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.