A Hard Goodbye

Sweat beads at my brow and my shirt sticks to my skin after the long hike in. Warm rains have thickened the air, hinting at the southern summer to come that I won’t be here to see. But it’s not summer yet—I still have today, still have the present—and in the jubilance of mid-May, the land hums with generous life. The hills are cloaked in a thousand shades of green and the river flows clear. Yellowthroats and wrens flit along the brushy banks while wood thrushes and peewees serenade from the canopy. Tiger swallowtails dance between tree trunks and yellow sallies drift lazily over the water, tempting the trout below.

I’ve called this place, where the Blue Ridge escarpment clips South Carolina’s northwest corner, home for the past six years. But soon, I’ll be leaving, and I don’t know when I’ll return.

I’ve come to say goodbye.

Step in, sweet relief.

Stepping into the river provides cool comfort from the heat and humidity. Water rushes past, carving pockets and slicks and runs for the trout to call home as it journeys seaward. I begin my march upstream, casting to every nook and cranny in the riverbed, watching the dry fly bounce on the current. It does not take long for it to disappear in a splash, and a rosy-cheeked rainbow comes to hand. The river is in a giving mood.

Unlike me, the trout are reluctant to come and eager to leave.

The trout here are as wild as the river itself, spry and strong, bending the rod well past what’s expected of palm-sized fish, ever reluctant to surrender to the strange force pulling at their jaws. They are what initially brought me to this place. But with every return trip, the pristine cove forests with their towering poplars and hemlocks, the sounds of running water and blowing wind and singing songbirds, the overwhelming solitude—these are what kept me coming back, time and again.

There’s a sense of wilderness in this valley. What a rare, special thing.

Parting shot, parting view.

Nearly everywhere there should be a trout, a rainbow shoots after the dry or grabs the trailing nymph. I fish onward in ecstasy, constantly reading the uncountable cues of the river, unthinking and unburdened, not worried about the unknowns to come, of new jobs and new cities and everything I’m leaving behind. No, such thoughts don’t intrude in a place like this, on a day like today. All that exists is upstream, farther into the mountains.

I would have continued onward forever, all the way up to where the headwaters run in veins across the hillsides, if not for nature’s prompting. Gray clouds darken the skies, and thunder rolls up the valley. I scurry up the bank through curtains of rhododendrons to the footpath that parallels the river. I steal one last glance back before beginning my trek out. She’ll flow on through my mind until I return.