Humility..

What’s the toughest trout stream you’ve ever fished? And what makes it that way? Is it tough because the fish are all but impossible to approach without spooking? Or are they so heavily fished over that they become jaded and technically difficult? Or maybe the type of cover and holding lies the fish favor in your toughest steam are such that a decent cast and float is all but impossible. Or perhaps a composite of some or all these things and some others to boot.

I’ve fished some streams over the years that have given me fits with their refusal to surrender a single fish. Often, I’ll happen to fish them after having a pretty good run of luck elsewhere on other waters, as if the Great Leveler of Angling Self Esteem in the sky decided I was getting too big for my waders and needed a little right-sizing and a reintroduction to humility.

I’ve had very difficult fishing on Oregon’s Metolius River in the shadow of the Cascades, where pods of wild rainbows rose again and again in a maddening rhythm while ignoring my every offering. There are few tougher fish than the browns of Pennsylvania’s Cedar Run when the heat of July has shrunk the pools to mere shadows of their size in April. Likewise the chutes and runs of Lost Cove Creek in the North Carolina Blue Ridge in the low flows of autumn when the stream banks are wreathed in fallen leaves and the trout are skittery and flee their own shadows. And the picky, over-exercised browns of Fisherman’s Paradise on Spring Creek in Pennsylvania and Black Earth Creek in Wisconsin have more than once sent me back to the car mumbling to myself, hat in hand.

I believe though that the most difficult trout stream I’ve ever fished is not any of these fairly well known places. It is rather, a tiny ribbon of water that flows only a few miles from the place in the northwest Pennsylvania dairy country where I spent my boyhood. It wends its way through shaded meadows dotted with grazing cattle and through short stretches of hardwood-shaded fast water. Its blue clay undercut banks and criss-crossed log jams are alive with wild brown trout. But, for me at least, they might as well be tarpon, turtles or potted flowers for all the good their being there does me in terms of being able to catch them. I gingerly approach the tiny pools they live in with the fish stalking methods developed over 40 years of fly fishing. At best, I get to see the tail of the slowest of them disappear into a muskrat hole in the clay bank. At other times, I raise my rod to cast and can see the wakes of panicked trout fleeing two and sometimes three pools ahead. When I come here, I’m lucky if I catch a fish. No, strike that.. When I come here, I’m lucky if I actually see a fish. I mean not just a tail or a wake hurrying away from me, but an actual fish.

All the same, the stream never disappoints me. Frustrates, enrages, humiliates, sure. All of these. But it never disappoints. Because in an odd sort of way, I think it is good to get right-sized and bested in this manner from time to time by a living thing with a brain the size of a large lima bean. It serves to help maintain a proper balance between my occasionally overblown sense of my own prowess as an angler and a natural world whose beauty and allure are so often about its inherent mystery and refusal to be mastered. It is, in my view, allegorical to the mistakes of arrogance we have made as a species in dealing with the natural world. The free-flowing rivers we have shackled with dams, the mountain tops we have destroyed in our search for energy and the marshes we have callously filled so we can put up a hundred houses that all look the same. All because we can and because we are top dog on the chain of life. It does us good to be bested now and then.

So, I’ll always be in favor of tough trout streams. At least so long as there are also a few easy ones around where I can go and salve my wounds. The awe and humility I feel in God’s creation are too much a part of the beauty of the natural world to ever want it otherwise..