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.