and it’s the only kind of fishing I’ve wanted to do since.
I had learned a new skill, caught plenty of trout, and made new friends who also fished on the fly. When I started catching brown trout in Father’s Day Creek, near the weekend home of my in-laws, I allowed myself the selfish thought that life probably would not get better. I had become a father. I had become a fly fisher. I had discovered paradise.
So maybe you can understand why I think I found the Last Best Place on Earth, why I consider it my spirit-home, a good place to be on a good day to die.
– Father’s Day 2000, 6 am
I rose from bed, made some coffee, and drove from my in-laws’ house to the small parking area by the bridge over the creek. The drive to Father’s Day Creek takes you through farmland and forest, and then, for the last mile, down a narrow country road into an area that became a new, but not better, place during my years of fishing there. Old houses and barns on farmland that had appeared to be in full retirement gave way to sprawling ranchers with sprawling lawns, cul de sacs, and two to four cars and trucks per household. The farmers were mostly gone. By Father’s Day 2000, the biggest crop in the area seemed to be chemically-treated grass. The road had been graded – all the stomach-tickling dips removed – and paved to impervious perfection and to a smooth glide to accommodate commuters who speed out every weekday morning. Some drive an insane two hours to their jobs. The new development – all those wells and septic systems – and the new road made me worry about their combined effect on my favorite creek. Would the wells diminish the flow of spring water into it? Would the septic systems leak and the bacteria seep into it? Summer rainfall on the new road would certainly send filthy, steamy drainage into the creek’s naturally cool waters. I harbored these fears – and they are legitimate fears – each time I visited Father’s Day Creek. But on the morning of June 18, 2000, I blocked out my concerns about human behavior and focused on finding trout. I had the place to myself.
In case you are wondering about my credentials when it comes to fishing: I have done a lot of it. But I am not the late, great Lefty Kreh, the world-reknown Yoda of fly casting whose years as outdoors editor of The Baltimore Sun overlapped several of mine as a reporter and columnist there. I am not a professional angler or guide, and, while I have worked for newspapers for more than 40 years, I was never an outdoors writer. I am just a guy who has done a lot of weekday and weekend fishing, more than he realized until he did an accounting of it, though, it turns out, not as much as he would have liked.
Starting at age six, I fished for sunfish in a little brook in Massachusetts; hornpout, sunfish and bass in a mill pond; migrating herring in a herring run; cod and haddock, conger eel and mackerel in the deep sea off the New England coast; flounder in the bays near Boston, flounder in the Cape Cod Canal and flounder off a wooden bridge in Duxbury, Massachusetts, flounder off the Virginia coast; striped bass (also known as rockfish) near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, in the Little Choptank River and Tangier Sound; stripers in a tidal creek on Cape Cod; smallmouth bass in the Susquehanna River (Pennsylvania side), shad in the Susquehanna River (Maryland side), shad in a tributary of the Susquehanna; smallmouth bass and rock bass in the Potomac River and the Delaware River; crappie and carp in three reservoirs; brown trout and rainbow trout in a dozen rivers in Pennsylvania, cutthroat trout in the Lamar Valley of Wyoming, rainbow trout in the Madison River of Montana and the Henry’s Fork of Idaho, brook trout in three ponds in New Hampshire; landlocked salmon and brown trout in the Androscoggin River (New Hampshire side), smallmouth bass in the Androscoggin River (Maine side); bluefish and speckled trout in the Chesapeake; hybrid rockfish in a Maryland farm pond; three kinds of trout in the rivers of western Maryland – the Casselman, the Savage, the Youghiogheny, the North Branch of the Potomac, Bear Creek, Muddy Creek, Lostland Run and Sideling Creek – and I’ve fished for bass in the farm ponds of southern Maryland; jack crevalle and snook in the tidal creeks of Florida’s Gulf Coast; false albacore off Montauk; bluefish in the surf of the North Carolina coast; and steelhead in the Salmon River in New York. I’ve caught brown trout in the Battenkill in Vermont.
I once awoke to the squawking of gulls, hundreds of them, on Cape Hatteras, and ran down to the beach to investigate the cause of the racket. It was minutes after sunrise, and a horde of bluefish had invaded the surf, attacking a school of Atlantic herring, chasing them into the shore. The tide had started to recede, stranding dozens of the herring in large, shallow puddles on the beach. My dog, a black collie-retriever mix named Rosie, hovered over one of the puddles, suddenly snapped up one of the silvery herring and ran off with it in her mouth. In the surf, the slaughter continued for another hour: Hundreds, perhaps thousands of bluefish feeding frantically on frantic herring, and the surf smelled of shredded fish. Another man might have instantly run to fetch his surf rod — you can catch a bluefish in its feeding madness with a bare hook, after all — but I stayed and watched a while. It was the blitz of bluefish the local anglers had told us about. I had never seen one. I tried to imagine the first Hatteras native to come upon this sight, way back when, at the dawn of everything. I imagined him running off to alert his tribe, then giving thanks for the feast that had come crashing ashore.
I did not catch fish in all of the places I just listed, but, as my friend Tom “Bush Hog” James used to say: “Fishin’ ain’t catchin’.”
That might sound like a copout – the motto of someone more interested in drinking beer than hooking bass – but Bush Hog was right about fishing. It’s about relationships and conversation, about comparing notes on life with others, about relaxing and getting your mind off the raucous world, the one that screams and roars beyond the ridge line above Father’s Day Creek.
Now, it’s easy to apply Bush Hog’s philosophy if you’re just sitting in a lawn chair by a pond or an ocean, or straddling a bench in a boat, waiting for a fish to strike your baited hook. It’s easier if your style of fishing is sedentary.
Fly fishing, on the other hand, requires lots of informed decision-making, physical dexterity for the cast, concentration and patience. There’s no sitting down, either. You have to hike to the good spots, wade into the water when you get there, stand and deliver your fly to a trout that is sipping bugs in the current and, therefore, vulnerable to deceit. I’d be lying if I said fly fishing wasn’t about catching. It is. But most of us do not kill the trout we fool into taking our flies. We catch them, look them over, maybe take a picture, and release them. I cast to trout in Father’s Day Creek to see if I can trick them into taking my fly, but also to make sure they’re still there, that they’ve not been decimated by poacher or plague. When they don’t bite, I get a little worried. I worry that the trout have scattered because the water temperature has been rising with climate change, or that some fellow from the horrid housing development nearby caught (and killed) a bunch of my fish with hooks baited with Velveeta balls, or that something fouled the stream when I wasn’t there to protect it. It could also be that I’ve been fly fishing long enough to have started losing my touch, but I doubt it.
Father’s Day Creek is a three-hour drive from Baltimore. I have neither right nor title to a single acre of the woods around it. And yet I consider the little river my own. I have felt protective of it, as if I were the hired riverkeeper, since the first time I set eyes on it.
The course of the river is varied in the most wonderful ways. Water ripples over a river bottom of brown gravel and decomposed leaf and wood, giving it the shade of dark tea. In some places, the water plunges into deep, spooky holes. It cuts sharply through a rock gorge crowned in hemlock. It rolls softly along a steep slope covered with wild rhododendron. There are places where it is no more than 20 feet wide, others where it opens to more than twice that width. In early spring, the current can knock you off your feet as you try to wade. In summer, the flow is greatly reduced but constant, and the water never seems to get warm enough to harm the wild trout that call it home. Light swarms of yellow insects emerge as evening falls in June, and trout rise to eat them. It is a beautiful, life-sustaining
