Solstice Walleyes

   

     All outdoor pursuits of mine, especially fishing, are always at the whim of the seasons. Living near a coastal river amplifies the effects of the changing weather, makes the chills down my spine feel all the colder. River people aren't God-fearing people, river people are river-fearing people. 

    Winter's a sort of off-season on my stretch of the Delaware. The stripers have all bid us a big broom-tailed adieu, snakeheads and flatheads are lying comatose facedown in the mud until they're re-born come May with the sycamore leaves. What that leaves anglers with are walleyes and muskies. 

    I've been placed under a curse when it comes to muskie hunts, having fished the river for all these years and never having landed one. It seems every river rat I know has a bycatch muskie at the very least. I hooked two glide-bait fishing over the summer that I never got to stick. I've lost more than I can count. Times that I dedicate solely to muskie fishing are marred with natural disaster comparable to the plagues of Egypt. Walleyes, however, I can catch. 

    My first day fishing back home produced great success, as I visited old stomping grounds with a December river in a revived shade of brown following recent rains and snowmelt after one of the driest fall seasons in living memory. The color suited her. 

    The first walleye of the winter season hit a hot-steel X-rap on a steady retrieve, thumped it with the desperate aggression that walleyes are supposed to before it rolled over and slid right up onto the bank. It felt so good to be back, to be home where rivers run directly to the sea and the seasons feel more ephemeral than up in the mountains. 

    After the sun dipped down and moon began to reflect out from the prism of the marble-like eyes of a river walleye, I picked off one more fish before heading out, a twenty incher slowly crawling a plug over the bottom. I harvested both to eat as walleyes in the Delaware River are primarily a sterile and stocked creation with very little natural reproduction. However, I still made sure to spike them both and send their lifeblood seaward with a thanking wash in the river. 

    My fish-killing ritual has over the years, combined aspects of tradition, practicality, and spiritual functions. Spiking a fish in the head serves the purpose of a quick death, a humane dispatch to not let one of God's creations put down on earth for food and function suffer far longer than necessary. Bleeding the fish removes impurities and irons in the blood that can spoil meat quicker and cause complaints from individuals being served your fresh catch that it "tastes fishy." Finally, washing the blood in the water sends the essence of the fish to the Atlantic Ocean, at least on my side of the coast. We're made of water, the fish are made of water, the waters that they live in are all headed in a primordial coastal journey, and I'd like to give them a head-start. 

    By the time the winter solstice hit, the East Coast was covered in crystalline flurries of ice and snow right in time for the bustling holiday season. I spent the shortest day of the year scouting new walleye spots further north, before I found myself at the earliest possible evening across the river from the property of a friend of mine, Kyle, who lived right on the banks of the Delaware. A figure in black on the opposite side slid down the bank, made a cast, and appeared to hook a fish right away. I called Kyle. 

    "Is that you on the other side of the river?" 

    "Yup, and I've got a walleye in my hand." 

    I briskly walked across the bridge just as Kyle was releasing his twenty inch fish and joined him, both throwing plugs. Soon, I had a sixteen inch fish in my hand as the sun was going down. I then quickly picked off two keepers in rapid succession, one of which ended up tying my personal best at twenty-four inches. 

    

    By then it was almost completely dark and my guides were coated in ice that I would have to clear about every two casts and I was deciding to call it a day. As I brought my plug over the rock shelf I felt and slam and a backwards undulation with more moxie than any walleye had in the gas tank. I called water wolf, shouted, "muskie!" but then it turned over to reveal a mid-twenty walleye with one of the treble hooks stuck in the back, a hook that I popped out and instantly released. 

    The winter solstice carries a mixed baggage for a winter-grinch like me who also enjoys night fishing. When my fingers are frozen solid with iced rod guides to match, and my braided line is stiff from ice, I think about summer nights catfishing the Schuylkill or the Jersey shore boardwalks, and think about how much nicer it must be in sunny South Florida right now. However, I think I may need seasonality. This whole freezing-my-ass off to catch walleyes all winter long blows, but it makes me appreciate those warm summer nights so much more. 

Hemlock Headstones

 

    Our first snowstorm of the year hit on Wednesday night, blanketing my area with a soft cold sheet that cling tightly to the ends of the Earth, not wanting to let go. I had walked out of a yellow-warm and red brick classroom to a sudden chill and a dark night scattered with falling flakes like cold, cold ashes from a campfire. For the next two days it became bitterly cold, and bitter, bitter was the wind and wilder, wilder grew it's song as it howled with anger down the mountainsides. Maybe they started as a small breeze in a neighboring valley, a breezed that produced sighs of relief as they cooled throbbing temples when someone cracked open a window with a sweltering hot hearth 'neath. However, that breeze by this point had been kicked and thrown up and down the mountains and now raged, lashing out and rattling the dried leaves on the oaks and beeches, and all the people in between with a whistling shriek.

    However, when I woke up on Sunday, I was greeted by sunshine and birdsong. The snow and wind felt like a dream, folded up into a paper kite and thrown up into the air to spiral and drift every which way it could, up, up and away. It almost made me jealous, the whole inhumanity of it. The ability to bypass dead ends. 

    I did some half-hearted trout fishing in the lowland limestone valleys. The river was green and almost painfully cold from travelling snowmelt, the kind that leaves a little twinge of frost on all it passes through it's seaward, Eastward journey. The sky was bright, a baby blue with not a cloud in sight. The kind of sky that stays blue until it puts on a billowing gold fringe to mark the beginning of sunset. 

    I soon left the trout grounds and began to walk up, up through the ancient lowland hemlock growths studded with ferns and rocks that have seen hundreds of years pass through this mountain. Up the gradient, the composition of the mountain began to change from hemlock and yellow birch and ferns to the crooked spiraling ridge-top oaks trying to carve a living in an environment that gave them obstacles at every turn. I wish them the best of luck. 

    Nestled between the oaks and laurels were the bright yellow flowers of witch hazel. By November, when the forests have shed their greenery and donned their winter grey, witch hazel flows against the ebbing ephemeral fall tides. A lone bright spot, a late fall-early winter Pennsylvania forest is marred with the long finger-like yellow flowers of a witch hazel, and the silent insect-less woods are harmonized with the pitter-pattering of black seeds falling onto the dead leaves. 

    About a mile later brought me to the edge of the ridgetop, where you could gaze down the peaks of ridges past and see the winding snow-melt green river through the Pennsylvania lowland farm country. Generations ago, this ridge was a lookout point for the Lenape and Shawnee, who stood upon the peak and stared through that line where blue mountain met blue sky. 

    The Appalachian mountains have ancient, ancient origins. The mountains are the same as those of the Scottish highlands and the ridges and peaks of the Norwegian coastline, that were separated millions of years ago in the Continental divide. The Scots and Scandinavians have similar hollow folklore of witches and an air of the mythological that dwells deep within. Thousands of miles and millions of years away. All connected by mountains. 

The Fall Run

    By the time the first November gales reach the Jersey shore, a quiet gray rust has settled down all across the coastline. The bones of summertime boardwalks and the weather faded old signs of restaurants and fishing shacks line the streets like terracotta warriors. It's eerily quiet compared to the neon bustling mass that it stays all summertime long. And yet, on the outer sand beaches, the Jersey shore teems with life as it hosts the centerpiece for one of the largest annual migrations along the Atlantic coast, a melee of birds and bait and bass and blues. It's what fisherman up and down the right coast look forward to as the Fall Run. 

    I arrived in Seaside Heights before first light, and listened to the old familiar cries of gulls and the sound of rushing waves as I strapped on my waders in the parking lot. I missed the ocean very much, living in Central Pennsylvania these past few months. Cresting the narrow strip of sand dune, I rose to the sun, a blood-red glowing strip stretching across the horizon. The wind was howling in my face. Winds of the West, fish bite the best. 

    My arrival was timed with the outgoing tide, which had reached its peak around 4:00 AM. I threw around a pencil popper for a little bit, with nothing to show. Still, it felt fishy enough, magic hour sunrise, west wind in my face, that I refused to move. I tied on a darter and threw it into the wind as best as I could, gave a few fast cranks to dig it in behind the first white-cap, then slowly began to crawl it through the trough. On my second cast, my first bass of the fall hit. I felt the familiar old head-shakes and tail thumps of a striper, dragged the slot sized bass up onto the sand. I gave the fish a measurement, and seeing that it was 29 inches, decided to harvest it. My mama told me she wanted me to bring a fish home for dinner, and I couldn't refuse a direct order from mama. 

    I pulled out a knife, spiked the bass in the head, and bled it out, watching the red blood of the bass flow down the sand and get washed off into the ocean like the red blood of the horizon as the sun slowly rose. Thanked it for its sacrifice. 

    Throwing that fish on ice, I stopped by Grumpy's Bait and Tackle, one of the only establishments in the area that sees an influx of activity on the Jersey shore come summer's end. Bought a diamond jig, chatted with Ray about the recent bite, and went back out. 

    By now, the wind had picked up greatly and the bait had begun to set up right outside the beach. A pod of seagulls and gannets were working a pod of bunker up close. Very close. Inside the inner trough, close. These bunker were big too, full adults. And slashing through the bunker, corralling them like sheep dogs, were stripers of every size. 

    Bass behave differently based on the size of the available forage. Stripers eating anchovies and sandeels act stoned, lazily hunkering down on the couch. They definitely want to eat, but don't want to work too hard for it. Stripers on mullet and adult bunker on the other hand are full-drunk, aggressive, come out swinging. And this pod of fish seemed pretty shit-faced to me. 

    I put on the biggest plug I had, a giant wooden metal-lipped swimmer, and started working the edge of the school. Pretty quickly, I got a massive thump. This fish gave a few tail beats and took off towards the outer bar, burning a few yards of drag with it. My 5 year old Penn reel was also binding up from years of salt and sand exposure, so it took a bit of effort to turn the fish. Eventually, she broke the surface, shook her head, and dove back down. With each incoming wave though, I got this fish closer and closer, until I was able to drag her onto the sand in a surge of white water. I knew instantly this was my biggest bass ever. 

    I unhooked that 34 incher stuffed to the gills with adult bunker, knelt in the breaking surf, felt her clamp down on my thumb and draw blood. I released that fish and she swam off with a huge tail thump. 

    By now the big bait pod had push almost past, being corralled by stripers circling and slashing in an ancient south-ward dance performed every single fall for thousands of years. I managed to pick off two more slot-sized fish on a storm shad, fish that had lingered behind the school to pick off any wounded bunker that failed to keep up. 

    I fished that spot for a little longer, while some of my nearby anglers caught a few schoolies on metal jigs. After the tide switch, the wind died down and the beach lay out flat. I saw birds and bait working, but without gusts to push them tight to shore, they were way out of surf-casting range. I casted for a little bit and watched and casted and watched some more until I was no longer fishing but just lapsing into a methodical cycle of casting and watching the endless blue ocean with no expectations. All the while, listening. In the south, a pod of stripers and bunker broke the surface, way out of range. Heading south to the Chesapeake for the winter. I wish those boundless striped wanderers safe travels. 

    

    

Supermoon Trout and Natives

"I went out to the hazel wood, 

Because a fire was in my head 

And cut and peeled a hazel wand, 

And hooked a berry to a thread 

And when white moths were on the wing, 

And moth-like stars were flickered out, 

I dropped the berry in a stream 

And caught a little silver trout" 

- more Yeats, Song of the Wandering Aengus 

    I was standing on a grassy bank upstream of an old stone bridge, overlooking the soft and winding valley of Penn's Creek. A classic singing Pennsylvania freestone stream studded with boulders and conflicting currents whispering to the groves of armed honey locusts that guard both sides. They're tired of the creek, heard all she's had to say, and simply stand stone-faced and spiky to the world. 

    All of a sudden, a stiff breeze flies over the valley, parting the curtained clouds as a harbinger to the opening act. The supermoon shone on through, a rounded silver apple that lit up all that lay between mountains. The three hours past sundown melted away to an hour before, it was as bright as dusk. Instantly, a yip and a howl broke through, sending twisting whirlpool'ed ripples through the night air. The rest of the coyotes joined the fray. 

    I stepped down into the stream beneath the bridge and begin to let out fly-line. Hearing a trout rise directly across current, I made a cast with a deer-hair sculpin, slowly began to strip it in, before feeling a sudden stop, from the male brown trout that came off the opposite bank and gulped down my fly. 

    Bright nights aren't typically ideal for trout fishing, yet tonight proved an exception. I heard fish slurping food off the surface everywhere, casted to risers by sound and silhouette. I picked off two more trout as well as a pair of large native fallfish. 

    

    Night-fishing for trout has been something that has made me a much better angler, improved my fly-casting out of pure desperation to not throw streamers into trees, allowed me to look at trout streams in a way not many anglers get to know.

     In this day and age, too many people take in information simply from information. The connection between information and experience has been severed. Fishing and other outdoor pursuits has grounded me, allowed me to learn from experience, fail, make mistakes, triumph and always come away knowing more. Some days you catch, all days you learn. 

Rainbow Elephants and Circus Peanuts

 

    For the past month and a half, my home state of Pennsylvania has been in the struggling gripes of a drought. Philadelphia recorded 40 days without precipitation of any kind and our rivers in the Central Appalachians have been running consistently low, low enough that fishing during the day didn't feel right. Trout like to lie in fast deep-water, waiting for the current to bring them and endless supply of food like an all-you-can-eat buffet of mayflies and baitfish. However, lack of water makes them feel exposed to osprey-shaped perils from the heavens, and so fish will tend to hunker down in the bottom of the deepest holes or the thickest piece of available cover. 

    I've been fishing, but only for night-stalkers, the brown trout that leave their hiding spots under the cover of darkness to slink around the shallows and chase baitfish. I've been spending my nights wading through ink, listening to the rustling of reanimated oak-leaf corpses shaking on the branches like windchimes, beneath those dancing stars. 

    Yet on the second week of November, a whistling gale finally came through and brought with it a decent serving of liquid. This may have been a dull omen, as the 29 men on the Edmund Fitzgerald found out nearly 50 years ago to the day. Yet as a pollywog and land-dweller I brothe a huge, cold, foggy sigh of relief as the rain fell through the valley and soaked life into all that was green and gray. High winds canceled my morning Forestry classes, so I made a plan to do some streamer fishing in one of my favorite local spring-fed streams. 

    I threw a circus peanut for pretty much the whole time, tossing an olive articulated streamer at every undercut bank, log jam, and into seemingly in every willow along the riverbank. From the first underlying piece of wood I threw my fly at came a rainbow that swiped at the peanut broadside, turning its pink streaks out, flaunting its colors. Next cast, it ate properly. 

    As I walked upstream, one changed topographical feature that leaped out at me was the redds. Fall is spawning time for brown trout, and everywhere I looked there were fish laid out on circular, lighter colored patches in the gravel. This time of year, make sure to watch where you step and make an effort to not fish for trout on redds. Unless you're in the Great Lakes tributaries, where for some odd reason fishing for spawning fish is not only allowed but considered the season to do it. 

    A blindly thrown cross-current cast and suddenly something slams my circus peanut on a tight-line swing. A huge green-backed, pink-bellied fish surfaces, thrashing its head back and forth, trying to shake my fly. I get downstream of the fish, but it on the reel, and it runs upstream in a burst of drag. There I hold it as best as I can with a 6wt, each time I bring the net closer the rainbow freaks out and darts forward in another burst of speed, until it finally got tired enough fighting both me and the river and I manage to float the net around it. 

    This fish marks my second big rainbow I've gotten on a streamer this fall, while their European brown counterparts are busy with their ancient spawning dances. I'll admit, the denizens of this stream are a little strange, with mixes of wild fish, stocked fish, and mutants that get washed down from the trout club several miles upstream. I don't know how much it counts, or how wild/stocked that fish truly was. Fish are strange, fish politics are strange, and that's something that'll never truly change. 

Waiting for Frost

 "I am not oblivious to the sun as it lowers on its stem, not fooled by the clock holding off, not deceived by its tired hands holding forth" - Dorianne Laux 

Rose hips will sweeten with the first frost, the first sudden, crisp, cold snap that forces them to suck in all their stored sunshine sugars, clutch them tightly to their hearts and not let go. It's been too warm for that here in State College, the earth runs too red-blooded and hot here throughout the Football Season, and so they've been gathered with little avail. Still, I was in the mood for some rose-hip tea, so I went to one of my most bountiful patches near me, on the edge of a park bordering a memorial for a war in our country's short, struggled, bloody rose-hip red history. 

Usually, I don't prefer the gluttonous feeling of succumbing to quantity over quality in the world of wild foods. However, on the Eastern deciduous forests chock full of non-native and plentiful introductions, I don't really mind picking invasives clean. We have native roses, but a vast majority of our prickly floral canes belong to a European invader, multi-flora rose. I hit the rose-hip lottery too, as the bushes were studded with ruby-red fruits like an imperial crown of the East. My hat was quickly filled and I popped hips into my mouth as I went, crunching into the cold, dry fruit and feeling the faded stored summer sugars and their slightly floral notes graze across my tongue. Soon, I feel into a monotonous rhythm of popping, crunching, spitting.  

Having conquered no less than about 1/200th of the rose-hips I saw, soon an overwhelming and human urge to climb a mountain took over me, a possession of solvitur ambulando that often takes ahold of me when little else does, and so I drove a little down the road over the Rothrock State Forest and crawled through some rhododendron and laurels.

 It was a chilly, very dry and bluebird day, the kind of cold dry that gets into your lungs and envelops your entire being. I did make my way up the mountain and found a decent amount of wintergreen as well. It's one of my favorite plants in Central Pennsylvania, a delightfully frosty trail snack. 

    I ended up finding a nice clearing in the middle of Bear Meadows with soft mossy rocks everywhere and promptly dozed off, letting some of the last October rays start to slowly bake me before the cold ice bath of the November gales set in. 

On Light Pollution

 "And bending down besides the glowing bars

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face 'neath a cloud of stars" 

- Yeats 

When the first electronic lights were created, when people first began to build our molten cities of steel and glass and concrete, stripping our mountains bare of stone and our mother of bones... 

    When it was decided that the blood of electricity had to course through the veins of every dwelling, when the high-rises were built, that is when our species began to forget about God. A city sky-line is dark, with only the brightest and luckiest of stars being able to shine through, while every other star and story is kicked to the curb for the crime of daring. 

    I reject the phrase, "black as night!" 

    Cellphones and cameras never do it justice. How could they? How could you photograph creation, how could you compress light-years into pixels.  

    People were always meant to be in awe when we look up. The night sky was meant to terrify, to inspire, to fill us with a sense of giddy joy and wonder every time we stood in a clearing on a cloudless night and connected our eyes to the cosmos. For thousands of years, our proof of divinity, of beauty, was unavoidable from sundown to sunrise. Light pollution murdered our connection to creation, stabbed it in the back. 

    

October's For the Trout, Year Two

 

"...a little like October in a sense... in love with itself"  - Michael Palmer

    Fall's the great ephemeral American time for gratitude, a time of reflection and change. It's also probably the most overhyped season of the year for wild brown trout fishing. Every single fly shop in the area is posting videos about the epic BWO and October caddis hatches, the sick streamer bite going on. Back home, the striper bite is heating up along the beaches of the Jersey shore. Everything's in a rush come autumn. 

    Native brookies: some of the most incredible species we have in the East. They're resilient yet delicate fish that have survived in little cold, clean, pockets of mountain streams all throughout Appalachia. I've been trying to emulate them lately, attempting to be quiet, colorful, quick, and utterly intolerant of conditions where I can't be my best. 

    Fall is spawning time for brook trout, when the males turn their seasonally festive pumpkin orange and begin fighting for spawning habitat. In my opinion if you're wading for brookies, you're not in the right places. However, if you somehow have boots in the water in a brook trout stream, keep an eye peeled for their circular spawning redds, and just watch your step. I approach mountain stream brook trout different than I do with browns. Brown trout fishing for me is all about chucking big meat flies, attempting to get the biggest fish in the hole to kill something. When I'm on a brookie stream you can jump across, the goalpost shifts from catching the biggest fish or even the most fish. I just want the prettiest one. 

    On this morning so crisp you could reach out and snap the air in half, I managed to catch a few colored up ones on a Parachute Adams. I never throw anything but single dry flies for brookies, and never will fish anything else. Free-stone mountain streams are small and unforgiving enough that there is no need to fish slow and technical. Fish living in them can't afford to pass up any opportunities. Maybe that's another admirable quality of a brook trout. 

    After spending a few hours up in the mountains, I followed the path of rain down to a larger, winding creek at the valley basement, where the brookie stream was demoted to tributary status and the hickory tussock moths were scurrying around the groves of shagbark and bitternut. I moved a few browns and ended up landing three on a small articulated Peanut Envy. 

    For the entire fall, Central Pennsylvania has been cursed with below average stream levels. I prefer to approach trout fishing in my local rivers like a river fisherman instead of a trout fisherman. What are the flows like? Where's the structure where big fish like to hide? How do I present a fly best to trigger a fish to kill it? These questions will catch you better fish than learning the scientific taxa of aquatic macroinvertebrates. However, this approach hasn't been super helpful recently when there's barely a piss-trickle of water in many of our streams. Spring Creek has been about as low as I've ever seen it, and you can walk through pretty much all of Spruce without getting wet above the belt. 

    Here's the thing though: catching fish is pretty much all just a combination of location and timing. My favorite timing, especially in low water? Go at night when all the smart anglers who don't avoid personal responsibilities are tending to such matters. The night fishing recently has been great, stripping mouse flies and skating muddlers for audible brown trout. 

    Last night, I spent the evening beneath a bridge at Penn's Creek whilst the sun slowly danced down across the valley. One fish was moved during the daylight on a streamer. As soon as it got dark, I threw a muddler cross-current and heard a big swipe break the surface right behind it. Continued stripping and I soon came tight with an 18 inch night-time brown trout, my new personal best. I had just released that fish and made a cast upstream, half paying attention as my muddler swung past me in the current, when suddenly I hear a deep gurgle and a loud smack, one that moved more water than any other night-time hit I've ever had. I raise my rod to nothing there. Just a single giant October ghost. One that I'll keep searching for. 

Aurora

 "I never saw magic crazy as this, never saw moons, knew the meaning of the sea." 

- Nick Drake, Northern Sky

I've yet to drink my fill on annual astrological events. The solar eclipse here in Central Pennsylvania was about as ephemeral as they come, with a four second glimpse through a window of cloudless sky in a sea of gray being my only sighting. The northern lights made an appearance back home in May, and I spent some time looking for them while out striper fishing, but a slight drizzling rain had persisted all night. Yet this October night was crisp and cold and clear enough for the aurora's second coming to shine on through bigger and better. 

    I didn't even know they would make a showing along the East Coast until my roommate informed me of such a thing right before sundown. Any other personal responsibilities for the night were soon demoted to the shadows of afterthoughts, and I raced off for the Penn State Arboretum. 

    Upon arrival at sundown, pink striations were already lighting up the sky. I laid down in an empty grassy field and looked up. People always forget to look up. How horribly incompetent our species is at contemplating vastness! Perhaps that is why we ogle so profoundly at major changes in the sky, that we're just so unused to the macrocosm, the idea that our world is so much bigger than us.

    My loner facade soon began to crumble, however, as my friend Matt and his brother soon joined us, and I then linked up with my friends Ethan and Mar, and we watched the striations pulse along and away across the Big Dipper and beyond. 

    At first, they were mostly pinks and purples, which slowly gave way to muted blues and grays and finally greens, life-green bands that lit up the sky every which direction, full of magic. 

The pictures taken in this article were captured by much better photographers than me, most specifically my friends Ethan Feldman and Mar Escarcena 

Sumac Lemonade

 

    Sumac lemonade tastes as sun-baked as the waning of September, as sour as the first apples.  The rains have washed away most of the flavor, seeping it down the fuzzy branches and into the silty dark soil below. However, enough still remains as long as memories of August, and enough is enough for sumac lemonade. My little sister Lauren and I dashed out of the car on a sunny morning on Goat Mountain, stumbling into a sumac tree with its spiraled bright red crowns playing queen of the forest. Most were out of reach, but Lauren managed to knock down a few crowns with a stick and the ones we tasted, while they felt like eating lemondrops off of a carpet, still were nice and tart. We knocked down and harvested about 4-5, sorted the brown seeds out, and left the red ones to seep into a bowl of water like the rain washing down the sumac of summer right into the topsoil and forever. Sweetened up the next morning with a bit of honey and it turned out wonderfully tart, a welcome drink to sip on and think of October to come. 

Big Meat Flies

     "The serious fly-fisherman's knowledge of these fish draws heavily on science, especially the easygoing, slightly bemused, English-style naturalism of the last century, but it periodically leaves the bare facts behind to take long voyages into anthropomorphism and sheer poetry." 

    - John Gierach (1/21/1946-10/3/2024). Rest in piece to one of the greatest writers to pick up a fly rod. Trout Bum is such an important book in my life. Thank you John Gierach, and I hope you're off catching brookies in that big celestial forever. 

    At this point in the trip, I was soaked to the bone. Central Pennsylvania has been covered by a rain for over a week straight, remnants of the hurricanes wreaking havoc to our South. We were more fortunate than our brothers and sisters on the other side of the Mason Dixon line though, and the Appalachians managed to dissipate most of the storms before it crash landed here. Instead of bouncing even further north, they lingered, heavily and steadily like a gray blanket. 

    I'm being a heathen, throwing a big black articulated meat-fly, force-feeding trout instead of nymphing or dry fly fishing. Hatch chasers can wax philosophical about the impurities and barbarisms of streamer fishing all they want, but that split second when a brown trout evolves from insectivore to piscivorous from the sight of a streamer swimming by will quicken the heart faster than a cup of good strong black coffee. 

    My first real foray into articulated streamer fishing began with a small rainbow that appeared from an undercut bank, jacking my fly and essentially hooking itself. A beautiful and deadly flash of silver and green that ignored all common sense, let himself be overtaken by impulse. 

    I pushed further up the creek, elevated by the rain and a sense of excitement for what lay ahead. Every raindrop every time my streamer hit an undercut bank and I slowly stripped it in, I watched behind for followers. I also found some autumn olives, a delightful ephemeral October treat. 

    Autumn is supposed to be streamer season, when big browns lose all sense of self preservation and decide it's time to start killing shit before the spawn and the chills of winter. My experience with seasonal river fish is slightly different. Even though fall can bring rains and overcast skies, after a long hot summer water levels are still typically much lower, especially compared to the snowmelt of spring. Still, you can run into some banner days fishing big baits in the fall.  

    After breaking my way across the whistling riffles I made my way to a piece of flat-water surrounded by willows on both sides. A half-hearted cast underneath one led to the biggest rainbow trout I've ever hooked coming out and crushing the streamer. I stripped most of the line in, but as soon as I pulled out the net she ran the fly-line back onto the reel and forced me to put on more pressure. Still, I had 12lb tippet on and it wasn't much of a fight. 

    Measuring at around 23 inches, this fish was a proper Spruce Creek specimen. Was it wild? Maybe. Did it also possible wander downstream from the private trout clubs where they're hand-fed pellets all day? Also a high possibility. Still, I caught it on public water a long ways-away enough from the private clubs that I was pretty happy with that fish and send her on her merry way to hopefully go sip midges and mayflies instead of dogfood. 

    

Hurricane Relief

 

    The recent floods in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene have devastated our brothers and sisters in Southern Appalachia. The human toll is already astronomical and will only increase as floods recede and searchers move in. Please donate if you can to volunteer organizations that are doing saint's work in this time of need:

https://www.bpr.org/bpr-news/2024-09-28/list-ways-to-donate-and-help-flood-victims-in-western-north-carolina-after-hurricane-helene

God bless all of the brave volunteers and first responders helping save lives in the aftermath, and my heart goes out to anyone that lost property or loved ones during this terrible event. Lots of love. 

Mousing Night-time Browns

     

    "I lived Narcotic hours in which like the Taoist Chuang-tse I worried about butterflies and who was dreaming what" - Ed Abbey 

    An Appalachian river at nighttime is a near surreal experience. The low whine of insects pose riddles and koans in your ears and every single splash in the dark is warped and twisted by your mind to be the twisting of a 30 inch brown trout that just sipped off the surface a mouse, frog, or baby bird. Imagination runs wild at night, morphing sounds and little pockets of sight into feelings that tickle up the spine and pound in the back of the throat. 

    I've been getting into the night-fishing game as of late. Our rivers in Central Pennsylvania right now are running low and clear due to the lack of rain, leaving brown trout feeling over-exposed to the outside world at day. However, under the cover of night when ospreys and eagles are all tucked away, they feel right at home and in the mood to kill stuff. When you're standing in the complete darkness of a riverbank with only the hum of no-see-ums and the rippling riffles, launching a mouse fly on a 6wt as close to the opposite bank as possible, slowly stripping it across the surface, and then come tight from a river brown trying its darn hardest to drown your fly, it's a magical thing. Makes you want to stand and holler to the owls and the Appalachian mountain stars above. 

    Before this night, I spent a bit of time looking for dry fly opportunities on Spruce Creek. October Caddis are the main hatches here in Pennsylvania this time of year, but on this day, they were showing in very few numbers. A few fish were rising here and there, and I managed to pick off a few small wild browns and rainbows, mostly blind casting. Hatches are a fickle thing out East, I try not to chase them. The highlight of Spruce Creek ended up being an easily 22 inch brown I spotted lazily hovering around the deepest pool of the creek, utterly uninterested in even moving any fly presented to him. 

    In the valley bottom, the black walnuts have just lost their leaves while the sugar maples and basswoods are starting to turn and the sassafras lights up the hills like a twisting, winding inferno. I cut a twig of it, chew out the oils, twist it around my fingers. Sassafras has some incredible properties. The oils quicken the heart-rate and sweat glands, giving it a medicinal property. Some daring folks have even successfully synthesized MDMA with the stuff. 

   I made the decision to move to a slightly larger river with much more flat water before dark. Still chewing my sassafras twig, I sat upon the riverbank and watched. Some caddis were hatching, a few fish were rising here and there but nothing super violent, no carnage or blitzes of trout and insect. Soon, the sun sank down below the mountains and the stars slowly turned on above. I rigged up a mouse fly and slowly walked into the water. 

    I made a cast across current, a short upstream mend, and squinted in the dusk of the river to the silhouette of my fly slowly swinging across the current. On my third cast, my eyes barely made out the splash of a trout swiping behind my fly. On the fourth, I hooked him. 

    I've had a lot of moments in my seven years of trying to fool ichthyological life that a simply "holy shit that actually worked" can summarize. Most recently were my first pike and bowfin, but my first snakehead, first fish on topwater, first trout on the fly all come to mind. My first brown trout on a mouse fly at night was up there. 

    Soon, it grew fully dark, with a large bright gibbous moon above my head and clouds of insects that swarmed by face every time I turned on the light to land a fish or undo a tangle. Night fishing's all about feel, something I learned in the walleye scene back home, and I soon came tight to another fish just upstream, one that put the line on the reel and made a huge run downstream. I flipped my light on, got a face full of insects, but was rewarded with my biggest brown trout on the fly so far. 

    Soon after the release of that trout and the settling of the waning gibbous moon above the river, I slowly but surely waded up to a more open section of river, a pool too slow for me to effectively nymph during the day. At night, the floodgates went wide open. Almost every cast I had a swipe, follow, boil right behind the fly. I ended up landing 8 more fish in that stretch, including a rock bass that took me by surprise. 

    My last fish of the night ended up being another 16 inch brown, one that had barely sipped the mouse off the surface, so subtly that I didn't see the take and hooked the fish as I began my retrieve. 

    At this point of the night, it was getting late and my mind was playing more tricks on me than I would have liked, meaning the time for me to pack it up was nigh. I drove for a while along the backroads of Central Pennsylvania, nothing but my own thoughts and music belting along to each other in the cool night air. Eventually, I stopped in a section of Rothrock State Forest, pitched a tent, and slept there, under a blanket of stars that shone as bright as the jewels of the East without the hustling neon of city lights to overtake them. 

Brook Trout and Bears and God

"Now I am drunk on vastness" - Giuseppe Ungaretti 

   Earlier today I was at one of the largest football stadiums in the Western Hemisphere, watching my school play some small team out of the edge of no-where, Ohio, amidst a sea of blue and white fans hungry for blood. Americans are the most violent and passionate peoples on the planet; no matter where you came from, you needed a few screws loose enough to roll here, this country full of misfits and vagrants from sea to shining sea. And nothing gets our blood pumping quite like college football. 

    After watching about a quarter of the game, getting cursed out by a father at least three beers deep judging by the crushed tin cans at his feet right in front of his young son for trying to move past, I eventually had enough, leaving the stadium to an empty State College and deciding to go do some brook trout fishing. 

    A few miles, ten brookies and a brown later, and I casted off the last of the small handful of dry flies that I brought with me into a cedar. I decided to then turn back, look for some mushrooms. I ended up finding some birch polypores, a small white shelf fungus used to make amadou, an ancient type of firestarter. Simply cut the polypore into thin strips, boil them in ash, beat the living crap out of it with a rock, mallet, or other flat object, and you have yourself a tinder that will catch a spark like nobodies business. So useful, even Otzi the Iceman had some amadou on him when he was defrosted so many thousands of years later, clinging to fire, to warmth. 

    I made my way across the ridge and past massive sets of logs piled up like the old bones of giants across the moss-covered landscape. I placed a foot on what I thought was a moss covered rock that turned out to be a moss covered not much at all, causing me to fall through and tumble, tumble down the mountain hitting several rocks and logs on my gravity propelled tour until I stopped with a crash, my hand landing in a soft patch of moss just inches away from a jagged rock waiting to split something open. Ouch. 

    I'm stubborn about locations, not really giving a shit when it comes to writing and sharing about spots everybody and their mother knows about, but as someone who likes to disappear into the woods, out of cell service, for longer and greater hours than what my mother would be comfortable with, this serves as a reminder of the dangers of doing what we love, for it is with danger that we find the most love and life. I chalk it up to divine intervention that I've wandered through this world relatively unscathed, for it is in wilderness where God is most present. Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Siddhartha, all of them found this out first hand. 

    At the moment, I'm in a large and twisted hickory above a sea of it's smaller brethren, all waiting for sunlight in the dimly lit shadow of the north slop at dusk. I have a good idea of what made me turn, for God designed the paws of Ursa americanus to be light as shadow yet lumber with the weight of hundreds of pounds of meat and bone and fur, supporting a hulking dark mass of fish and berries and nuts and fawns and dumpster waffles and all in between. At the end of this turn, 20 yards away, was my first wild PA black bear, lumbering away and up the slope upon seeing me, where she must have thought I was eating up her hickory nuts for the winter. 

     

Rothrock State Forest 8/31

 

    Last day of August, an official farewell and adieu to the waning summer as it staggers out sundrunk and tipsy on life. This was one of the hottest summers I've experienced on record, as if the sun had grown tired of our East-Coast indifference and decided to demonstrate a taste of her power in case we forgot. It seems like we've been getting a lot of these summers lately, no longer Indian but something harsher and fiercer entirely. 

    The weather today didn't feel like summer. A massive fog has engulfed most of State College and instead of dissipating in the afternoon it stayed, spitting the occasional torrent of rain and lighting down at us. The rain didn't dull the experience thought, but instead, served to deepen the colors of life. Stone became dull, but the mosses and lichens almost glowed a brilliant green and the late summer foliage showed off its stored chlorophyll through the mist. The occasional shelf fungus, artists bracket, and oyster mushroom also sequined the forest. 

    I spent most of the morning on a Central PA brook trout stream that hugged a huge swath of State Forest land. The stream still ran clear and cold and the brookies were looking up. It didn't matter what dry flies I threw, anything that splashed the surface got ate. I was fishing with mostly caddis patterns, catching natives in almost every single plunge pool I managed to bow and arrow cast into. 

    At one point, I came across a perfect plunge pool, breaking white water and a log condensed into a little tiny oasis. I got two small brookies on two consecutive casts. Eventually, my fly got waterlogged past the point of dessicant powder being able to save it, so I put on a fresh Adams and lay it down into the same pool. My fly drifts for a second, maybe more, lingers, then gets taken under by the nicest fish of the day, a beautiful black-mawed male brookie, not quite in fall colors yet, but getting there. Brook trout are one of the most precious jewels of the Appalachians, a place where hundreds of years people lay down their lives beneath the hills looking for fortune. The fact that a char, native to the Arctic Circle, managed to survive and hold out in mountain streams from Maine to Virginia is nothing short of remarkable. It's hard not to get a little touch of fisherman's nostalgia when you pull out a native brookie and to you and the sun it reveals all its vermiculations reminiscent of the coal-rich valleys and the spots that shine as bright as stars on a clear Appalachian autumn night. 

    I walked further upstream, through the moss covered rocks and ferns, picking off more brookies as I went. The more I walked, the more the sky began to darken and darken, a foreboding that eventually left me unable to see my fly. As soon as I strip my line back in and clip my Adams to my hook keeper, it stars pouring, a rain that comes in waves yet keeps the pressure on and on. I sat under a tree and breathed in. The air is so clear up in these mountains. 

    Eventually after the rain let up, I made my way back downstream. I stopped by a local small creek connected to a nearby lake and caught a few pickerel on an orange blossom special. Chain pickerel are another beautiful native species, but one that's unfortunately much less appreciated. The takes on streamers were visual and explosive in that trademark Esox heart-stopping eat. 

    I made my way to a trailhead on Rothrock State Forest. By then, the fog had rolled in and coated the landscape like a thick gray gravy. Anything 20 years in the distance may as well have been 2,000. I found an old beech with a suitable rock underneath and sat down, surrounded by greens and grays of all ilks. The greens of the ferns, mosses, lichens, leaves, the grays of the stones and mist all began to blend together until I too became something still and gray and green and could have stayed that way for a while in the precious stillness with no sound, not even from the croak of a tree frog or the whine of a no-see-um, the quietest August I have experienced in a long time. 

    All of a sudden, the silence is shattered by a low drumming noise from behind me, a reverberation that stirs the whole forest around me. The crack of a twig, and I turn to spook a big turkey that was striding up behind me. Neither of us knew they were there. He looked to be an old bird too, by turkey standards. He's probably been running around this mountain for the last three years, with this winter possibly being his last. 

    Eventually, the sun peaked out and gilded the fog, more and more until it dissipated into air and the woods started up again in it's usual summer cacophony. I had to leave soon afterwards, with a heavy heart, and went back down the mountain away from my forested precious reality through the summer waning, before fall sets these hills ablaze.