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 Dad’s big rainbow with the blood-red lateral line. This is the corner pool where Cahills blew off the water like wayward June snow squals. Around the bend is where the hours of my youth swept away.
Where I fell in love with rivers.
My home river.
Black winter water runs into a pool I know like a childhood best friend. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
But I hadn’t come home to fish. On the last day of January, Mom had an operation on her foot. Two weeks later, Dad slipped carrying a load of laundry down the basement stairs, thankfully only blowing out a knee on his tumble to the bottom. Neither of them can walk without crutches.
I had come home to fill Ziplocs with ice and cook dinners, take out the trash and walk their dog, water house plants and finish the laundry, perform all the other domestic tasks I neglect around my apartment. I had come home to take care of them, and it was jarring, the caregiving roles so suddenly flipped. As I darted around the house juggling my parents’ needs and my other full-time job (the one that let me work remotely for a couple of weeks), I couldn’t help but wonder if this is what parenthood is like. Busy working, busy providing, only the rare second to spare.
I was three days into my unexpected responsibilities when I made it to the river. Even though my parents told me to go, told me I’d done all I could for them, I still felt guilty, just being away from where I was potentially needed. I ventured another guess about parenthood as I headed out the door.
Winter trout on my home river are spread thin across the short days and are better than anything found wrapped under a tree. I once did the math and figured I averaged thirty hours fishing for every trout I landed here between the months of November and February. A winter trout is a moment in time.
I fished for two hours and then went home. I didn’t find my moment. I hadn’t expected to.
Mid-March, a month later. I am several hundred miles south of home. Budding branches frame a blue sky in the national park outside the city I moved to last summer. The creek rushing past me hurries to wear down the ridgeline that birthed it.
There’s potential in the air, in the purple buds, with the juncos’ parting calls, in the new water. And it doesn’t take long for the match to spark: a black stonefly, a little blueish-grey dun, a slightly bigger and darker dun flit by. Like a fire slowly breathing to life, as the sun warms earth and water, more bugs take flight, drift the current, shrug off the cold. Never more than one or two at a time, but they’re plentiful enough.
The trout wake, and I catch my first few of the year. Wild mountain jewels that glisten in my palm when I slip my dry fly out of their jaws.
It’s spring along the Blue Ridge, a month before the season and the early hatches will arrive on my home river. I fish alone, taking my time, letting the rod lead me up the mountain. There’s nowhere else I need to be.
Helping my parents was a jolt of reality. After two long weeks, I came to realize that responsibility will not be taken in microdoses forever. Eventually, fishing—time, rather—will grow weighted by its force, and fishing will spiral to the bottom of life’s priorities. Days spent with a rod in hand will slide from beautifully routine to beautiful punctuations. Free Saturdays on the river will grow sacred. Like a winter trout, they’ll become moments in time.
But here and now, another brook trout splashes after the dry. I savor the present until shadows drape the hills and I’m forced to trace my footsteps down the valley.
I call home as I drive back to the city. Mom tells me she’s walking well without crutches, and we talk about when she thinks she’ll be able to hike again. Dad and I discuss early-season mayflies. Blue quills and quill Gordons, we decide, but an Adams will work just fine. He says he hopes to be able to wade by the end of the summer.
I’ll make the time.
