Sitting on porch, I’m “peopled out.” It’s been a good day. I’m tired—but not yet ready for sleep. I tried to relax—watch a little football—but I’m learning (and accepting) that I am old and really don’t care all that much for new and the way things change. I used to be able to watch college football forever. Modern “whatever it is”—paid teams, transfer at whim (and to highest bidder), not having to actually be a student, care or have any interest or investment in the actual “school” part of team identity—I couldn’t care less.
So I’m smoking a cigar. I’m enjoying the crickets while their night song is still around—I am enjoying the heavy-dew mornings too of cooler dawns and colder nights that have been absent for a while. I saw something the other day that made me think of fly fishing small streams and it made me think of adventures and discovered places in younger days as well as on ones I’d still love to live: small waters, cuts into the bank where water sweeps beneath, trees and bushes in overhang—brown trout hitting from their hides; rainbows in pools and holds behind shelves and stones, brown trout too in deeper holes, rising to surprise; brook trout in even smaller runs, places where you wouldn’t expect for trout to be—their small but intricately painted and patterned bodies of the New World, not imported from the Old.
Barnum, West Virginia: one found by total accident by guidance of a local as, happily lost, we fished a smaller stream that fell down an Appalachian mountainside, bank-to-bank—barely wider than our rods. We had a buy week from football and drove with a foldout state map of adjacent state whose smallest detail was state and county highways.
We high-centered a jeep on a boulder on a dirt lane up a mountain and decided (or had decided for us) that there would be our camp. We gathered and made a fire from the woods around us, and the one branch I could not break and did not burn became the fulcrum in following day that would free our Jeep from its condition.
There was a three-foot brown on the side of the stream when we found it, like a salmon expired after the spawn. We saw only one other fisherman that trip. Catch and release only—he carried another monster brown whose head stuck out of his hip waders where he carried it. “Gut hooked,” he said, and we just nodded; neither of us ever having seen or caught a brown like it before.
I went back there many times, one of my favorite accidental finds. We fished it in dead of winter; herded deer in the valley where they sheltered and were pushed down from the wooded snowy mountainsides. I fished it in summer, alone, for three days where the only other people I ever saw was a guided boat you could hear one bend upstream before it appeared. I’d tuck into the woods, disappear so they could have their solitude, and when they passed the stream and valley were mine alone again.
Nearly all those memories are twenty years. I’ll tell their stories as my own grandfather tells of fishing rivers that are now a reservoir and hunting woods that have long changed hands. The places are someone’s and something else—but the memories are mine: a single life, small stream—intimate because they’re “mine.”