Rivers of Time

I began my day with an old friend, wandering the timeless Beaver Kill with Dana Lamb…

This week I opened his first volume, “On Trout Streams and Salmon Rivers” to once more savor the highlights of my winter reading. We walked this morning the length of the Beaver Kill, dreaming of the rush of “red-letter days” and sobering over his laments. Lamb waded the greatest American trout river during the Golden Age, when gorgeous wild brown trout swam in all the pools from Turnwood to Peaksville, and he waded it still after World War II when automobiles and spinning rods brought throngs to the river to take every trout they might, and the angler’s solitude with them.

Remembering one pool during the halcyon days brought a knowing smile when he told just where he cast his “Fanwing”. Wild browns still abide there my friend, and on the right day perhaps a great one would come again to your favored Fanwing Royal!

There are still a great many anglers who flock to our most famous river, yet most seek the easy, cookie-cutter stockies that Lamb lamented. Few hunt the wild browns with devotion to the dry fly, and I rejoice in that, for it allows me to recapture something of the solitude he missed in those post-war years.

Along the route of his tour, he wrote that the “Acid Factory pool holds no charm for me and never has“, which brought my own earliest memories of the river to life. It was there that I found dozens of trout rising as the Shad Fly caddis boiled from the rushing flow. On my very first trip to the fabled Beaver Kill, it was I who had just the right fly! I remember most the fourteen-inch brook trout who demanded my best cast across the maelstrom before he deigned to take my fly. He was strong and darkly colored, and I still believe he was as wild as that water, having come down from Horton Brook to feed in the wealth of the big river! My hands shook when I turned out the fly and released him back to his kingdom.

Thirty-three seasons have passed since that day, nearly a third of a century, but I still feel the excitement of those first days each time I visit the river. Whether walking through time with Dana Lamb, or working out line amid the glimmer of spring sunlight, the Beaver Kill still captivates me, and always will!