Sanctuary

It is a state of mind as much as an actual place, a reach of bright water where fantasy dwells with silence and the soft murmur of sun warmed air and trickling water.

Memory lives there, decades of it, though it lives in the present in the ultimate challenges I face there. Flies were born there, theories formed, revised and proven. It is everything that is angling to one who lives for angling itself.

It is a place for sitting in the warm sunshine, contemplating the likelihood of the hatch long anticipated and the run of years that has brought me to bright water for sustenance of the soul. There are echoes there, voices laughing, the symphony of an old Hardy singing in high notes of leviathan unleashed! Images of things that may never be again…

I walk there with a favorite old rod in hand, this one passed on from a friend in the Cumberland Valley. He fished it hard for a good span of years, and now as his time on the water has passed, I carry it on these Catskill rivers to make my own memories. Bamboo has a soul, something of the maker who crafted it from the culm, something of the anglers who have wielded it remain.

I marvel at the magic in this place. How many times have I entered here to find the water quiet, waded in, and had trout begin rising in greeting? That happens not on other reaches of bright water. This young season the greetings have been brief, a cast, a drift, and they recede. The magic remains, but so does the incredible challenge.

No season has truly begun until I wade these waters, assess the changes wrought by winter’s ice and snowmelt’s floods. Last year I found a fine bed of new shallow gravel in a place I used to wade the high flows, before a few spring floods deepened it well beyond wading. Nature giveth and she taketh away. Her gift may be quite perfect one day hence.

If I have my way, I will trust my ashes to the sparkling currents of sanctuary, return something of my essence to the river that schooled me, delighted me, delivered me. The ashes of some fine shaft of cane shall join me there. Take what you need with you.