Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers by John Gierach

Author:John Gierach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

13. RUNOFF

I grew up among sensible midwestern lake fishermen who didn’t much care for rivers and streams. Moving water was too unruly, forever arriving and departing like time itself and prone to seasonal personality disorders that made it unpredictable. My people weren’t exactly dour, but as Germanic heart-landers they were suspicious of the kinds of surprises kids and rivers regularly served up. They expected their children and their water to stand still and behave and at least the lakes didn’t disappoint them.

So I didn’t develop a taste for current until I moved west after college, and as with some of my other newly acquired appetites, I fell hard. The restlessness of streams matched the mood of my early twenties, and the enormity of their courses from snowmelt creeks to rivers to brackish tidewater to clouds that dropped more snow in the mountains was the kind of big idea I was learning to like. For that matter, after a childhood of bass lurking beneath lily pads, trout seemed impossibly quick and flawless, darting and hovering like UFOs in currents that must feel like a constant wind. I quickly came to love everything about streams—except runoff.

Even after more than enough time in Colorado to get used to it, I’m still discouraged by a mountain trout stream in full spring flood, rumbling with current, and opaque with mud and mats of beige foam whipped to a froth by plunge pools. Staring at this brown mess, the perky little size 16 dry flies I hope to be fishing here in six weeks seem unlikely to ever be useful again. I remind myself that in the mountains snow is life itself and that when it melts it has to go somewhere; also that trout eat well and grow fat in high water and that when the streams finally drop and clear the fish will be chubby and gullible, but it doesn’t help. Maybe I wouldn’t go fishing every day of my life even if I could, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to.

The spotty pre-runoff fishing here begins as early as the occasional warm spells in March. With the headwaters still locked in snow, the low country streams are clear and perfect, and although the water is often too cold for fishing, it sometimes warms enough on sunny afternoons to trigger brief hatches of small, hardy aquatic insects. When that happens it’s possible to actually catch a trout on a dry fly—a fresh miracle after a winter that’s dragged on too long. I try to get out whenever things seem promising to warm up my casting arm and work out the off-season kinks, but I know it’s borrowed time and I fret about the fishing as if it were a degenerative medical condition. How many good days do I have left? No telling, but not as many as I’d like.

Some years runoff begins gradually enough to provide fair warning—the current is a little swifter today than it was last week; it’s getting

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