Snowflakes at Eighty Days

Drifting softly, they fall to cover the grass just revealed. Flurrying snowflakes driven on the Northwest winds, as the gales which crash across our Great Lakes come to earth in sight of the wide Delaware!

We have come to mid-winter in these Catskill Mountains and lie upon the edge of another deathly chill. The warmest day in ten might just kiss freezing. Not a pleasant thought, as I ponder this moment some eighty days away from the hoped-for dawn of a new dry fly season.

Though we have seen snow for well more than a month, Catskill precipitation still lags with respect to historic norms. Missing the warm rains promised these past two weeks has avoided the rapid melting and floodwaters, seeming at least to let the snow upon the high ridges do some good as it seeps underground, but we are forced to open our hearts and arms to more snowfalls should our rivers find the reserves we need for spring. Praying for snow is a hard thing to ask of a village bound angler.

Perhaps I should be systematic, pawing through the fly boxes now and replenishing the most-used flies as winter meanders across the calendar, but it is more likely I spend the day squeezing the cork of a favorite old rod or tying a few patterns my fancies drift to by chance. In that rod I can feel the quickening of life and the excitement of a long run, it’s bamboo shaft bucking and dancing in the sun. Those new patterns harken to moments from the past, and trout not quite tempted by the best that I could offer.

In time, fishing becomes less about planning and rigid preparation, and more about the impressions of rivers gurgling through the canyons of the mind. It should be so, that the years leave us captivated by the magic hours life has allotted us upon bright water.

We are fortunate here, as the Catskills offer a dry fly season that is longer than winter. The cost for such grace varies with the intensity of the hatches, the snows, the droughts and the floods. Those special days and hours could not be more precious than to an angler cognizant of his own mortality.

Bright rivers wind down through the years, and on to the sea, turning back upon themselves to prolong the journey. Each turn is precious: a turn from sunlight into shade, a turn of thread upon the feathered hook, the turn of the handle of a fine old reel in answer to a chorus of flight.