It was of when my dad used to take me flyfishing on the Yellow Breeches up in PA. I was fifteen or sixteen at the time, gangly, and perpetually leaning to one side or the other like most tall adolescents do. There's a picture of me from one of the trips and I'm standing awkwardly in the water on one booted foot, fly line spinning out in the current behind me, looking so utterly hapless and half-grown in a way that's strangely appealing to me, especially thinking of it tonight with all the significant, melancholy weight of my twenty-six year oldness.
We would wait until just before sunset when all the shambling, middle-aged yuppies would be packing up their expensive gear. The river had been featured in a national flyfishing magazine and had gotten too much recent attention for our taste. Still, it was beautiful. I remember the dark, thick weeds blown out by recent rain, mayapples sprouting in the woods, thorns new and soft on the cat brier the way they can be before summer really gets going. It was late enough in the season that the warming water had that distinctively rich, alive smell. You could smell it as soon as you stepped down the slope of the parking lot, into the vague, descending channel cut into the land by the water. It smelled like wet, dark green.
My dad had a secret weapon: the shammy fly, yes, this--a thin, floppy strip of off-white shammy cloth sewn haphazardly onto a hook. My brother and I mass-produced them. They were so hastily-made that they often disintegrated under the small, sandpaper trout teeth after a few good bites. I expect it was supposed to resemble a small worm or larvae of some nebulous but fatally-intriguing-to-trout kind. Allegedly, my dad received the prototype of this shammy fly as a gift from an old, wisened fishing wizard who seemed to be of the "teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime" philosophy, but the accounts vary wildly. The worst version of the storyI heard involved my dad's drunk friend crashing fully-clothed into the river to demand fishing advice from a poor old lucky sap, who then offered said fly in a desperate but doomed attempt to shut him up.
But this fly! Unlike most handmade flies, which are precise, accurate representations, this was a cheat, a generic trick, something failproof for any trout stream: clear, cloudy, hot, cold, running down, running up. And God, they'd hit it. My dad especially liked sneaking up on some poor idiot fellow fisherman's hole, watching silently as the increasingly-desperate and empty-handed man lashed the same empty stretch of water for hours. Then, just ever so casually, my dad would emerge from the bank, slip into the water, and drop a line downstream into the useless spin water. First cast--always. He seemed to award himself bonus points if the hooked fish then tore upstream and tangled in the line--or legs--of the other angler. It was a beautiful thing to watch.
But humiliating his would-be competitors aside, my dad didn't want the little stocky rainbows that would hit anything, or the shy native brook trout that could only be coaxed out in certain predawn hours. He only had eyes for two fish in the whole creek system--worthy opponents--the two 12-inch albino rainbow trout.
Even at fifteen, I had never seen albino trout before the Breeches, though I'd fished a lot of water. They were odd and strangely horrible, almost sickly golden against the general native brown of creek water. The fact that they were so large and distinctive meant they were smart, and had somehow managed to avoid their evolutionary curse for a number of years. My dad claimed he had hooked one, once, and before it had slipped the line he'd brought it in close enough to see that it was pitted with heron scars and old hooks. But always this mission, always this quest. In retrospect, it must've been a nice break, an excuse to take off from the likely strain of our often chaotic and ruinous family outings. We were not a happy family.
He would recommend a stretch of water and then abandon us, slip out of the water and walk for miles along the bank until he spotted them. I was a fearful, anxious girl and I didn't like him going off alone, especially in the growing dark. I was really too old to be this nervous, but it always hit me like a volleyball to the stomach as soon as I noticed him gone. It's not that I thought something bad would happen to him; he was so capable, so completely at ease in any kind of nature. I think it was more that I worried that after fishing was done and the rods were packed, he wouldn't ever return to our car out of the solid night. The river would just swallow him up as if it had a better claim to him than we ever had.
I remember anxiously following him once, choosing to go by water so he wouldn't hear my shameful approach. I waded dead up the center of the river, water to my chest. It was so deep and thick around me that I made none of my usual sloshing. The mayflies were hatching and they rose in a kind of living mist around me. Fish were rising too, brushing on all sides of me, but I wasn't fishing for them by then, only hunting for my dad. My feet groped along the pebbly bottom. Sometimes I'd stumble over submerged logs and catch myself in slow, horrifying motion, water swelling into my holey waders.
I knew I'd found him when I saw the thin, fine draft of cigarette smoke drifting along the black surface of the water, cloud-like. I couldn't really see him, waist deep silhouette standing under a willow that draped into the creek, but I could see the red cherry of his cigarette every time he drew on it. I didn't speak or approach, I just lingered there, the current breaking around my form. Even now, here, imagining it is reassuring.
All this seems fairly garden variety, doesn't it? Thinking about it, I realize I have turned into an adult who is very much like my father, which sounds complimentary, after this gushing, adjective-reeking missive about his fishing talents and mysterious airs. But I don't mean it like that--I'll never catch any albino trout. But sometimes I too find myself erecting flimsy reasons to be alone in the woods, to follow some compulsion off the agenda. I don't know. I appreciate it more in my dad now, and forgive him for it. Tonight I looked up pictures of a offshoot river named for a british soldier's wardrobe malfunction in the middle of nowhere PA because of him, and I couldn't believe how well I remembered it all, the power of place. And I'm cutting myself some slack.
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