To fish, especially to fly fish, seemed to be a practice in reconciling expectation.

Lacking a cigar-smoking, plaid-clad grandfather, I didn’t start fly fishing until I was an undergraduate at the UW. I made maybe five or six trips to Black Earth in the Driftless region, spending whole days walking the farmlands, casting into the small clear roots of spring fed streams winding through the fields. Throughout the hours, I caught not one single fish.

When I would string up my fly rod, each ferule that I passed my line through beckoned a new scene in the day I expected to have. First ferule, my first cast. Second ferule, dropping the fly precisely in the half-moon shadow of the big rock off the eastern bank. Third ferule, an eagle, the ultimate omen of lurking fish, circled up river. By the time I pulled my line through the final ferule, I was negotiating a taught battle against a sixteen-inch brown trout and had my net dipped and waiting.

What I expected as I got ready with my hatchback’s trunk popped open, feeling gangly in my Cabela’s waders, never accounted for the tangles, the terrible casts, for accidentally trimming the wrong side of my line, for the cow half-awake in my favorite hole, for the fly box falling out of my unzipped chest pocket, and watching it explode on a rock beneath me, and then seeing twenty-dollars-worth of flies get lost down stream.

After I graduated, I moved to Fort Collins, Colorado to be with my then-girlfriend, now-wife, as she finished up her last year of school. The Poudre—one of the best Rocky Mountain, free-stone rivers on tap out West—passed right through town. Driving fifteen minutes west, I could fish a craggy, narrow, and against-all-scale canyon. I fished nearly everyday, and stopped sucking soon thereafter. 

I paid attention to the static of microscopic gnats, to the dusty grasshoppers I walked out of the grass. I saw what was caught spindrifting in the eddies, and flipped submerged river rock to see what was slowly coming to life beneath the surface.

When I looked up from a cast, I had to crane my neck to see the sky roofing the canyon walls. I started tying my own flies, and browns and ‘bows started eating them. My daydreams of the river began to more closely resemble reality. Some days exceeded expectation.

Once, in the first week of May, a cold air brewed gray skies and a snow that descended with all the manifestations of ash. We just wanted summer.

It was Sunday and my wife was at work. I didn’t feel like being inside, so I drove to the canyon. No one was out. Instead of its usual crystal clarity, the river flowed with a murkiness born in the snow melt surging down from summits thousands of feet above, collecting forest-fire ash as it ran. The canyon walls funneling the gray snow affected a desolate snow globe.

I pulled on my waders and boots, zipped my jacket, and tied a wooly bugger onto my line just before my fingers froze.

I walked into the river where a grassy bank should have been and lobbed the heavy sub-surface lure along the edges of a slow-water branch, protected from the overwhelming run-off in the middle. Even so, I felt my over-sized waders being tugged by the rapid current, forcing me to constantly reclaim my balance. Casting felt like swinging a rock on floss. My dry feet, tied in my wading boots, protected in my waders’ neoprene booties, and insulated by wool socks, were numb. My legs were truncated stilts.

My wet hands were a fiery red, as if indicating on some inverse scale their actual state. I was set to walk out. I lobbed a few more casts and then my line went taught and stuck. It drifted out towards the quicker current, steady and slow. A stick. I brought in the slack line and began reeling it in. Then frantic jerking and wrenching below the surface. A speckled and shining brown broke through the water. It twisted above the current in the falling snow, and then fell back in trying to throw the hook.

Fish in net, I took the hook out from its jaw and looked at it looking at me. I let it drift back into the opaque current.

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Back home in Milwaukee, I couldn’t wait to fish again. I met up with a buddy guide of mine and he took me to a stream in Sheboygan. We drove through hills and farmlands plotted in multivarious shades of green. Grain silos quietly marked the day’s advance in synchronized shadows. On a small country road, enclosed by maple and oak, he directed me to look out for a break in the trees. I pulled in staying close to the tree line to avoid orderly projections rising from the trimmed grass.

“This is the best place to put in,” he told me, as I began to register the engraved names and dates on the stones in clearing.   

There was no river in sight. No familiar roar. No canyon walls rising. We had just parked in a rural cemetery. I only heard the cooling engine and tried to ignore the audience of the lost. Assembling my fly rod, I felt out of place. What I had been envisioning was on some other nameless river.

We circumnavigated headstones, and entered the forest. We stepped through bramble, trying not to snag our lines on the low hanging branches and saplings. Trying not to rip our waders. We walked through chest high grass and swept branches from our face. He told me that I should try walking through this place in summer, once everything had a chance to actually grow. Stepping over a gurgling spring, the earth became momentarily soft and he said we were almost there.

Finally, I heard something. It was not a roar, but a thrush. The spring-fed stream did not surge, but glided. Only after focusing above the streambed did the water in its perfect transparency become visible.

He offered me the first cast. We stood cautiously on the bank as I let line out. To have the first cast on a small stream—any stream—is a privilege. I seized the opportunity by getting snagged in some low-hanging branches that were behind me. Apparently they were there the whole time. I stepped into the shallow water to unsnag. My buddy said that we could try the next spot, which meant, “you ruined this one.”

I replaced the nymph on my line with a klinkhammer. Drifting along the surface of the water, it’d look like an insect trying to emerge from its watery birth. Nothing at the second hole. Move on.

A little farther upstream, a fallen tree bridged across the river, but before it, the water ran smooth and calm. A little pop broke the surface. There was a fish. Again, he let me have the first cast. I didn’t snag. The fish rose and took the fly with it underwater.

The brown trout was barely a foot long. Its skin was golden and its fins were nearly transparent. Here, where previously I would have only seen woods at the edge of farmland, I had discovered a new preciousness of my home. Here, where before I would have never thought to come, I felt lucky to be. The fish was brightly marked in red rounds, like berries found in late summer. It was healthy and it swam off.

The small road that brought us to the cemetery was concealed somewhere in the woods. No one else was fishing the stream. My expectations were beside the point. 

Photo: Andreas Nickhorn