Fall

As a long-time consumer of fly-fishing literature, there are a handful of pieces that have stuck with me over the years. These are stories that are a pleasure to read at least once a year, often coinciding with a particular time of year.

One such piece was written by the late Craig Woods. I was first introduced to Craig via a story in Trout magazine about the Battenkill. It was this article, along with one by Nick Lyons that convinced me that I had to fish the 'kill. Woods writing appeared in a number of magazines over the years, and I was rarely disappointed with what he had to say.

Of all the stories he wrote, Battenkill Autumn was my favorite. The story is in his book The River as Looking Glass, published by the Stephen Greene Press in 1988. I have read this story once every October and with each reading it takes on different meaning. As I get a little grayer each year the theme of autumn takes on obvious new meaning. Perhaps not of impending demise, but certainly a recognition that my knees are not quite what they used to be, I say "what" more often than I should and exactly where did I leave my glasses?

I have had the good fortune to meet Craig's brother Jamie and count him as a good friend. He organizes a breakfast for angling and outdoor enthusiasts at a Cambridge, NY diner several times a year. There is a lot of wisdom and no shortage of humor assembled around that table. It is often best to remain quiet and listen. I have seen how much affection Jamie has for his brother and envy that he had a partner in crime to spend time on the water in his youth.

It is with deep affection for this story and the privilege of being part of a gathering of fine anglers who meet at The Country Gal's diner that I am posting this wonderful bit of prose with only very minor editing. I think Craig would be OK with this.

Just sitting on the bank of a trout stream can be reward enough in the fall.

Battenkill Autumn - By Craig Woods

The smell of woodsmoke is in the air, and it makes you think of warm places indoors, sheltered from the elements. The smooth late-summer smell of freshly mowed fields is gone now, and you don't sweat from the walk into the flat-water stretch above the bridge. It is October, and you know that among the colorful leaves strewn on the water's slick surface, trout will be head-and-tail rising to emerging mayfly nymphs.

You know that the trout will be rising to them because you were there the day before, and the day before that. In fact it's been five days in a row, and most of that time was spent trying to figure out what the trout were feeding on. Now you know that they are feeding on nymphs of a tiny green mayfly - a Baetis or Pseudocloeon mayfly - with a chunky little body and dark, blue-gray wings. The fly is so small that the imitations you have tied to match it are on size eighteen and twenty hooks. All you did was to wrap a fuzzy green dubbing to the body on the hook shank.

You fish alone and in the middle of the day. You fish alone because it is autumn. You fish in the middle of the day because that is when the small flies hatch and because it will be warm in the in the Indian-summer sun. After years of fishing the river, you have just come to realize that this hatch in September and October is one of the few times you can count on rising trout and a predictable emergence of flies. Most of the other hatches of the river are so inconsistent these days that it is hard to catch them right; and when you do find rising trout, they are super selective.

Some fly-fisherman say that the river is fished out.  This is not true.  Biological data gathered by the state fish-and-game agency show that the population of trout in the river today compare favorably to populations of trout in the river twenty years ago.  The trout are simply becoming harder and harder to catch on flies.  And they are especially difficult to catch on dry flies.

But you think you have the answer now, at least for this hatch.  And you know that the pod of trout that you’ll try that simple green fly on contains some good fish.

Everything happens in October.  The river and the woods are alive with activity, with an urgency.  Everything moves as it does at no other time of the year.  The woodcock flights are beginning, migrations from Newfoundland through New England to New Jersy, where the birds congregate before continuing on to the spots where they will winter.  Ducks and geese are migrating.  You seem to notice a change in your English setter even before you open the bird season – isn’t there something electric to her gait and overall demeanor when you work her in the dry grasses and thinning woods that are the grouse covers that you located over the summer?  The deciduous trees erupt in their expression of fruition, and you look for the richness of the colors – the reds, golds, and yellows – on the mountain to measure against the amount of rainfall and sunshine in recent weeks to see if the foliage is as bright or as dull as you guessed it would be.  Everything is happening. Changing, moving, preparing for the grip of winter, which is long and hard in these parts.

You are moving, too.  There is so much to do in these weeks of October, and you want to move quickly to get it all – the hunting and the fishing – before it is gone for the winter.  You want to make sure you have gained enough sustenance from your sport to last you for the winter.  It is your preparation for the coming grip: the thought that you won’t have had enough scares you.  You are aggressive – in a special, quiet, human way.  But you are moving quickly like your surroundings, and you wish you could suck in everything that’s happening to make sure it will last until spring.  You begin to think that the term “Mother Nature” doesn’t have to be childish and banal after all.

And the trout are moving too.  Mature fish have begun to seek out the spawning areas of clean gravel.  They are aggressive in a savage way, eating as much as they can, storing up energy against the rigors of spawning and the demands of survival in the cold months.  They have zeroed in on this hatch of small mayflies, and they rise eagerly to the nymphs in the surface film that are struggling to become airborne.  The trout will come up – head, dorsal, tail – as long as there are flies to eat.

The trout are rising steadily when you reach the flat.  You see some of the hatched-out olive duns floating on the water and some caddisflies in the air.  But the trout want nothing to do with these insect forms.  They want only to feed on the struggling nymphs a couple of inches below the water's surface.  You remember reading a story by Russell Chatham about fly-fishing off Baja for yellowtail.  He tells about discovering that the yellowtail are feeding selectively on small baitfish, which doesn’t seem to make sense because there must be larger and more plentiful prey to be had.  Funny to think. But it is just like that with these trout.  They want only the little nymphs.

As you wade across the river, you feel as though you’ve just about worn a path on the stream bottom because you have fished from precisely the same spot for the last five days, at the head of a gravel bar on the far side of the stream.

The cast is difficult: the fly must land directly upstream from you, it must float down to you just two inches under the surface, and it must be twitched occasionally.  You grease the leader within two inches of the fly and begin to cast to the rising trout.

The slow flows of fall often all for a stealthy approach.

The leader jumps slightly when the first fish takes, and the trout bulls strongly downstream to the riffle below you.  It is a larger fish than you thought it was.  You backstep into the shallow water near the gravel bar, and as you do this, the fish moves on the surface.  It’s about fourteen or sixteen inches long and typical of this river’s browns – silver-yellow on the flanks and sleek in shape. You play the fish’s runs off the reel and as the leader cuts through the water, bright leaves wash against it and get caught on the line-to-leader connection. When you bring the fish in, you kill it and clean it in the shallow water.  Your hands smell like trout for the rest of the afternoon.  It’s a good smell.

You fish for four or five hours, and the little nymph works like a charm.  The difficulty lies in getting the fish to take your fly instead of one of the many naturals, so you try to call a little extra attention to your imitation by working it slightly just as it passes the fish’s nose.  Your technique improves as the hours pass.  Occasionally the wind gusts and rattles the branches of the oaks that line the upstream bank on your right, and acorns come down to riddle the water as though a handful of pebbles had been thrown into the stream.  But it doesn’t bother the trout.  They keep working steadily.  They are locked into their feeding.  And you are locked into your fishing.  Chipmucks and squirrels rush to gather the fallen bounty that has landed on the stream bank.

It is late in the afternoon when you leave.  You are chilled from standing in the same spot for so long; your feet are numb.  But the day’s fishing has filled you with a special kind of warmth.  You have kept several trout that you and Samia can have for dinner.  None are as large as the first one, but they are all autumn bright, and you know the river can afford to lose them.

When you leave you realize you will probably not see this stretch of water again until it is high and forbidding with spring snowmelt, a half a year away.  The sun is off the valley, and the shadow line is halfway up Red Mountain, moving quickly.

When you leave, the trout are still rising.