By Shane Behler The river where I fished when I should have been doing my homework moodily rolls by. Every rifle, every pocket, is a tether to the past. Here is where I hung roll casts in overhangs and miss-timed hooksets on spinner-sipping browns. That’s the slick where I went in over my waders netting …...

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 …...

We trace the coast, gliding high above the estuaries of the Southeast. I watch the interchange of nutrients and sediment, fresh and salt water from my window seat, wondering how long it takes the silt particles I kick up in Blue Ridge trout streams to make it this far downriver. A lifetime? A millennium? I …...

Growing up and sharing the good word of fly fishing. My adulthood is rapidly approaching, and I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. The responsibilities associated with this next step were stalled by enrolling in graduate school immediately following college, but the comfortable familiarity of academia is set to expire with another...

Winter fishing can be a brutal (and often futile) exercise. It takes a foolhardy person to step into an icy trout stream in the middle of January. However, I’ve never considered myself to be very sensible. I grew up in New York, where winters are described as a million things other than mild. When you’re …...

When I confide in people that I am from the Northeast, they are almost always surprised. I take this as a good sign. But their looks of mild shock usually elapse into suspicious glances, as if I’ve been leading them on by not talking with a thick New York accent. And no, I do not …...

Many writers have expounded on the meaning of fly fishing, a question perhaps as vague as the meaning of life itself. John Geriach put fly fishing right up there with sex and death as the greatest mysteries of life. I won’t disagree with him. Thomas McGuane has probably come the closest to answering the great …...

I pick my way down to the river along the angler’s trail, carefully stepping over ferns and stalks of goldenrod wet and heavy from yesterday’s rain. The dampness unlocks an earthy smell of soil and decomposition that compliments the perfume of the river. I climb down the riverbank in flip flops and armed with a …...

I almost stepped over the first brook trout I saw in South Carolina. A wavering of his tail caught my eye before my boots crossed the rivulet that spanned the trail. A single steppingstone placed mid-current was all that was required for hikers to maintain dry feet; a bridge, or even a felled log, would …...