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.