A Familiar Spot

[WestCentralFisher]

If you fish enough, particularly on the same waters, you sort of develop a sense for when the fishing probably isn't going to be much good. This is heightened in the winter; there is just a sort of stillness to everything some days. You can still see some fish, because it's a crystal clear, spring-fed river, but they aren't doing much. You might easily show up the next day, in seemingly the exact same conditions, but it's not the same. There is a sort of sense that everything is just a bit more alive, and if you don't trip over your own feet, you'll probably catch a whole bunch of fish. 

Wednesday, the first day of this year, was the former. I met my Dad on the river late in the morning; it had been September the last time we fished together, far too long. There had been good reasons in both of our lives for that, but nonetheless it was a problem that needed to be solved. The place we met at is about the furthest it could be from a secret, but it's also just enough under the radar that you can pretty much have it to yourself on a winter holiday. 

The fishing, as I hinted at, was on the slow side. That's a relative matter. This river is absolutely loaded with trout, so even on the slow days you are bound to catch a few. My dad caught a few little browns on an olive woolly bugger; I caught two 9 inch browns and two rainbows a few inches larger than that on a little olive jig. The strikes were tentative, and the fights sluggish at first, before heating up. 

It really was one of those days where I didn't mind the fishing being a little bit slow. I found myself looking a little more at my surroundings, which are quite impressive here.

When I looked up at the steep, cedar dotted slope above the river, it occurred to me that this was almost certainly the first place I ever fished for trout in Missouri. I was about 8 years old. My grandfather was a passionate fly fisherman. It had been his birthday, and he had driven over, set up his RV at a campground down the road, and called up my dad and informed, not asked that we would be going down there and going fishing with him. I had totally forgotten where it had been, and it bugged me, but on this day, looking up at at that hillside, and thinking back on that day 25 years ago, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that was the spot.

He spent that whole trip patiently trying to teach me how to fly cast, with what you'd have to call limited success. I don't think he fished at all. I'm absolutely certain no one came remotely close to catching a single fish in two full days of fishing. And it's one of my fonder childhood memories. 

He passed from cancer a few years after that. He was one of those tough, stoic men who died, almost literally on his horse. Once there was nothing much more to be done, he spent his last few months on a horse ranch in the southwest. He went straight from a trail ride to the hospital, and was gone within a few days. This surprised no one.

If he saw me casting an ultra-light spinning rod instead of a 5-weight, he'd have pretended to be offended to his core, but he'd mostly have just been happy that I spent my holiday on the river with my Dad. 

When we breaked for lunch back at the truck, I mentioned this to my Dad. He agreed it looked like the same spot, and we both got a good laugh reminiscing about how disastrous my fly casting had been on this river 25 years ago. Apparently I hooked pretty much everyone in our party at some point with a fly, a detail my brain conveniently has omitted from memory.

We both agreed that if we ended up living lives where the sight of a pretty hillside on a trout stream was the sort of thing that inspired people to remember us, we'd have done OK. 

Then we finished our lunch, and went back to the river. I asked my dad if we could switch set-ups for the last couple hours so I could fish with my grandpa's old 5 weight for awhile. Fittingly, it had gotten windy, and I was pretty rusty with my fly casting. It did not go particularly well, and I caught no more fish, and did not come particularly close. I could just envision grandpa sitting on the bank a safe distance behind me, and chuckling after a failed cast, and saying "If that's what you call 10 and 2, son, I'd hate to see you drive."