The Spring Rains

 

    Our fall was dry and our winter was cold. I've heard tell before that a long and cold winter means a good spring. I don't quite remember who told me that. I heard it in whispers tucked between run-off, running brown and running green, both coming with their truths and lies. Spring hurts, spring hesitates, it can't just rip off the bandage. The shad have made it back. I wonder if the river longs for their presence in the wintertime the way I do. If she cleans the house in preparation for guests, rushes to the door in anticipation when they arrive. Or do they enjoy a good ol' seasonal Irish hello? I lost my grandfather right on one of the first warm days of the spring this year, the man from which I got all my fire in a house of soft-spoken parents. The man who gave me my poet's blood. Christ said that those who enter the Kingdom of Heaven shall do so with the minds of children, and I thought about the child-like vigor with which he laughed and spoke and drank and the child-like way he took pieces of my grandma's homemade bread and fed swarms of birds outside while he laughed. I thought of this and became as sure as I was of anything that I would once again see him, always in the drum-roll of doves and the cold run-off of Springtime. 

    

At the End of the Rainbow

 

    Oncorhynchus mykiss tend to lose all forms of self-control upon the conjunction of late-winter and early-Spring. I can almost relate to this. Upon the soft, cold sound of snowmelt the taste of the first few warm days after one of the longest, coldest winters of my life becomes almost unbearable. Rainbow trout have other objectives though, as in about a month they will begin to dig their gravel beds and dance their ancient spawning dance, so right now they are feeding as heavily as they can. 

    Wild rainbows used to be an awe-inspiring rarity for me. I remember the first one I caught, a little pink parr-marked silver bullet that ate an egg sack that I was drifting for Atlantic Salmon at the time. The parr-marks sat like little glowing neon-pink cotton-candy haloes, some alien symbol, amidst a nuclear background sky of green and chrome. 

    The wild brown trout in Spring Creek, a Pennsylvania green-gilded limestoner that ranks amongst the highest in trout productivity in the East, is a fishery that is revered amongst crowds of the Eastern fly fisher. However, I've discovered from living a few miles up the road from Spring Creek that it also boasts an impressive collection of wild rainbows too, something that is extremely scarce in my state. 

    Spring Creek is not stocked, hasn't been for many years. The stream is still maintained as a wild-trout, catch and release only fishery, the first part of which I fully support, the second I have mixed feelings about. However, as is a constant in all things natural, constants don't exist. Trout move. Upstream, downstream, across places where you'd never dream ichthyological life would squirm. Stocked fish move up from Bald Eagle Creek, including those orange and pink hatchery mutants known as Palomino trout. I've caught giant hatchery escapees and seen the bridge at the park in downtown Bellefonte where families throw handfuls of pellet-feed at large, vaguely rainbow-trout shaped bloated creek denizens below. 

    I've reached one of the final stages in my development as a fly-fisherman: learning how to tie my own flies. I already have a crippling caffeine addiction that sustains me through most responsibilities of my life, and have a desire to move to Alaska to become a fishing guide, so learning how to lash furs and feather onto a hook into artistic expressions of mayflies seems like just another step in the natural progression of things. After many questionable YouTube tutorials and broken threads, I managed to tie myself up some greenie weenies, Walt's worms, and a few of a very niche Upstate NY fly known as the Ausable Ugly. 

    I arrived at Spring Creek on an unusually warm afternoon, one that screamed in the face of the long winter we've endured. The water was low and clear and I covered much of it with an Ausable Ugly and nothing to show. I put on a nymphing rig and began to ply the depths without a bobber, simply bottom bouncing and feeling for miniscule ticks in my line. I managed to pick off a wild brown doing this. I kept going and caught three more fish, all of them rainbows and both of them wild. 

    Eventually, in the warm weather other fly fisherman showed up and I was high and low-holed by two older gentleman while I was retying my nymphing rig, which made to decide to change spots. 

    I drove to another section downstream without ever changing out of my ever-leaking waders and hopped right down. I stuck a fish quick enough on the nymphing rig and missed another before I broke off that rig and I put on the Ugly and started drifting it under a float. I caught two more fish, both rainbows. To round out the day, one of them came from a particularly deep and popular bridge hole where as soon as I caught it, two kids wearing Go-Pro's hopped in the creek on either side of me and started recording a video. 

    The next day I spent mostly underground, in the ever 55 degree bowels of a limestone cave, one of many in the Central Pennsylvania region. Beneath we found several salamanders, waiting to emerge, trapping a little bubble of springtime with them that was on the verge of bursting.