Last weeks fishing report that Dale Bowman of the Chicago Sun Times didn’t include in his weekly summary. I kind of liked it even though I didn’t get out fishing much and didn’t catch much either. Didn’t write much, but I put in a few paragraphs by someone that did. I don’t know, I liked it…
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Not much to report this week, only got out twice and both were short ventures. Two creeks, two smallies caught, two missed. The creeks were high running chocolate. Hit the river once, it was even worse and produced nothing.
The spot on the river I hit is a good spot I used to frequent and while living in Yorkville, I didn’t get to it much. Now it’s just upstream. Nobody goes there cause it’s pretty much a haven for the homeless. They even put a bike path and bridge over the river. Now the homeless don’t have to walk over the rail road bridge to get to the island.
I’ll go back there. Me and the homeless get along well for some reason. I don’t judge them and I’m good for a cheap cigar.
I think that makes the following from Big Two Hearted River a good thing to run, if you feel like it and nobody else sends you anything. Just substitute smallie for trout. Wish I ran into more river anglers that embody this sentiment. They seem to have all disappeared.
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Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log spires of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their again by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.
He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.
Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.
Nick’s heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling. He turned and looked down the stream. It stretched away, pebbly-bottomed with shallows and big boulders and a deep pool as it curved away around the foot of a bluff.
Nick walked back up the ties to where his pack lay in the cinders beside the railway track. He was happy. He adjusted the pack harness around the bundle, pulling straps tight, slung the pack on his back, got his arms through the shoulder straps and took some of the pull off his shoulders by leaning his forehead against the wide band of the tump-line. Still, it was too heavy. It was much too heavy. He had his leather rod-case in his hand and leaning forward to keep the weight of the pack high on his shoulders he walked along the road that paralleled the railway track, leaving the burned town behind in the heat, and he turned off around a hill with a high, fire-scarred hill on either side onto a road that went back into the country. He walked along the road feeling the ache from the pull of the heavy pack. The road climbed steadily. It was hard work walking up-hill. His muscles ached and the day was hot, but Nick felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him.
Howard Levett
13 Jul 2014I think that’s a perfect way to end your post. I love that story.
walt
13 Jul 2014There’s a transparency in the Hemingway excerpt that fits nicely to the scene of the river bridge, the homeless, and the cheap cigar. Yes!
bob
14 Jul 2014Most of us think our lives are some sort of permanent continuum along the lines of ‘this is how it is, how it always has been, how it always will be.’ (my quote mark ain’t workin’ for some reason). We think our lives – especially the good parts for an optimist, or the bad for the pessimist – are what constitutes normal. This applies even to those of us who are comfortable with the Zen ‘Acceptance and Impermanence’ thing.
ten – twenty years of fishing say, ‘this is how fishing is, this is how it does, this is when it does, this is what the fish do.’ I am wrestling with Nature’s saying, ‘oh, nay, nay.’
fish ain’t where they were, when they were, in the numbers they were, with the species that were. Perhaps the ‘good times’ were the illusion, the transitory moment, the blip in the normal. Perhaps the ‘good times’ have been the short 8,000 years between ice ages that saw (or allowed for) the rise in human civilization (esp. farming) that we take for granted as ‘normal, earth climate.
I wrestle with this even as I am aware of, and comfortable with ‘change and impermanence.’ It has now been three to four years since the rock bass all but disappeared from our harbors and lakefront. A short lived, one year, perch bloom of big fish too. Was that a moment, not a trend (question mark ain’t workin’ either).
I feel ya on the river thing.
Richard Velders
14 Jul 2014Love the Hemingway reference too. Not quite the same here after seeing my treasured Water Willow go under water for about the 5th time. The Illinois River went into the Starved Rock parking lot once again.
Dan "Impractical Fishermen"
15 Jul 2014I just read that book. Now I want to go camping and flyfishing with grasshoppers.