Remembering Autumn

Autumn fishing was something new when I embarked upon retirement, not in general, but here in these Catskill Mountains. Yes, I had come during my travelling years, more around Labor Day, that season the masses have been trained to think of as autumn, but sportsmen know as late summer. Just once I ventured North in October to celebrate the inauguration of my friend Ed Shenk into the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame. I fished of course, wandering the West Branch and casting tiny Hebes on the Delaware, but the fishing I found did not showcase the wonder of springtime. Without other causes during the following years, I failed to return.

That first retired autumn I really did not fish much at all. It had been an unusually wet year in the Catskills, literally drowning most of my summer fishing, and conditions failed to improve from there on. I wandered the mountains west, north and east of our new homestead in Hancock and searched for grouse covers and eventually whitetail deer. There were those days when I made game, but the grouse which flushed tended to do so wildly and far out of range. Some of the covers I found nearly required swimming to explore with so much rainfall in the mountains. My deer hunting proved similarly productive. I savored each moment.

I was flushed with new wonder during my first full year here, and late summer provided a rest from the fine fishing I pursued from April through August. This was a dry year, and by September even the tailwaters were thin everywhere, and downright warm in some reaches. I fished less and waited for October.

When October’s rains came, and the weather cooled, the rivers welcomed the wading angler with open arms. There were breezy, sunlit afternoons along the Beaver Kill, delicately casting a dry ant pattern from a respectable distance while big brown trout sipped along shaded banks. Many of those afternoons followed a morning walk with the shotgun where, true to form the trout brought to hand far outnumbered the birds flushed. At last, I saw just how much marvelous fishing I had missed during the two decades I stayed away after Labor Day.

Learning continues upon bright water, and time in these mountains impresses with the variety of Nature’s moods. There have been years when that storied fishing proved as elusive as those brown mottled birds, and others when I bowed my head in thanks for the bounty laid before me.

Autumn has become synonymous with the Beaver Kill, though she hasn’t smiled upon me each and every season. Each passing day of the year weaves the threads of Nature that determines the personality of autumn’s glow. The Catskills are always beautiful; that seems the sole constant in this mosaic of light and air, earth and water.

The seasons of an angler are always changing. We revel in the special times between the droughts and the floods, the extremes that reach farther into the future than we know. Whatever comes, I remain grateful for each step I take along both rivers and ridgelines.