Missing Autumn

Just a moment ago I tore myself away from the rivers, and suddenly it is mid-November. I have gone through my usual funk during these past two weeks and have arrived at a point of acceptance. That may sound like emotional progress, but with that acceptance comes the realization of loss.

I have developed a bit of a ritual during the sweetness of autumn since retirement, and though it varies in regard to specific places and flies and execution from year to year, that sweetness has ruled. Autumn 2024 marks the second consecutive autumn when, though I have wandered, waited and searched for it, I failed to find that touch of magic.

There are moments when I feel like Nature is evening the scores, as I have enjoyed some absolutely blissful moments during my autumns as a retiree. Fresh, classic days and experiences, punctuated by big, beautiful wild fish tend to stand as monuments in memory, particularly when they are framed in the light of the final weeks of an angler’s season. When a season or two passes without such days, the loss is deeply felt.

I worry too about our rivers. Floods, droughts, man’s manipulations intentional and otherwise, all of these can do damage. Too many damaging events in a cycle can do a lot to change our river ecosystems, and not for the better. I am a worrier from a long line of worriers, and I try to remind myself of that from time to time, just to maintain a perspective. Nature does heal herself.

Fishing seasons are most certainly variable, and that variability is one of the things that make angling special, beautiful and challenging. We may learn a great deal over a lifetime, though we will never know everything. For every pool we explore expecting the bounty we fail to find, there is undoubtedly another out there where that bounty exists unseen. Perhaps we should have wandered around that very next bend.

The late Charlie Fox wrote of an angler condemned to purgatory, finding himself on a lovely, favorite reach of stream on a perfect spring day. A trout rose to a hatching mayfly, the angler made a perfect cast and caught a fine sixteen-inch brown trout. As he walked along the stream, he began to notice neither the scene nor the events ever varied. He was doomed to fish that same pool on the same hour and day and catch that same trout, forever. Mr. Fox knew well the true magic of angling.