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.