Troutsmith

 

 

Terrace Books, a trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press, takes its name from the Memorial Union Terrace, located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Since its inception in 1907, the Wisconsin Union has provided a venue for students, faculty, staff, and alumni to debate art, music, politics, and the issues of the day. It is a place where theater, music, drama, literature, dance, outdoor activities, and major speakers are made available to the campus and the community. To learn more about the Union, visit
www.union.wisc.edu
.

TROUTSMITH

 

 

An Angler's Tales and Travels

 

 

 

 

K
EVIN
S
EAROCK

 

 

T
ERRACE
B
OOKS

A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

Terrace Books

A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

uwpress.wisc.edu

 

3 Henrietta Street

London WC2E 8LU, England

eurospanbookstore.com

 

Copyright © 2013

The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

 

Printed in the United States of America

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Searock, Kevin.

Troutsmith: an angler's tales and travels / Kevin Searock.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-299-29370-3 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-299-29373-4 (e-book)

1. Fishing. 2. Fishing—Wisconsin. I. Title.

SH441.S455 2013

799.12—dc23

2012032686

 

A version of “Tiger of the Valleys,” titled “Jewels of the Flow,” appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of
Wisconsin Outdoor Journal
; “Spiders and Flies” appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of
Wisconsin Outdoor Journal
and in the March 2006 issue of
Midwest Fly Fishing
; a version of “Spring Ponds,” titled “Kicking for Pond Trout,” appeared in the May 2006 issue of
Wisconsin Outdoor Journal
; “Auld Red” appeared in the February/March 2007 issue of
Gray's Sporting Journal
; “The Black Trout of English Run” appeared in the September/October 2007 issue of
Wisconsin Trails
; a version of “Dame's Rocket” is published online at
www.flyfishingwis.com
.

For Teresa,

 

who says she never said,

 

“Give a man a fish and he eats for a day;

teach a man to fish and you never see him again,”

 

but she knows it's true.

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

 

Troutsmith

Short Casts—Wisconsin

After Work

The Black Trout of English Run

Fishing in Print

Anglers Adrift

Tiger of the Valleys

Spring Ponds

The Four-Minute Fly Tier

Nets

Turning Back the Clock

Good Days and Bad Days

Spiders and Flies

Dame's Rocket

Fishing Fine and Far-Off

It's All Good

Redmire Pool at Dawn

The Choice

Trout Lake

Devon and Cornwall

Days on the Dove

Auld Red

I wanted to write a book of fishing, because fishing is water-magic: irrational, seductive, powerful, and dangerous. Too many lives are irrevocably changed by time spent near water. Too many ordinary-looking people we pass by on the street are really thralls; their eyes seem focused on the here and now, but their minds are haunted by the siren song of water crashing down from high country, or booming to the shore of some lonely beach. They wish to be elsewhere. I am one of them.

I've devoted my life to fishing in the same way that other, wiser people have devoted their lives to sculpture or the piano. Fishing is my art: an exercise of great skill acquired slowly over more than forty years of devoted study and practice. This makes it hard for me to work with beginners. People ask me questions like “How do you cast so that the lure lands on the
exact
spot that you're looking at?” or “How did you know that the fish had taken the fly?” and I'm embarrassed because I can't explain how I do these things. Or maybe I'm afraid that the answers aren't what twenty-first-century people want to hear. In a world where knowledge and information are just a click or two away, wisdom can be gained only through the hard lessons of experience, and experience needs time.

None of us spends as much time in the outdoors as we'd like, but the next best thing is sharing stories with other kindred spirits. So come fishing with me if you dare, but be on your guard. It is a terribly fine line between a passion for fishing and an obsession. I fish because I'm driven to by something deep within, because I can't not fish. Days on the water with me can begin at first light and end long after sunset. Such days are hungry, thirsty, wind burned, and footsore. They are also rich and unforgettable adventures. There's no telling where the quest for fish may take us and I can't guarantee your safety. We'll travel a fair way across this good earth, and find that despite its problems this is still a beautiful world filled with miracles. We'll fall in with a few good friends, the best men and women I know. We'll encounter some legendary fish, and perhaps even bring a few old battle-wagons to the net.

There's a story about a bent, wrinkled old man who could usually be seen fishing from atop a stone bridge in a little village. Only in winter would he desert his post on the bridge, and his return in spring was as sure as the trill of a red-winged blackbird or a crocus pushing through last year's leaves. In season the villagers got used to seeing his hunched form leaning over the parapet, studying the depths of the pool below, pondering the fate of worm or minnow suspended beneath his handmade quill float. Though never a talker, the angler always had a smile or a friendly wave for passers-by. Finally one day a child asked him the pivotal question “What are you fishing for?” The angler smiled, and then he answered with just a single word, “Memories.”

Durwards Glen, Wisconsin, 2012

 

 

He fairly flew out of work at the end of the day. It was one of the first warm, sunny afternoons of the year, and spring fever had hit him just as hard as it did when he was sixteen, knocking him for a loop and sending him back to something like adolescence. The state highway took him fifteen miles south, to the village where John Muir had lived once. With the truck's windows rolled down and the CD player blaring he sang at the top of his lungs, crazy, off-key accompaniments to Neil Young, wailed like a banshee. His wife would have been horrified. His students would have laughed. John Muir would have understood.

He parked near the ruins of the old mill dam. Downstream the little creek meandered through sandy bottoms and thickets of tag alder until it finally lost itself in the Wisconsin River, but upstream where it cut through a glacial moraine the stream splashed noisily over a rocky bed, bubbling and gurgling through a series of classic pools, riffles, and runs. Today was an upstream day. He'd save the swamps below for the long June twilights, when the big
Hexagenia
mayflies fluttered clumsily in the gloaming and hook-jawed old brown trout began looking up with hungry, merciless stares.

Still whistling, he unzipped the double rod case and chose his weapon; a light, limber 7½-foot fly rod that took a #4 double-tapered line. He loved that little rod; he loved the strong, fruity smell of the Chinese quince burl reel seat and the glow of its nickel-silver fittings; loved the way it balanced with a fine English fly reel, seeming almost weightless in his hands. He strung up the rod and knotted a two-fly rig to the end of the tapered leader, a heavily weighted scud fly in the lead, followed by a smaller, green-throated and grouse-hackled caddis larva. One fly for dead drifting and the other for “induced takes”—that quick, subtle lift of the rod that he'd learned from old Jimmy Leisenring on the Little Lehigh, in that long ago Pennsylvania of his youth.

Killdeer bobbing on the grass, robins fluttering in the thickets along the stream, and then the dark, mossy green water boiling past the rocks in its stony bed: a classic trout stream in miniature, like so many Wisconsin trout waters. Cautiously he waded out into the tail of the mill pool. He moved like a heron—smooth, slow, and noiseless. He raised the rod, and like magic the line began to unroll across the long pool. Small movements of his hands, the strict economy of motion that comes only after many years on the water, and yet the line shot out in front of him for forty feet or more and the flies settled lightly on the surface of the pool.

He let the flies drift downstream on their own, but he watched the little orange indicator like a hawk. Nothing. When he judged that the flies had reached the deepest holding water in the pool, he pulled a foot of line through the snake guides and twitched the flies with the rod. The orange dot stabbed quickly down beneath the surface and his right arm came up at the same instant. The line tightened, and little beads of spray were thrown off the leader as a trout began thumping hard down among the stones at the bottom of the pool.

How many times had this scene been played and replayed since that first fly-caught trout, some forty years ago? Thousands, tens of thousands of times, and measured in thousands of miles, driven and walked, from the granite ridges of New England all the way to the misty fjords of Vancouver Island, where he had cast to sea-run cutthroats as gray whales breached and sounded off the rocky headlands, and the wild surf pounded his back as he hauled his line into the blue-green Pacific. In the beginning he had sought to possess trout, but now he realized that it was they who possessed him, that trout were a dream, sometimes a nightmare, and he had chased them for so long that he was utterly lost in that dream, just like his father and his grandfather before him.