The Last, Best Day
From the top of the big rock on the ridge, you can look west across the valley to the tall mountains. At this distance, they are a hazy lavender. Since 1967, when I first discovered this spot, it has been a late October ritual to stop on this rock for a few moments before following the long, steep trail down to the trout stream.
If you lie on the rock and look straight up into the rising circle of maples and hickory, the brilliant Indian summer sky will be framed in scarlet and gold. When there is no wind to lightly rattle the leaves, there may be absolute silence--the kind that makes you strain to hear anything above a faint rush in the inner ear. That moment of utter stillness helps me recalibrate my senses for what has often been the finest day of the year.
Back on the trail, I follow steep switchbacks down the mountain through dense rhododendron thickets and into sunless coves where springs seep across mossy boulders. At spots the trail is nearly knee-deep in leaves, and their rhythmic swish keeps time for an old bluegrass song that has come to mind: "I'd rather be in some dark hollow, where the sun don't never shine . . ."
Fifty-five minutes later I can hear the rush of water, and I soon break out into the flats, where the ferns have already turned yellow. They seem almost luminous in the filtered light beneath the canopy of towering hemlocks and tulip poplar. Just beyond is a house-high rock that slopes down to the stream. The water is low and clear, as I had expected. At the base of the rock is a deep pool, an emerald strung by threads of whitewater to a necklace of shallow amber pools above and below.
A small trout is trapped in amber just upstream. I see its shadow on the gravel, then the fish itself as it hangs there, moving slightly up and down to inspect offerings too tiny for me to see. Then it rises deliberately and sips something from the surface.
Quickly, I remove my hiking boots, hide them under a rhododendron, then lace up the felt-soled wading shoes I've been carrying. In a few moments, the small Wulff Royal is knotted to the leader, and I stoop low and ease down the rock until I am about thirty feet behind the trout. It takes the fly eagerly.
The first fish is always a confirmation of sorts. This stream, its watershed, and its trout are so unspoiled that I keep expecting to arrive and find it has all been a dream. Or worse, that it was not a dream, but a treasure pillaged while I was away. Or worse yet, that I will have to endure a patient and paternalistic explanation for its loss. It doesn't take much to spread sand and silt miles downstream--a road bulldozed through the headwaters, a clear-cut on the steep slopes, or a few misplaced mountain chalets. The threat is not fantasy. Two nearby streams in this National Forest have recently been crippled, and another has been so severely choked with sand from a new logging access road that it will not recover in my lifetime.
But this little trout, just released, hovers over reassuringly clean rocks, its golden flanks and random red spots revealing a sure lineage to the German browns that were first stocked here in the late 1800s to replace the diminished native brook trout that once held dominion.
A mile upstream, I find my favorite mossy glade beside the stream and take off my vest. A familiar rock forms a perfect backrest. Beside it, a second rock has just the right shape to cradle a drink while I eat a ham sandwich. In nearly three decades, only one major tradition has been abandoned. Once I would have eaten a liverwurst, onion, and ripe Liederkranz cheese sandwich, but I learned by experience that retribution was too swift. The postlunch nap, however, is still observed.
By late afternoon I have lost count of the trout I've caught and released, but all the likely chutes and pockets have yielded at least a strike. Most of these trout are small, but it is not unusual to catch--or, rather, see--bigger fish. I am looking at one now.
It lies in only a few inches of water at the tail of a long pool where an almost imperceptible side-current slides alongside a grassy, undercut bank. A mere flick of the tail, and the trout can swap kitchen for bedroom.
What to do? The trout hasn't seen me, but I am too exposed to risk retreat and mount a possibly more effective approach. Yet if I try to cast from here, the trout will surely see the movement of my arm or the fly line. I stand motionless for what seems a long time. A light breeze momentarily ripples the water, and I use that advantage to sink to a kneeling position.
I take a deep breath, false cast over the open part of the pool where I hope the trout won't notice, then angle the cast so that the fly lands several feet above the trout. The fly floats past the spot. I try again. Then again. Nothing. I slowly stand and take a look. The trout is gone.
On the rock at the top of the trail, I sit until the far mountains are lost in darkness and the sky is vaporous with stars. The warmth of the day is long gone, but a little lingers on the surface of the rock, and I will carry just enough of it home with me to survive the winter.
Dogs That Point, Fish That Bite is available in hardcover ($19.95) at bookstores or from the University of North Carolina Press. Toll-free credit card orders: Phone 1-800-848-6224; fax 1-800-272-6817.