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Overview
The river is one of those rare places where the trout are as long as your arm but also exceedingly difficult to catch. Lyons explores its secrets and confronts its greatest challenges. At first he catches little. Then slowly, he acquires the various and special skills and disciplines necessary to take the large wary brown trout of this extraordinary river.
Spring Creek is a memoir of halcyon days on a remarkable river and it draws a rare portrait of an angler actually learning to fish more wisely. It is a richly humorous and perceptive account of an angler's passion for his spot—and a book all fishermen will cherish.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620878989 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Mornings
Every morning around ten, for thirty-one days, we'd stash our gear in the huge tan Suburban and head for the river. We'd head up the first hill, onto the highest bench, then rattle along the single rutted lane across the fields of wheatgrasses spotted with dark-green weed and sweet clover and pale-yellow prickly pear. There were always clusters of antelope in the fields. Often they would watch us — inert, wary, turning slightly so as always to be facing the car — until we came close enough to be a threat, though we were no threat. Often there were several spindly legged fawns with them, bom several weeks earlier; Herb had seen a doe drop one in the narrow road and he had stopped and watched and then gone around them. "Not enough meat to make a decent sandwich" he once said in his deep voice — the words always curt, final — watching a newborn antelope scamper away, already quick and lithe. Overhead, curlews with long curved beaks canted away, shrieking, and often we saw their chicks, which had no beaks yet, scuttling from us into the grasses.
Every morning, at the bluff that ended the last bench, we would stop the car and get out, and then look down into the valley, stretching off in front of us as far as we could see, with several braids of the river meandering through it like a blue ribbon stretched out casually upon a great green and tan rug. Except for the willows on the inner rim of the bench, near the headwaters of the East Branch, and the ragged line of cottonwoods in the distance, there were no trees: the river lay open and exposed and I knew at once that it would be hard to fish, with no cover, no breaks from the sun, with every movement of rod or line or person taken to be one of the trout's great predators here — pelican, osprey, kingfisher, merganser, heron, gull. An anthropologist who visited compared it to the Serengeti Plain, and it has that same broad fertile space.
We'd have the whole day, from then until dark, to fish the river. We could fish it anywhere we chose — miles and miles of it. We could fish it as hard or in as leisurely a manner as suited our fancy. We could go back to the ranch for lunch, or pack in a sandwich or some elk sticks, or fish straight through, hard, intently. Sometimes Pat, Herb's wife, and Mari would bring down lunch in the other Suburban.
I soon realized that Spring Creek was the most interesting river I had ever fished or could imagine; and I learned that it was loaded with secrets that would take exceptional skill to learn. At first I felt very privileged to be fishing the river, but soon my thoughts turned chiefly to where we'd fish and what the fishing would be like and when it would come and what fishing we'd already had. Within a week, the days blurred and I had to concentrate to separate them, keep them in sequence, though I have had no trouble finding in my brain the full and vivid picture of a hundred moments, most of the fish I raised for the month I was there. Those were halcyon days and they changed my fly-fishing life forever.
From the top of the last bench the river looked blue, though up close it was green and blue and a dozen variants of amber, umber, coral, and beige; it was really colorless as water in a glass, pure spring water, but it took on the hues of its bottom and of the banks. Sometimes the crystalline water was slow and moody or flat; then there were the fifty or so great bends of the West Branch, some tight, some broad as avenues; there were riffles and chops and pools and tails and swampy runs and brisk runs and shallow flats a couple of hundred feet across, all in dozens of configurations, so that there were thousands of different fishing chances. Everywhere, the water was the clearest I'd ever seen, water in which the auburn, spotted forms of the trout and the wavering, hairlike masses of elodea and watercress were ghostlike. The river held trout large enough to make my eyes pop — mostly browns, all wild, with a scattering of rainbows — which would rise to flies the size of gnats. Nursed on the muddy, milky waters of the Croton watershed near New York City, where I had fished with worms and spinning lures, it all spooked me silly. The river seemed quite beyond the meager talents I thought I could bring to it.
When the wind did not ruffle the surface of the river too harshly — giving it a slate, opaque cover — the water was so translucent that you could see distinctly to the bottom of the deepest pools. What I could see in some of them, five to eight feet down, wavering like living shadows near the bottom, sent shock waves through me.
We would stop at the final bluff to look for the blue herons, which pecked holes in even very large trout and killed many smaller fish. They were astonishing hunters and several times I saw one result of their efforts: a beautiful, wild brown trout with a hole right on the top of its back, as if someone had shoved a pencil down an inch or so, very hard. Herb did not like them. "They can't even pick up some of the larger trout they stick," he said. After I'd seen three with that raw pencil hole in their backs, I felt the same, let the Audubon Society be damned. If there was a heron hunting, it would usually whirl into flight, its gigantic wings flapping heavily, merely at our appearance more than several hundred yards away. I never saw one until it was in flight, and at first mistook the six or seven pairs of sandhill cranes that nested in the valley for herons — though the sandhills traveled in pairs, the herons always alone.
We'd look for several minutes from the bluff, standing quite still and sometimes shivering from the early cold, and begin to think about the day and the weather and the flies and what had happened the day before and which section of Spring Creek we'd fish that day. Then we'd head down the last hill.
Now there was nothing to think about but the fishing. It was a truly remarkable river, but on a given day you could catch nothing; during the weeks I was there, three people — all fine fishermen — got skunked. Once I got none; Herb always got fish. Flies might hatch upriver but not down. The sun might be too bright, the wind too strong, relentless. The large pool on the East Branch might explode with feeding fish or remain perfectly placid, as if it did not contain a trout. The Two Islands Pool might go berserk. The Great Horseshoe Bend — as distinguished from many lesser Horseshoe Bends — might look barren, or might have one, three, or thirty fish rising. But once I had looked into several of the deepest pools I knew something of what the river contained, everywhere, and a shiver of expectation ran through me every time I looked at the water, anywhere, or pitched a fly into it, and still does even now, years later, whenever I think of Spring Creek.
In the deep pools, when the light was just right, you could see fifty or sixty wild browns, of all sizes — a few ten-inchers, a whole slew of fish between fifteen and nineteen inches, and a few old alligators that would go twenty-five or more. Sometimes, concentrating on some deeply undercut bank, if you were lucky, you could catch a glimpse of something dark and larger than anything your imagination could conjure. Was thirty-two or thirty- four inches an exaggeration? I don't think so. Several times, fishing carelessly up the West Branch, I'd spook one of those old fellows and it would bolt from a dark bank — black and too slow for a trout, as if it really wasn't afraid of me or anything else in this world, though prudence dictated it move: a fish the size of a muskrat or a dog, coming right past me, black and thick, scaring me half out of my boots.
But Spring Creek was also a place where solitude and quiet camaraderie were possible. It might be a river crammed with wild trout of great average size and great wariness, a place where I had more interesting fishing chances than I could imagine having anywhere else, but it was also a place where I made some great friends and learned more than I can tell.
At the bottom of the hill there was a shallow stretch of the river that the Suburban could ford easily. But usually before we crossed we made a short trip downstream to the right and the Suburban leaned down toward the river and I leaned over Herb's shoulder to see the water. On the way back to the crossing, with the vehicle dipping low on my side now, I had an unobstructed view of the river. The water was thin here — perhaps a foot to eighteen inches deep, over a sandy bottom, spotted with waterweed. Darting across the bottom, their shadows more palpable than their bodies, were a couple dozen trout. They were long and tan — some darker than others — and from the car we never saw them at rest. They were elusive, evanescent; they seemed born paranoids, afraid of every motion, every shadow. I hadn't the faintest idea how to approach them, or how to catch such fish, but they were beautiful to watch in their wildness, and they were very large — some twenty-two inches or more — and they gave to each morning a kind of benediction. And they always roused my metabolism. I called this the Paranoid Pool and, from the beginning, I never expected to catch a fish in it, though Herb said there were times, when there was a slight chop on the water perhaps, when the fish could be caught, when you might gain entrance to the Castle. As day after day passed, I grew more and more determined to be skillful enough to catch one of these fish, fish as tough to catch as any I have ever seen. By the third week I had found half a dozen such spots on the river, many of them even more difficult to fish.
Below the Paranoid Pool there was a huge shallow flat, several hundred feet across and twice as long, and then the water narrowed, rushed against the far bank, split off into a back channel and disappeared, and the main current formed an exquisite run of several hundred yards that emptied into a broad right-angle bend as the back channel joined the main flow below the island. This was a deep pool, braided with a farrago of currents; it held a great head of trout and you could usually take a fish or two here, whatever the circumstances, but it was very hard to fish wisely and consistently well.
After we'd looked at the Farrago Pool we'd head back, then ford the river and rumble slowly up the rutted and pitted dirt track that skirted the dozens of S curves of the West Branch, looking for flies or rises, flushing more curlew and their chicks, as well as little killdeer that hugged the road and then disappeared into the grasses, spotting a white-tailed deer or a cluster of sandhill cranes beyond the fence that kept the cattle from trampling the banks of the river, in places you could see where an oxbow had silted in, grown grass, and caused the river to adjust its path. The older routes were a delicate, lighter, fresher green than the other grasses. Herb had been advised to tinker with the river, to add structures that would help prevent the silting of bends, but his principle of conservation was abrupt and final: Leave it alone. He believed that the river would change, shift, adjust, suffer, flourish, and take quite good care of itself, thank you. Fencing out the cattle was an exception. And once he and I, on a scorching July afternoon, planted about a hundred willow shoots — none of which survived.
As we drove slowly down the West Branch, we'd hear the ice in the lemonade jug rattle, and we'd keep an eye peeled to the river. We'd always pass the decaying carcass of a calf struck by lightning that spring, and I'd always look to see if it was less of itself. The interior had collapsed and the skin kept getting tighter. At first there was an eager mass of insects everywhere on it, but as the season progressed the carcass kept shrinking, as if by itself, as if it was struggling to get gone from this place. The carcass always made me think of Richard Eberhart's poem "The Groundhog," where that little creature keeps decaying until, near the end, the poet sees merely the beautiful architecture of its bones and then, at the very end, when there is less than a spot, thinks of Alexander in his tent and Saint Theresa in her wild lament, and about mortality and such large matters. The calf carcass didn't vanish that summer; it was too tough. But it decreased. I tried to find some metaphor in it but decided to let it remain simply a decaying calf's carcass, several yards east of a run that led to one of the best back bends on the West Branch.
In fifteen minutes we'd be at the south end of the property, opposite a huge bend pool that pinched into a slick that you could watch comfortably from the warm car while the world warmed. We rarely saw fish move on our early trip upriver, though we often paused at several of the larger bends for a moment or two. At the south end we had an unobstructed view of a lovely run; its glassy surface and slight gradient let us see instantly the slightest bulge on the surface.
Herb usually saw signs of fish first.
He'd point and I'd have to look closely and then I'd see a dorsal slightly breaking the surface, or bending reeds near the far point, or a wake, or the delicate spreading flower of a sipping rise, or a quick black head, up then down.
Herb and I had exchanged hundreds of letters — often several a week — in the years before I first fished Spring Creek with him. Though he did not tie, his observations on fly design, the attitude of flies on the water, knots, new gadgets, leaders, fly-rod length and design and action, technological improvements of various kinds, books old and new, and dozens of other fly-fishing subjects were acute and frank. He fished only with the dry fly and his observations were directed exclusively to matters connected to a fly that floats — but the word "purist" would sound silly if I used it to describe anything about him. He had more fun fishing the dry fly; he conceded the rest of the river to the trout; he enjoyed that visual connection to his quarry — the link that occurs where our world of air meets theirs, on the surface. He could be growly on the subject, claiming that he was a "fly" fisherman, not an "artificial bait" fisherman, but the heart of the matter was less philosophy than hedonism, I think: he enjoyed the one more than the other.
He had clearly read far more than I ever will about fly fishing and he read with a shrewd and independent mind, guffawing at pretenders and second- handers and people who didn't give credit and "lightweights" (a favorite term of his), even if I had published or edited or introduced such people. An English friend — the author of half a dozen books on fly fishing — said: "He has a wonderfully grumpy, bollocking exterior which hides a man of great kindness. He is also a remarkable fly fisherman and makes me feel like a novice." I did not know when I flew out to be with him whether he was the superb fly fisher the Englishman and others said he was, but his opinions were sharp, often raw, always telling, even when they made me smart. What he did he insisted upon doing deftly. He spoke abruptly, sometimes in half sentences, often with laconic wit, in a low baritone. He scared the socks off at least one mutual friend. Thinking back, these many years later, I realize that mingled with the special expectation you feel when you sense you are about to begin the new and unknown was the nagging sense that we were from wildly different worlds, that up close the visit would prove a disaster.
I came full of expectation and some trepidation, and then, as early as that first morning, I forgot what I had expected and whatever it was I might have feared, and thought only of the water before us and the discrete possibilities of the day. The days were crammed with surprises anyway, of the kind that any great river provides, and I could not have imagined what happened any more than I have the imagination to invent a river like Spring Creek. For years it has so dominated my thoughts that I have been able to think and write of practically nothing else. Setting out to write this book has become as much an exorcism as a report, a private rage for order, for clarity. I want very much to see that period clearly, from mornings to evenings, from knowing nothing to knowing something, in all its tension, intensity, challenge, and fun, from when I met the river in late June to when I left it in the bright sun of late July.
In the mornings, when the grasses were still wet with a bright silver sheen and the antelope fled and the curlew flew ahead of us as we rattled along the rutted and pitted track across the benches down to the river, we always felt the nervous tingling of expectation.
At first I wanted to fish all of the river at once, and I felt anxious when we chose one spot. The fishing might be better upriver or down, I thought. It made me uneasy. But after a few days I settled down, took matters one at a time and carefully, and felt content as we reconnoitered downstream, past Paranoid Pool and the big flat and Farrago Pool, then looked at the first few pools on the East Branch, and then drove slowly up the length of the West Branch, noting the carcass and the old oxbows, pausing at four or five bends.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Spring Creek"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Nick Lyons.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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Table of Contents
Preface,
1 Mornings,
2 Easy Chances,
3 The Big Fly Comes,
4 Some Very Minor Spring Creek Tactics,
5 Wind and Rain,
6 Big Fish,
7 Visitors,
8 At the Second Bend Pool,
9 Major Tactics,
10 Time and the Headwaters,
11 Ghostlier Demarcations,
12 One Last Tough Trout,
What People are Saying About This
Nick Lyons is a national treasure . . . a writer of literature who fishes, and one of the best we have.