grass brushed the water’s surface. It was then that I began to catch the brilliantly colored wild rainbows and browns of Falling Spring.

A love affair would blossom, until at last I moved to Chambersburg and opened the fly shop I named to honor her: Falling Spring Outfitters. Those were heady days, highlighted by fishing at each day’s beginning and end, as well as the excitement of taking the risk to live life attuned to my own angling imagination.

My favorite evenings were those in May and June, when the soft orange and yellow sulfurs would draw the limestone trout to the surface. Stalking the water meadows after sunset with a short, light rod and a dainty dry fly, the brevity of the rise and the impending darkness raised the anticipation and excitement to new heights. At times I fished alone, though there were glad evenings when a number of us would gather hopefully, where the tiny stream riffled behind Bill White’s house. We would sit and talk, anglers all, and every once in a while, one of the group would rise and make a few casts when a soft ring twinkled in the twilight.

There are countless memories from those years in the Cumberland Valley including both triumphs and failures with the dry fly, as I worked to solve the mysteries of weed driven currents with a tippet that could hold a trophy brown. There was a huge brownie beneath the stone arch bridge one late summer evening long ago. I tied a tiny streamer then, the Pearl and Squirrel, which tempted him with both its lively sparseness and pearlescent flash. I won that close quarters battle, finally netting a trout well over twenty inches long!

I think back to tricos on summer mornings, visits with Ed Shenk and Ed Koch in the shop, and all the hundreds of dozens of flies I tied there. I remember one warm spring day, when March felt more like May, when my unplanned walk along the stream brought me face to face with a pair of trout I scarcely believed. Fishing had declined by then, and such trophies were no longer seen, much less cast to and caught.

I aimed my back cast through the tree branches behind me, and sent a small Shenk Sculpin to the far bank, then let it swing out into the current where those leviathans lurked. The brown trout I battled finally to my netless hands was 25 inches long, my largest from those bright waters. I can still remember the little CFO screaming as that fish ducked under a log and ran full speed away downstream! To land him was unexpected to say the least, though clearly meant to be.