"I am quite certain that there is a God in the same sense that I am certain my love is no illusion"
- Simone Weil
I scraped into the gravel parking lot of a Pennsylvania limestone stream on an exceedingly wet and warm aired Thursday afternoon, an air that was alive with little black stoneflies and some blue-winged olives sailing through the currents. I stood upon an old stone bridge and surveyed down the horizon of the stream, where about every 20 yards were older fly fishermen throwing nymphs, most of them on European tight-lining rods. Upon seeing this I decided to open my streamer box, tie on the largest olive-colored Galloup Dungeon I had, and walk about a mile down the creek into State Forest land until I was satisfied with the lack of human presence.
When I think about the way I fly fish, it's almost entirely solitary. I'll gladly take other people and love doing so, but when this happens I barely fish, preferring to melt into an omnipresent figure in the background muttering "think about casting like hammering a nail" and "try to get the fly up near that rock." Therefore, most of my actual fishing hours, and outdoor hours in general, are spent by myself out in the woods, running the rivers and streams solo. In nature, in life, and in my own life so completely studded with nature it becomes like a heart totally encased in leaves and branches, I feel loneliness in a similar way that a child wants to show someone a cool object that they have discovered. I don't really wish for people around me when I'm in a bad mental state. It's those moments where I've climbed a mountain and gaze upon an Appalachian night sky overhead, when I hike several miles into the backcountry and catch a brook trout with spots reminiscent of that same Appalachian night sky, that I wish I had someone to share the experience with.
There were a few fish that dared to breach that sacred line between the suffocating embrace of air and the waters of life, even fewer that were entomologically rewarded with mouthfuls of Blue-winged Olives. I had one pull on the Dungeon. I walked even further down, pushing on, climbing down some rhododendrons and making a cast to let some line out. When I picked up, I felt weight, gave some panicked spasm that may have had the semblance of a hookset, and watched the biggest brown trout of my life jump a foot out of the water and spit my fly an additional two.
After the loss of a big fish, it becomes so much harder to imagine lightning striking twice, picture another of the same wise-old caliber making a similar mistake soon after. Still, I kept on fishing, and stuck a small brown trout that ate a fly about half his size.
I pushed on, onward the directions of the swirling currents, and ended up at the most beautiful place I've been on this popular Pennsylvania limestone stream. One side was an open meadow occasionally studded with black walnut and the spiky traps of honey locusts and the other sloped up to a steep suitcase-bank that was packed to the brim with hemlocks in the overstory and rhododendrons in the under. A decent amount of the hemlocks were mere bone but many stood, towering and green, as a fist of defiance against Wooly Adelgia. I thought that was beautiful enough that I shed tears and sat along the green river and listened all alone but in the company of running water and mayflies on the one day that they would be allotted on this green river and green earth, the ability to fly. And so I thought how lucky they were, that the one place they would ever see outside the bottom of the stream would be this, the nursery where they would breed and lay their eggs and lay down their bodies atop the surface of the water in the evening of life to become trout food.
I fished a little, more halfheartedly flow-casting into the current and letting my fly swing. I hooked a walnut on my backcast, as if it was beckoning me to slow down, take a step back, and look around. I was grateful to the walnut. I walked over to pop my streamer out of its branches and found a small piece of discarded plastic that I believe the river led me to, to stick in my bag and pack out. I eventually did leave, made plans to come back very soon. I would specify that photos don't do this place justice, but anyone who has walked the roads of this life know they never do. Photos only imitate life, not radiate it.
