The only problem is how quickly they’d hit and spit the flies we floated through their thalassic homes. The skill here isn’t in drawing the strike. Rather, it’s in reacting to it quickly enough. There was plenty of action, and we got strikes in every hole. We simply couldn’t set the hook fast enough. In retrospect, though, it’s had to tell if the fish were that good or if the stream-chilled beer we portaged dulled our senses. Either way, the three of us were consistent.
The first few we managed to hook tossed the fly as casually as we crushed our beer cans. In a sport that favors size over beauty, we were finally reduced to netting seven-inch brook trout like West Coast steelhead. Whatever the hell that feels like.
Eventually, Todd nailed the first brookie with a driving hook set that would have made Bill Dance proud. The fish thrashed in the overgrown puddle it calls home as I frantically groped for the net, eventually sliding it underneath the fish so Todd could bring it to hand just long enough for a picture or two before releasing it. After all our effort, the moment only lasted for a breath as two grown men became one with a small piscine masterpiece grown from the very water in which we stood. We’d have called it transcendent if we could have formed the word.
We eventually landed a speckled trout each. The memory burns in my mind, probably because I’ve failed on every subsequent endeavor. I’d finally caught a local trophy. It lay in the bottom of my net with its oversized mouth gasping, its eponymous specks glowing on its back like a Bright Light tapestry written by God. A tiny, Southern belle in the palm of my hand.
To catch a fish like this is to connect with the land in a way that transcends your mortality. This fish, like the land in which it lives, is the same as it was thousand of years ago when a forgotten ice age stranded so far from its northern cousins. To catch it, to hold it in your hand and stare at it with what might be the only human eyes into which it will ever look is to understand your place in the world. It makes you feel powerful yet insignificant as you are able to grasp your place in the natural world.