Passaic

The water wolves are hiding beneath the flooded ridges and valleys of timber and 

Amongst the dead branches and bones of old lawn chairs bob basketballs and pre-pierced needles 

And the fumes from the refinery that droops and seeps into their gaping maws 

That cause the melancholic squonkish tear duct that exists in every pickerel 

They don't care, they just sit back into their twisted, matted nests and 

Wait... wait... wait... 

Until that false sense of urgency slices through like a filet knife through y-bone 

Clattering along the bumpy baby-blue sky-blue life-blue road 

Water wolves can't make up their mind, play with their food, half the time snatch it out of the waiter's hand before it even reaches the table 

And the other half of the time that false urgency halts 

Like it did in white-tail fawn who spooked from the brush pile upon my approach 

The Great Green Grinnell

     Many different things make up the cultural identity of the state of New Jersey, such as its large coastline, large sandwiches, and large amounts of traffic. Most of said traffic gets concentrated throughout a narrow corridor in the Central-Western part of the state that meanders North-East, creating a concrete race-way connecting Philadelphia to New York City. This highway also separates New Jersey into two different playgrounds for outdoorsmen and women to hunt, fish, explore, and fall in love with. The first of them is the heavily wooded deciduous forests of North Jersey, full of black bears and trout and endless possibilities of being lost and being found. North Jersey is cool, but it's the vast and tannic pine forests of South Jersey, in all its swampy glory, that I've been ate up with recently. 

    My addiction to snakehead fishing is no secret. Nothing eats a topwater lure like a snakehead and nothing forces me to explore new water to look for new topwater hits than snakehead fishing. And like any serious addict, I'm constantly chasing new highs. So when my longest fishing partner Max called me up to chase snakeheads at a South Jersey marsh, I instantly agreed. 

    The drive down was almost an hour through some of the worst traffic in the Philadelphia area, a congealed mass of gears and oil churning away at the ever-under-construction yet never-maintained roads of South-East PA. Yet, I finally made it to the beacons of the Delaware, one of the many bridges that connects the two states, and flew down the interstate fast and violent as a Great Blue Heron towards the marshes. 

    I arrived and pulled off on the side of the dust-clouded road to a hot tidal flat choked with cattails and lily pads, perfect for snakeheads. However, bowfin fishing was also a tickle in the back of my mind, so I had caught a half-dozen redbreast sunfish from my local creek before I left. A bloody chunk of sunfish went out under a float, a topwater frog was tied on my other set-up, and a throbbing sun melted everything together. Another angler walked out from the brush and sparked up a conversation. As I was talking with him, half paying attention, a large black wake comes out and crushes my topwater. I let the snakehead eat, set the hook, and it thrashes on the surface for a split second before my rubber frog goes flying in the air and lands in the middle of the hot dry freeway behind me with a splat. I let my new friend throw a cast at the same fish, it eats again, and the same exact thing happens. He turns to me with a sigh. 

    "I've had five fucking snakes eat on top today and I've landed none of them. Water temps got them all finicky." 

    "Might try subsurface then." I responded. "I could probably get one to eat a fluke" 

    "That'll probably work. I never use them though. If they don't eat a frog, I don't want to catch them." 

    My trusted pink zoom fluke went on regardless, my new friend left, and Max arrived. Pretty soon, while fishing a new patch of lily pads, a wake appears behind the lure, I set the hook into a brick wall and soon land my first snakehead of the year, a roughly 4 lb coconut-head. 

    As I go to climb up from my landing perch, with the fullest intentions of tossing the snakehead into a cooler for the fryer, it gives a signature snakehead-death roll, unhooking itself, slicing my fingers with the gill rakers, and falling back into the water in the blink of an eye. I guess it's not a successful snakehead day if there's no blood drawn. I washed it off in the swamp water, letting the rust-red blood mingle together with the tannins like the way my best friend Sharkey and I cut our fingers to become blood brothers with some extremely tetanus-prone metal object on the red-sun-baked school playground so many springs ago. 

    All of a sudden, Max's float springs to life and dashes across the water. He sets the hook and instantly, a pissed off thrashing bowfin breaks the surface and snaps him off clean. Before we came to this location, we knew bowfin fishing was a possibility, but not likely as they were probably too busy in their spawning rituals. Now, it was reality. I chunked up a sunfish and threw it out under a float parallel to a set of lily pads and waited with near giddy anticipation. 

    While we waited for bowfin bites, both Max and I threw a variety of lures for snakeheads, managing to each stick a few smaller ones. They were being very finicky though, refusing to break the barrier between water and open sky and only eating deep. However, I did catch one on a chunk of dead sunfish that almost convinced me that he was a bowfin. 

    Finally, after almost an hour of picking through turtle bites and non-committal fish, Max gets a run with a lot more spring in the step. He sets the hook and a massive hole opens next to the pads, a melee of thrashing and spitting, and soon, his first eyespot bowfin is on the line. She fights all the way to the bank, where I precariously drag it up onto shore and the hooting and hollering commences. 

    Recent news from the past year had stirred up the rough fish community, where biologists had discovered that bowfin were actually two different species of fish. The northern strain was reclassified as the Eyespot Bowfin, named for their fake eyes sprouting from the tails, while the southern strain without the signature spot retained their original plain moniker. They were already a fish with many names. Swamp trout, cyprus trout, choupique, grinnell, choctaw, grundal, dogfish, and more regionally specific ones you'd have to travel far and wide to learn. 

    While the snakeheads were all killed and their flesh enjoyed by friends and family, we made sure to release the bowfin. Invasive snakeheads and native bowfins are often confused for one another, as they occupy similar habitats and both have long, brown, serpentine bodies. Look for the short stubby head and round anal fin of a bowfin, compared to the long head, mottled pattern, and long anal fin of a snakehead. Kill all the snakeheads you want to eat, they're delicious and invasive and plentiful, but I'd recommend releasing most bowfin you catch. 

    The sun slowly danced down between the pines and the shadows cooled down the steaming blacktop and yellow-green lily pads and duckweed. Everywhere, red-winged blackbirds emerged from their perches between the cattails and flew, flew, left and right, singing to whoever would hear. A chorus of peepers and bullfrogs sung back-up vocals and the whole swamp hummed along, totally alive. 

    All of a sudden, my bowfin rod also springs to life and I set the hook. My heavy baitcaster doubles over and a thrashing shatters the surface of precious stillness, as my first bowfin ever fights all the way to the bank. I turn her around a culvert and get a near heart-attack when the fish takes a run that leaves my braid dangerously close to the sharp concrete edge. Finally, I manage to bring her around and Max grabs the fish and drags it up under the bank, a beautiful green grinnell in all her spawning patterns lit up on full display for the world. 

    And to close out our day, as soon as I released that fish and threw out one more chunk, I catch another bow, a smaller male that ate as soon as my bait hit the water. 

    Eventually, it got too dark to see out floats and Max and I decided to call it a day, super tired and sun-baked but incredibly happy with how the day turned out. I turned the Buick northwards and drove out of the swamps beneath the last wisps of a dying aurora, and contemplated the many cuts on my fingers and knuckles sustained throughout this trip. It's not a successful snakehead trip without some bloodshed. Also the traffic on the way back was God-awful. 

    

Canal Bones

    Man, where to begin? Today was a day full of surprises... 

    It was supposed to be my first snakehead trip of the year, the kick-off to a potentially duckweed-choked summer full of frog explosions and death-rolls and the gnashing of teeth in jaws of iron capable of snapping 30 lb braid and twisting hooks around and backwards. Early season snakeheads aren't always like that though. They typically move slow, eat slow, will merely peck at a silver-plattered chatterbait or swimbait rolled along the bottom. If you can coax one to the surface, they'll lazily follow and slap around a popper or frog, narry receiving the childhood memo of not playing with your food. 

    My walk to the snakehead spot takes me along an old canal, once used for shipping and trade along the Delaware in colonial times and now little more than a long ago carved and flowing ditch along the ancient river that's still cruised by the odd snapping turtle and spawning carp. I've occasionally caught stocker rainbow and brown trout, largemouth bass, pickerel, and other loose oddities from the place, nothing extremely out of the blue but there was always life. 

    This time, after returning for the first time since August, the canal was in disarray. The rock-beds and sunken timber that I used to be able to pull crappies and largemouth from were on dry land. The canal which used to holdover trout until the hottest months of an Indian summer was reduced to a simple sludge-brown trickle with no sign of even a carp. The "Stocked Trout Waters" sign nailed to a nearby oak was almost comical. I trudged along for the mile long trek upstream, if you could even assign an upstream and downstream direction to the sludge, and found that the large condo near the source of the canal had begun construction on what new lavishes, only God knows. A fallen tree had cut off a few powerlines right below, but all around their little Versailles, trenches were being dug and machinery was in a mechanical, buzzing array to clear trees for the expansion of a new water-front property, coming soon! 

    Skirting the construction in disgust, retiring around a game-trail guarded by watchdogs of stinging nettle and sumac, I ended up down at the river and at my old snakehead stomping grounds. A chatterbait was run through with no avail. I tried a tube jig and managed to pull out a lazy largemouth. The river was running too high for me to continue further up so I went down and fished a small eddy behind an island that a guy I met last winter walleye season told me about. 

    My first cast behind the island with a spook and a crocodile-like wake suddenly appears behind it. I threw back in, walked the spook for a few sweeps and it's engulfed by a toilet-bowl flush. All I can remember was setting the hook, a snapping sound, splashings, and nothing but slack line and the sound of the river rolling along in all her blissful ignorance. 

    You ever have those days where all of a sudden, nothing seems to be going your way? Suddenly, I was casting into trees, getting snagged in seemingly snag-less holes, and couldn't buy a bite to save my life. Sitting down beside an old sycamore and listening to the soft, beautiful dismissiveness of the ripples, I cut off my leaders, placed them in my trashbag, and slowly stretched out fresh fluorocarbon, methodically weaving it back into the braided mainline with an FG knot. Promising unfinished business with that spot, I packed out and headed back to the car to fish a second location, picking up any discarded plastic I passed on the way. As Grey Berrier from the PA Outdoor Writers Association likes to say, to anyone that will listen, "there's no season and no bag limit for picking up litter." 

    Upon arrival at the second location, I stood in the shadow of Goat Mountain and breathed in the river-water and river-air for a minute, before tying on a swimbait. Two casts in and that signature walleye-thump reverberates down the line. I set the hook and pull out a roughly 15 inch marble-eye, a keeper in our inland lakes, but merely a rat in the Delaware. Two casts later, I get another and soon, I begin a slow and steady pick of small walleyes in numbers that would make a winter-time river rat blush. They lacked in the size department, however. 

    As the sun slowly crept past Goat Mountain and winked away from view, I decided to make a move to a spot that could become impossible, or probably just a bitch, to navigate when it got too dark. The wade was somewhat sketchy, and in my infinite, overcomplicating wisdom I decided to challenge myself by walking across a fallen tree, but I arrived at a peninsula that stabs out a quarter ways into the river, creating a shallow rock bar that you can walk out into the middle of and throw topwater lures to both banks. In one last hurrah before it got dark, I managed to pull a decent smallmouth that barely sipped a popper of the surface. She had battle scars too, multiple heron cuts and a dorsal fin that was worn down to nothing. A fish with stories between the scales. 

    I drove back home right around magic hour of sunset, a billowing pillow of pinks and oranges, window down and breeze in my hair, flying down a Pennsylvania backroad with the psychedelic melodies of Sturgill Simpson singing out to the world from the Buick, wishing I could be there forever. 

    

Muck Around and Find Out

    I arrived back home from State College on Wednesday night, white-eyed and missing the sights, sounds, and tastes of South-East PA like hell. This morning, I went looking for the last few straggling shad that may have ignored all biological impulse and hesitated to go upstream, dance, and die. I ripped a flutter-spoon and then a shad dart, up, across, and around an old shad hole with nothing to show for it. A few fish breached. I thought I saw lavender, but the visions could be simply chalked up to a divine combination of wishful thinking and ghosts. Probably too late, but you never know. 

    I tried for smallmouth and I tried for walleyes as well, succeeding to a limited degree on both fronts. The size wasn't quite what I was looking for, having missed out on peak spring rains and the walleyes and smallmouth that are angrily awoken by them and in the mood to kill whatever disturbs them. However, each one that I caught was a spunky, angry, thrashing reminder of how much I had taken their presence for granted so many years prior. 

    Aside from the river, my heart also calls home the swamps and marshes around the American Mid-Atlantic. Swamps are fringes, the ever-living border that sits between the aquatic and terrestrial. As both a herp and fish guy, they're the nursery, the crucial spawning grounds rich with the scents of rot and life.

    Throughout most of North America, where you find swamps and Stillwater, you find cattails. These tall, graceful, dancing plants have more uses than I can name. In the early season, their starchy rhizomes are the potatoes of the fen. In spring, the hearts are as good as an artichoke. The pollen can be collected as a nutritious snack and the leaves can be used for weaving. On a recent and sunny Sunday morning, I went down to a local marshy reservoir to catch largemouths and harvest a few. I caught my first few topwater fish of the year, a bass that hit a topwater popper, then pulled some hearts from the same patch from which those largies sprang from. 

    The cattails hears were good, but very fibery and would have been much better a week or two prior, before their bladed leaves even emerged. I'd like to find a way to pickle them, keep them fresh and crunchy for the months to come. 

    I never liked wearing waders, preferring to be able to immerse myself, feel the water temps and the muck and the silt far more than some mercury in a glass tube can tell me so. I start wet-wading in April and don't stop until November. As I cruised along the shoreline, taking careful, sliding steps, sometimes sinking, sometimes floating along, large sunfish finned out and flared their gills at my approach. The tenacity with which a small sunfish will defend his nest to the death is admirable, their drive an inspiration. I'm a 5'10 hulking, Godzilla-like figure compared to these six inch sunnies, sending up dustclouds of silt with every step and uprooting their cattail trees like dandelion seeds in the wind. Yet, a bluegill on a bed will stare me down and not budge an inch. 

    Be sure not to tread on any nests this time of year, fish, herp, or bird. The signature round sand-dollar nests of sunfish are littering the shores of most bodies of water in the North-east. 

    I also found the recently hatched, sky-blue, water-blue, life-blue eggshell of a robin and the springing of violets catching aflame across the hillsides, little miracles of life in a place that sees them on the regular. 

Earth Day

 

    It's Earth Day! Or at least, it was when I planned on writing this. It doesn't matter anyways. This beautiful world can't be celebrated in a mere day, or year, or a hundred lifetimes from now. The ravings of glass-towered billionaires who scream through our screens about their desires to probe deeper into the stars makes my blood boil. Have we lost so much hope in our beautiful, wild, and watery world that a frigid and red desert millions of miles away is a rose-tinted goal? Fuck Mars. I'm proud to be an Earth supremacist. 

    Our Earth, just like us, is 70% water, coursing through our veins, through our rivers. You can't love yourself without loving her. So to honor it, here are a few of my favorite, little, miniscule slices of this world with so much to offer. Make every day of your lifetime Earth Day, and keep fighting for her, for your rights to hunt and fish and forage and explore, to live off what she provides, and for a clean and wild place to do it. This Earth Day, don't celebrate. Love slow, love methodically, but love with a rage that burns like Castilleja on the prairie. 

"May your trails be crooked and windy and lead to the most amazing views." - Ed Abbey

Delaware River, PA

Kitty Hawk Sound, NC

Barnegat Light, NJ

Islamorada, FL

Delaware River, NJ

Barnegat Bay, NJ

Ithaca Falls, NY

Shenandoah River, WV

Delaware River, PA

Lake Champlain, VT