Perfect Worlds

Another short, fly fishing essay from my recently completed book of essays, TWO THIRDS WATER.

It’s a workday, just past noon, and in my rear-view mirror I watch the dust from the dirt road trailing away behind me.  In the trunk, my seven-foot, four-weight rod rattles in its metal tube, my light-weight waders and boots and reel and a box of flies back there too.  I round a bend and cross my fingers, and it works; there are no other cars at the barely-there-at-all pull off.  It’s late May, the day summer-hot, but this tiny stream—an old mint field drain actually—is always cool due to spring seepages.  Its banks run arrow-straight from whatever dredged them decades, maybe a century ago.  The brush comes in dense tangles on both sides, the water coffee brown and impenetrable to your eyes with the canopy spanning across and no sky or light revealing anything.  No obvious pockets.  No way to tell where it’s shallow or deep, sometimes deep enough to spill over your waders even.

Soon I’ve traded my work clothes for some old shorts, a favorite fishing shirt, stepped into my waders (which I’m using more for the thorns and poison ivy and mosquitoes) and doused myself with repellant and fired up a stogie (additional repellant).  I pull my small rod from its tube, press its two halves together, and take hold of the grip and give a little shake;  it seems impossibly light without its reel, practically nothing at all.  I screw down the tiny Hardy reel, straighten the leader and re-taper down to 6X and tie on a #16 Adams.  There’s no hatch to match, just experiments with a variety of dries.  If I get bored with the delicate job of flicking upstream to the sips and splashes of 8-10 inch native browns, I’ll clip back the leader and plunk small, slightly weighted wooly buggers along the far bank, wait, and give four or five quick herky-jerky tugs, and see if I can lure out one of the big boys from the undercut banks.

This is southwest Michigan trout fishing.  Finding these little no-name things, bushwhacking your way in through underbrush and poison ivy and waves of mosquitoes, puffing away at a cigar to keep them out of your eyes, spying the rise and working out the often complex geometry and physics of putting your fly there—and sometimes seeing them pounce on your diminutive offering, feeling the darting-alive pressure, working them in through the downed tree limbs, holding their tan and golden and black and red spotted scaleless smooth ten inches of body, that big eye looking up calmly, gills pumping red for just a still-in-the-water moment as you let them go.

At first I was disappointed.  I’d cuss my way through the web-like branches, losing my hat, my fly pulling free from the keeper and tangling itself inextricably to the labyrinthine fingers of sapling branches, catching a fish or two, all the while dreaming of—painfully missing—the easily accessible freestoners I cut my fly-fishing teeth on in New England.  But by necessity, I got better, and then I actually started to enjoy these outings.   

Granted, I had to be in the right mood, and if I was after no-tangle, no-bugs, no-brainer fishing, I could always strap my canoe atop my trusty Volvo and head to a friend’s farm bass pond and catch gullible, aggressive bass on flies so big and ugly they’d send these small, native browns streaking away in terror if one ever came whizzing their way.  So, when the mood struck me, when I just needed to think small—small rod, small flies, small water, small fish, everything in proportion—I’d venture forth to the dim, moist, no-more-than-a-trough streams that etch the south Michigan landscape.  On hands and knees, watching backcast and forward cast, slowly, patiently figuring a way to put the fly into impossible spots, has certain rewards, even if there is no take.  

Often, I’d give myself challenges.  “Get one under that log, Sabatelli, and you get a million bucks.”  Twenty tries and ten minutes later it falls into just the right current, and I feed out the line, and just before the line pulls tight and starts to drag—all illusion lost—pow, the instinctive lift, and one’s on…or not.  Just the breath-stealing nerve-alive waiting while the fly moves through the hot-zone, the place where you know it will happen if it’s going to, and when it doesn’t, you don’t try again; you’d never get a cast like that again. 

Occasionally, you stir a monster, that fifteen, or even twenty inch, hook-jawed brown whose been lying up under the cut-away bank for who knows how long, feeding mostly at night, cannibalizing the youngsters, devouring small rodents and birds that foolishly slip in.   The small wooly bugger gets them or especially, dare I admit it, a big fat night crawler dug up from the stream-side muck when you just have to know if one’s in that deep, mysterious hole you can’t get a fly to drift into properly.  So you deconstruct a big streamer and thread on the worm the way you used to years ago and add a pinch of split shot and flip the thing out, and on the first drift comes that impossibly strong pull….  They’ve taken 5 pounders out of here I’m told.  I’m certain there are some still in there, some bigger than that even, laying in wait in those deep, impossible to reach places.

But, really, it’s the little ones I’m after on these outings, small natives, who have never seen the inside of a hatchery tank and whose colors and shape and motion are wholly in-step with their small, perfect world.

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