Fly fishing on the "Little River" (location classified)

Sometimes I think I should stop planning fishing expeditions. I've a bad habit of setting out with a script in mind; and that, when it comes to fishing, is a recipe for disappointment. Sometimes.

My friends all seem to have equanimity. They won't just drive straight to the river. No, they have to stop and look at a bird or some damned geyser, and they delight in tormenting me with elaborate breakfasts followed by an hour dawdling in the fly shop. Maybe they're just naturally adaptable. Or, they're too wise to set forth with a script in mind. Either way, I'm not like that.

To be fair to myself, though, being a script kind of person is not all bad. Thinking there is a program in there somewhere can make you rigid; but on the other hand, sometimes there actually is a program, and a good one, that only gets spotted by the guy who's looking for it while all the wiser more adaptable guys are happily floating through. So while it's nice to be open-minded and have a lovely time rambling, and the guy who's looking for The Path will be often disappointed, the happy ramblers will never know how it feels for Path Guy when he finds the trail. It's like what CS Lewis said about angels: they never hunger or thirst, and they never tire, but on the other hand they'll never know how delicious is a cool drink of water to the thirsty, or the delight of clean warm sheets after a day of wet and cold.

Having a script, however, does mean that beauty and happiness sometimes have to get your attention with a two-by-four because you're looking so hard the other way. That's what my Little River did to me. It made itself such a pain that it finally beat the script out of me so I could see the loveliness it had to offer. And it's interesting that, though I've invited them, none of my friends with that blessed equanimity seem to want to fish there.

I was new to the area and didn't know where to go. I wanted to wade a lovely stream with nice, regular, copious hatches. I didn't want to spend a lot of time scrambling about. I wanted to stand in one place, decipher the hatch, crack the code, and land fish with long beautiful casts. No boats. I'm happiest fishing on my own two feet. Years later I actually did find that in my area, but in the meantime what I got was the Little River.

It was the usual story of the new fisherman in town being clued in by an old timer, but by the time I got on the river I knew there was a serious case of Script Divergence. Later I recalled that the old timer didn't appear to have fished in quite a long time. Maybe a couple of decades. But I had a bad fishing Jones and I pushed on.

His directions let me to a nondescript little stream without the usual turnoff at the side of the road, which should have been the first clue. It was maybe ten feet wide where I found it, the water dark stained with tannin and the banks thick with impenetrable-looking briary brush. But as far as I knew it was the only game in town, so I clawed through the tangles down to the water and dipped my thermometer. Sixty-three degrees. In July. So I pushed on with my program, little knowing that before the summer was out the whole script would be gone, along with all of the props: waders, net, staff, and vest.

Upstream my river reached its full width of about 25 feet and the thick brambles fell back from the water twenty yards, leaving the bankside to groves of hardwoods in a sea of ferns. Everywhere the bank was vertical -- three and sometimes five feet. I slid off into the water and was up to my knees in sticky muck laced with fallen branches and logs. The next spot was the same, and on the third try my right boot wedged in the wood. Struggling only trapped the other foot. I was alone, and of course no one knew quite where I was, and this was long before cell phones. After the panic subsided I gingerly wriggled free one boot and then the other, edging bankward until I was out. But one time, waiting for one foot to settle on something firm so I could move the other one, I glanced upstream and saw a rise.

Okay. The old timer had been right about needing a canoe. While thrashing back to the truck I felt someone tugging on the back of my vest and turned around just in time to receive a haymaker on the jaw from the handle of my net, which had snagged and drawn its elastic lanyard seven feet behind me.

The USGS map showed my Little River arising from a nondescript pond a crazily meandering fifteen river miles south of where I found her, and ending ten miles north in a big lake which I knew to be crammed with powerboats and tubers in summer. She was crossed by roads only four times. She ran mostly through woodland, but every few miles she dawdled in big marshes. No waterfalls and only a few feeder creeks, none of any consequence. She was watered by springs, draining a mountain cirque and percolating through the sandy soil. A spring creek two days' drive from anyplace known as spring creek country. A spring creek without willow banks and alkaline limestone water, just granite, mud, and sand. But there it was.

None of the road crossings would let even my little Grumman canoe into the water without a fight. Just the drag from the truck to the river was a day's work, and I had to haul it much farther to find a low spot in the bank so I could board without capsizing. But eventually I was afloat on the not-so-broad bosom of my Little River.

Those lovely hardwoods arched over the water, keeping it shady and cool and offering the fish protection from overhead predators, but they also fell in the river every few hundred yards. No two obstacles were the same. A raft of logs an inch below the surface, impossible to float over. A great trunk bridging bank to bank but only two feet above the water. Or the trunk completely on the ground, but the lush crown filling the river, tedious to fight through upstream and a real hazard on the way back down. As many places to knock your head, have your glasses snatched off, capsize, or snap a rod as anyone could wish for. It was such an ordeal to get out and drag around the blow downs that I was tempted to take chances. After a few scares I bethought me that I was alone and help was far off.

In Kentucky there's little company called Phoenix, who make a nifty craft they call the Poke Boat. It's kayak-like in general shape, but shorter and much beamier and flatter-bottomed and stable. And light: mine came in at about 27 pounds. It was a cinch to drag. The pointed bow could snake through the blow downs and the flexible hull could slither over sunken logs. There was room in the bow for a cooler and lunch. In the Poke Boat I sat with my elbows inches from the surface, as low as if I'd been wading up to my chest. Below the cut banks I was out of the wind.

Small streams are supposed to be a short rod, roll-casting proposition, so I began with my six-foot-six-inch 2-weight. That little rod didn't roll cast well when I was standing up, much less sitting down, and anyway there was no need to get that fancy, since the Poke Boat put me in the middle of the river and almost always facing directly upstream or down. With open lanes in front and behind, I could cast an eight-foot rod freely and roll cast when I really had to. Being so low, I didn't spook fish. I would nose around a bend, spot a pod of risers in the plume of cool water below a spring, set up a crafty cast...and find myself drifting back downstream around the bend and out of sight. Bracing against a paddle in the mud would let me make the cast but then I'd have to let go to play the fish, losing fish or paddle. I tried it both ways and didn't like either. Shoving the bow onto a sunken log would hold me just fine, but I never seemed to find log and risers together. An anchor, then.

Little Danforth-style anchors would hold me against a tsunami, but any anchor had to be hung from the bow or stern where it would snag in the blow downs, three feet beyond my toes, where I couldn't reach it. Mini mushroom anchors didn't snag much, but scooped water as I paddled and acted like a sea anchor. Old iron window sash weights were the answer. Foot-long cylinders with rounded ends and a loop for a rope. I hung one from a block on the bow and one from the stern, led the lines to a cleat where I sat, and I could drop them without disturbance at a moment's notice and not get hung up on the bottom.

In a kayak-style boat, my loaded fishing-commando vest was bulky, inconvenient, and painful. I had never noticed, until I tried casting while practically sitting in the water, how many loops, tags, and dangling devices it offered for snagging my line. Dropping it on the deck between my knees only made it accessible to coils of line stripped from the reel, and if I dropped a fish in the boat it was sure to burrow deep into that vest. After a couple of trips I was down to a few basics distributed among shirt pockets. Hip pockets were so completely inaccessible I might as well have left my pants at the truck.

Doing now what the river wanted, I listened and she told me. Through a green arch dappled with light, into a sunny marsh, then around a bend into the green again. Not silent, but quiet in a way which made me pass the whole day without speaking. The river was almost all smooth glide, with no water sounds except in the occasional gentle riffle. Animals seemed unafraid, probably because I was down below them. Deer peering over the bank. Redwing blackbirds and herons in the marshes. Sometimes the ruins of a cabin, very old since no road or trail came near. Rafts of weed crawling with bugs. No trash, beer cans, or old tires; too far from a road for that. A long bank covered with blooming wild roses, abuzz with bees and hummingbirds, fat beetles falling to the waiting trout.

They were mostly brookies, and a twelve-incher was a good fish, but very small fish were uncommon. There were occasional rainbows but no browns. I never saw a bluegill, sucker, or bass of any kind. The fish weren't at all selective. Any good dry size 14 would work; the trick was to get it to the fish without spooking him, and not whack my rod on a branch when I struck or leave the fly in a tree if I missed.

It was a real bug factory in there, and the main product was mosquitoes. No big deal by August, but one spring I watched a buddy get completely undone by them and flee the river in hysterics. I just doped up well and did fine. I could doze in the shade in summer and bask on a mud bank in a marsh in October. It's probably not how it really was, but in my memory it was never really windy. Every few minutes a short puff would make the trees sigh just a little, a great sound to fall asleep to. One October I found a feeder stream and followed it to a little pond I hadn't seen on the map, crossed it and followed the inlet stream an hour until a beaver dam stopped me. On the way back I idly flicked a Parachute Hare's Ear at a stump, and pulled out a fat rainbow. It was so perfect I floated back to my put-in without fishing, lazily dipping the paddle now and then to steer.

Other rivers have given big fish, thrills, technical challenges, and companionship, all earned with hours of driving and fighting crowds, won with expense and beating the other guy to your spot. Little River asked a lot of me, but she always gave back more and I always came home satisfied. If I ever had to catch a trout or die, that's where I'd go.