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MIKE HUDOBA RECALLS THE SUBTLE CHARMS

________AND MEDITATIVE QUALITY OF TROUT FISHING.

| excerpt |

Trout Fisher's Almanac
Edited by Sid Evans
Grove/Atlantic, 296 pages

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BY MIKE HUDOBA

Editor's note: This essay appeared in the March 1956 issue of Sports Afield.

Trout fishing gives a man time for meditation; a chance to absorb the meaning of a blue sky and pines sighing to the breeze. Tiny mosses on a streamside boulder, just placed right for resting, hold tiny scarlet flags above their soft green; in a cluster of forget-me-nots a shimmering green tiger beetle waves his antennae to a nether world of charm a man needs to know.

Trout fishing is the whirr of a hummingbird probing the columbine; a chipmunk staring curiously from a rock crevass; a phoebe darting from a limb to snatch an insect in mid-air; a small snapping turtle crawling along the bottom.

Trout fishing is trout at their stations, slowly finning, watching the surface where the stream smoothes out into a pool. Trout fishing is a mayfly dappling the water. Watch there as the trout turn; one moves to break the surface. Slowly widening ripples mark the spot where the mayfly tried to leave its eggs.

Resist the urge to cast as two other mayflies touch the water and slowly drift. Perhaps the trout you see shows no interest. You wonder why until a large dark shape materializes where nothing was before. You sit, tree-still, heart throbbing, planning your next move. This is trout fishing.

There are trout fishermen who never seem to reach the released tempo of effective trouting. One sees them hurrying from pool to pool in a rush to cover as much stream mileage as time will allow. Others may stay at one pool and flail the water for hours without interruption, impatient over the lack of rises. True, there is a magnetic attraction to the stream ahead, the next riffle. There is a hungry desire to round the bend where a bigger trout must be waiting. This is a part, an important part, of trout fishing, the spirit to explore, to seek the new. Just as it is an important part to return to old, treasure spots. But how much of the in-between flavor we miss if we overlook the little things? In fact, a man is trout fishing only if each day's success is not measured by the creel alone.

This does not mean that trout should be caught, or that a day in which no trout are caught is more enjoyable than one with abundant rises. Rather, it means that the sting of disappointment when trout do not readily take can be tempered by the observations of the wonders nature parades for those who will but look and see.

There are streams to which I have returned so many times the trout in each pool have become familiar companions. And I have found that a cast placed so and a fly drifted such will renew a pleasant acquaintance. If it doesn't, I wonder if someone else, more creel-conscious than I, has tempted them. I have tagged trout with a device available from the Fish Tagger's Association, and in one season took the same 15-inch rainbow six times. Each time the thrill of catching him was stronger than the last.

There is a stream in the Blue Ridges where I once caught an 18-inch brookie and released it. For several seasons afterward, I tried for that same fish. Once he rolled short of the fly, but never struck. I'm glad he didn't. He made me a better fisherman.

A stream I often fished in Colorado contained a particularly beautiful pool that had never produced a trout for me. The water was so deep and turmoiled by a waterfall that I could not see into the pool, even with Polaroid glasses.

It became a spot where I liked to rest and study the view of the canyon. I'd fish the pool more out of respect for good-looking water than from any faith in results. Only once did I raise a fish. My fly had finished its drift, and I paused to watch a deer drinking from the stream below. When I looked back, a trout was turning with my fly in its mouth. As if in slow motion, the trout continued to turn, exposing a rainbow-lined side not less than a foot wide. Finally its tail, as broad as this page, made one twisted flip and disappeared from view. The rod and my arm were in position to set the hook but I was completely unable to move. The trout did not hook itself. I fished that pool many times but never raised the gigantic rainbow again. That fish also made me a better fisherman.

Yet I'm not sure that if the same thing were to happen this season, I might again fail for the same reason. For such is trout fishing that you can fully prepare only for what has happened. Future days hold only the unexpected.

While I often wonder what would have happened if I'd hooked that trout, my life is no less full for failing to do so. In fact the outcome of that surely prodigious battle gives me a special daydream I use when things get dull at Congressional hearings. It also helps me fight harder to save similar places other cherish.

Although I have caught many trout, it seems the ones I remember best are those I did not catch. There is a delight in recalling the streams and pools. Each one is a world of its own with a particular charm surrounding it. Fishing is real fun ... all kinds of fishing. But the places where trout live have a special appeal that gives fishing for them the extra plus.

There is a bond between trout fishermen. Like every well-knit family, relations seem strained only to an outsider. It's not only true, but entirely as it should be that an artificial lure trouter speaks curtly to the live-bait fisherman -- if at all. A dry-fly purist may cross the street to avoid being seen with a known wet-fly man. I have known friends to fall out over spoken preferences between brook and brown trout. I know two members of a trout club who don't like to sit at the same table because one uses a nine-foot instead of a seven-foot rod on a certain brook-trout stream. They, of course, are considered a little extreme. One even has been seen bass fishing.

But let someone make a slur about trout as compared to other fish species, and let him beware. Trout fishermen close ranks like a herd of maddened bison. Only when the infidel is in full rout do they realign in their individual compartments and sneer at all the other compartments.

With the growth of this country and its population, the unspoiled environment for trout is becoming scarcer. Those who appreciate trout fishing and the quiet beauty of the places of trout must unite to help protect those values. It means too that we must appreciate the trout themselves.

There are many kinds of natural beauty, from the expansiveness of a sky showing through a covering of multigreen forest, to the myriad forms of wondrous natural life. But there is a special something, a washing of the spirit, a re-creation of the individual, for those who take to the streamside where trout waters sing.
June 10, 1997

©1997, reprinted with permission of the Hearst Corporation.

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