Tough day in the Catskills

This is it.

This is where it all began for our great nation of fly fishers, and this is where it began for me. The Beaverkill River weighs heavily on my heart, and every turn of it reminds me of my youth. Fondest memories begin at the cabins way out past Horton, where once upon a time on a family vacation I first witnessed an angler fishing with a fly rod and reel. 

He was waist deep in a rapid, casting across and down toward a wall of rocks on the far bank. His line looked like thick day-glo orange yarn and it didn't seem to be attached to anything. Not anything that resembled my clumsy spinning reel. There was no obvious machinery to what he was doing. No clear indication that his actions, or his  intentions, had just a simple hook attached. It was a whispy back and forth motion followed by total concentration. And he was pulling rainbows out, one after another after another. And then tossing them to the near bank, which was sand and smooth rocks, for his wife to collect and toss into their creel. It was the year 

nineteen hundred and eighty five and I was thirteen years old.

Now I visit this very special place as often as I can, in part for the legend that it seems to uphold, trout season after trout season, and in equal part for my own reasons. And also it holds some of the most wary, hungry and famously beautiful, perfectly adorned, and strong trout that I have ever seen.

So on a recent and rather warm spring day I set out on the two-hours-and-ten-minutes drive from New York City to Roscoe, just to see if anything was happening. To my satisfaction nothing was. Even the fish were laying low, probably just as afraid of the warmish water temperature as I was of the gas prices in Liberty. Despite this a steady hatch of Stoneflies was on, thought it did not

do a thing for the trout's spirits. I did get a tug on a large and weighted hairball of a nymph right away, but I couldn't possibly call it an official take because the line was just hanging loosely in the water as I pondered the the meager contents of the Stonefly box. It was a long day. I started fishing just after the top side of eleven in the morning and at four 

in the afternoon I reeked of desperation. I was driving from pool to pool with my waders and vest still on, looking like a very weird man frantically seeking an inch of my own water. The downside to the Beaverkill is that it sometimes draws a crowd. And I didn't want to have an audience that particular day. I drove downstream, passing on the Horton Bridge pool (very big audience) and finally settled way downstream, where the water opens up nice. Long flat sections followed by skinny sections of fast water that hold the strong swimmers.

I plugged away for a while with absolutely no luck at all. I experimented with hoppers, streamers, wets, dries, big and small (some real big, thinking I would just aggravate a trout so much it might strike) but despite

the clarity of the water there was not a trout to be seen. I consoled myself by insisting that this outing was for practice and that next time I would have it down pat.

But you know, I couldn't give up. I got in the car with waders and vest still on, and headed south to the Willowemoc. Which under the circumstances felt very much like

approaching a supermodel in a SoHo bar. Very dangerous to the humility. The Willowemoc can crush your spirits after a good day on the Beaverkill. After a bad day it can send you into

to a downward spiral of obsessive fly tying. But I knew a good spot and I felt like it was about time I landed a Catskill trout. I knew they were in there, somewhere. So I pulled into the little streamside lot, squeezed my car in between two others and said hi to a traveller who had just pulled off the highway for a nap. All the way from Ohio he drove, and damned if he wasn't tired. He knew nothing about fly 

fishing and he didn't care where he was. But he was polite enough to ask how the fishing was going, and just as polite when I complained for ten minutes straight about the lack of any visible insect activity and just what size nymph might work at which depth. He rolled up his window and I got to the river. And, as planned, someone was standing knee deep in the pool I was aiming for. And he was fighting a trout. It was around five thirty and I figured if I got back in the car and did seventy three miles an hour on route 17 I could be back by nine o'clock. 

Maybe the Yankees  would be on the radio.

I stopped at the dirt lot just

south of the Catskill Fly Fishing Center to see what was going on. There were four anglers just under the little suspension bridge that leads to the Center's grounds. The water was running narrow but it was breathing in perfect rhythm. This was textbook trout water. Then all at once there was a fish at the surface, and then another. I zipped instantly back to the car and fiddled for the vest and the rod. Good thing it was lazily disassembled! Then, for the first time that day, I had a section of water to myself. And suddenly there were clouds of Sulfurs in the air- the big ones! They were everywhere and the trout were feeding madly in every nook and cranny. Sadly, I had nothing resembling a big Sulfur in the dry fly boxes. In fact I had nothing but tiny gnats, olives, caddis, little size 22 things that always catch trout closer to home, nymphs (boring), and I tried every wet, dry, midge, suspender emerger spider, giant streamers (sometimes works on rainbows and steelhead), attractor, badly tied parachutes and you name it until the sun was nearly gone.

It was almost dark and goddamit and I hadn't landed a trout all day. And gas is $4.45 a gallon.

And then I remembered where I was standing. Fifty yards from the Catskill Fly Fishing Center, right in the backyard of Theodore Gordon, Lee and Joan Wulff, where the dry fly was once invented, then perfected. The place where everything I have ever held dearly on Earth was baptized, born and raised. I decided it was time to suffer my penance, and after a few minutes searching through boxes of flies in the vest, I found a few Quill Gordons from a few seasons ago. I chose the most elegant of the bunch, tied it on and set it down gently on a tailing riffle. As it disappeared within the upwards splash of a perfect rise I managed to say, "thanks," and landed an eighteen inch Brown Trout under the bluish light that seems to only exist beneath the shadows of a Catskill mountain at dusk.