The Goodbye Fish

A couple of weeks ago, I made my last trip of the season to my favorite streams in southwest Wisconsin’s Driftless Region before the season closed on September 30th. Even though they are a full four hour drive from where I live, I consider them to be my “home” waters and I like to say goodbye to them for another year with a few days of concentrated stream hopping.

I enjoy fishing these waters any time, but never so much as in September when you can feel and see the lead edge of the changing of the season all around you. The puffy cumulus clouds scud across the sky a little faster now than in summer and the leaves on the maples are edged in gold and yellow. With the advent of cooler weather, the red-wing blackbirds assemble into huge flocks and wave after wave of them pass overhead on their way back and forth from the hay stubble and corn fields. The sun does not dominate the land with the harsh authority it had in July and its daily arc is now noticeably more to the south. The days are a little shorter and that means a bit less time for us dawn-to-dusk fishing obsessives to be on the water. But the older I get, the less I mind this. And driven by cooling water temperatures and the need to load up on forage before winter arrives, the fish are at their most willing since the spring. Whether on the spring creeks of southwest Wisconsin or back in my native Pennsylvania, the autumn has always been my favorite time to fish.

My four day trip was filled with all the usual joys and curiosities that keep me coming back to these streams. It’s about more than just catching fish, although that is primary. You meet people, you see things. You learn. On the first day, a dragonfly grabbed my dry fly out of the air in mid-cast. Over the course of 40-odd years of fly fishing and literally hundreds of thousands of casts, this was a first. A pleasant young woman from Wisconsin DNR, Division of Fisheries carrying a clipboard stopped me streamside to interview me regarding where I had been and what I had caught. I’m more than vain enough to have really enjoyed the experience of somebody with an official title asking me what I thought about fisheries and the streams. I’m pretty sure she got all the information she wanted from long before I was ready to stop talking..

The fishing was good. Not spectacular, but good. It was grasshopper time on the streams and everywhere I went, the high grass and meadows that frame the water were alive with hoppers. They would spring into the air at my approach and sail ahead of me on their papery wings; some to land farther along in the grass and others to be caught in an errant puff of wind and find themselves on the surface of the stream. Not many of the latter lasted long there. The trout were watching for them and most soon disappeared, some in gentle rise rings and others in a sudden, slashing rush from beneath the surface.

I fished a simple Letort Hopper most of the time I was on the water and did well, bringing to hand a dozen or more sleek wild browns that averaged 10-12 inches long in pretty much every stream I fished. No really big fish. But that’s usually the way it goes for me. I don’t really put the effort in that is often required to find and catch the larger fish. I’m usually too busy trying to finish up in the pool I’m in so I can scramble up around the bend to see what the next pool offers. I’m a traveler, not a lingerer on the water. And this has probably cost me opportunities to bear down and catch larger fish. I don’t care and really, I can’t help myself anyway. I have to see what’s up around the next bend.

On the last stream of the last day before I have to head on back home, I approach a small pool sheltered by a crabapple tree. At its upstream end, the water clips along briskly over a sharp riffle. Then it slows and deepens as it moves along the high bank. Over time, the current has carried away much of the soil that holds the tree in place and now it leans over the water, its exposed roots reaching down into the flow and becoming trout cover in a deep pocket tight to the bank. I stand in the riffle below the tail of the pool and watch. Soon, I see the tiny dimple of a trout rising to take something from the surface just inches off the bank at the point where the roots of the apple tree enter the water. I wait a few seconds and the fish rises again. I clip the hopper from my leader, lengthen out my tippet and tie on my favorite all-purpose speculative or searching dry fly, a large deerhair ant. I move a few steps closer to the fish and aim a short cast just above the point where the last rise ring appeared. For purposes of the story, I’d like to be able to say the fly landed in a perfect way exactly where I aimed it and then floated over top of the trout and that he rose, took and was landed and released and then I retired to the bank for a mid-afternoon break for wine and cheese. But that isn’t what happened. The truth is a little less graceful and a little more like real fishing. The fly hit one of the tree roots, bounced in the air and came down and caught a blade of bank side grass. I gave a little pull to free it. It hit the water with a plop and then the trout rose and took. I raised the rod to set the hook and immediately knew I was into the best fish of the trip, sixteen, maybe seventeen inches. He zoomed to the head of the pool and then turned, streaked back downstream to the high bank and tried to bury himself in the apple roots. I just barely managed to turn him at the last second, whereupon he decided to fight dirty and swam between my legs and headed downstream. I’m neither acrobat nor engineer and I could not figure out how to turn and reestablish control and also get the flyline out from between my legs, not in the time I had to try to figure it all out. Pop went the leader. Out of view two pools down stream went the fish.

I reeled up and thought about going over to have a seat on the bank and adding a new tippet and a new fly. There was still perhaps another half-hour to fish before I absolutely had to go. But then I decided no I won’t do that and that I was done for the day and for the year, at least so far as Wisconsin went. It occurred to me that this is how the season should end; with a little bit of humility at being bested and with the knowledge that the fish is still there and that I’ll be back in the spring to go another round with him. Something to keep anticipation alive and ever-present in the dead of winter. All in all, it was a fine goodbye and it all went exactly as it should.