Small Streams

Image by Bob Romano

Over the last few years, I’ve found myself gravitating toward those little streams where wild trout seem to thrive. You will not find the names of these runnels familiar. Nor will they be found in your favorite fly-fishing magazine. Photos of fish caught in their waters will not appear on Facebook or Instagram. There are no fly shops or destination lodges nearby.

It may be a rivulet, unrestrained, falling with utter abandon off the side of a mountain or a dark and moody rill found a half-mile off a logging road, the limbs of spruce and balsam spreading from one bank to the other. Perhaps it’s a brook bubbling through a glade of rhododendron, maybe a narrow ribbon winding leisurely through fields of tall grass sprinkled with wildflowers.

Such streams do not contain the large fish found in tailwater fisheries or rivers running wide and deep. To be sure, on most afternoons I might find myself in the company of finger-long brookies, fish as frisky as fawns, or brown trout, growing fat on summer beetles and black ants, each fitting snugly in a moist palm, or it could be a ten-inch rainbow, the exception to the six-inch rule, rushing toward a tangle of submerged branches, just as likely splashing through the surface and ending with a pirouette to make Sophia Lucia nod with approval.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against playing tag with large fish. Once or twice each season, I’ll check into a well-known fishing lodge to spend a few days trying to outwit twenty-inch browns, fussy fish with epicurean palates, and like any angler, I find the tug of a large rainbow addicting. But when fishing larger rivers, I must pack all of the accoutrements such fluviatile endeavors require.

There is my wading stick and oversized net, chest waders, and a pack stuffed with boxes and boxes and more boxes of fly patterns in every conceivable size, color, and shape. There will be a fly rod for nymphing, another to swing streamers, and a third to cast delicate dry flies should the fish be rising. Then there are the reels to match each rod, with spare spools enabling me to switch from floating to sinking lines and back again.

All of this is fine and well, but when fishing a smaller stream, I need only slip on wading boots over my pair of well-worn hippers. The pack buckled to my waist is sufficient to carry forceps, clippers, an extra leader and a spool of tippet material. After I add a chamois sleeve to clean the slime off my dry flies and a plastic container of crystals to keep them afloat, there is enough room for a sandwich and perhaps an apple or brownie for dessert.

Hooked into a patch of rippled foam glued to the inside of the tin container are a few gold-ribbed hare’s ear wet flies in different sizes beside three or four elk-hair caddis, and if it’s summer, a couple of ant imitations, along with a number of pheasant-tail dry flies ranging in sizes from #12 to #18—my go-to pattern when fishing small streams.

I’ve often wondered why this fly, whether bouncing between the branches of a fallen conifer or slipping beside the shoulder of an exposed boulder, has consistently appealed to trout found in smaller water.

As a young man, I read Datus Proper’s What the Trout Said. Published in 1981, this thought-provoking work contains the late diplomat/angler’s insights into fly patterns. One of the author’s greatest influences was Vincent Marinaro, who wrote the book’s forward, and with whom the author had fished as a young man. Only recently, did I pick up Running Water, a book of reminisces penned by Proper in 2001. In one passage, the author examines why such a seemingly audacious pattern such as the Royal Coachman takes fish. He explains that for a fly pattern to be effective it must “be designed for both humans and trout because we see different parts of it.” An apt description of a pheasant-tail dry fly.

This pattern floats well on its parachute wing, which is a big plus for the angler while providing a low profile, which appeals to the fish. The mottled pheasant-tail body combined with its mahogany wing resembles many mayflies while the post fashioned of calf tail or Antron allows the angler to track the fly’s progress as it bounces over riffles or glides across a placid pool. In small-stream waters, where trout cannot be selective, there are few patterns that can compete with the effectiveness of this utilitarian fly.

To compliment my pared-downed kit is a fly rod, seven feet long, constructed of honey-colored cane by the Pennsylvania artist and rod maker, Tom Whittle.

There are the trout, of course, those Spartans of the stream, draped in colors only God could have imagined, fish that, after all these years, continue to take my breath away. If my luck holds, I will hold more than one in my moist palm. But there is more. For I’m accompanied by birdsong while casting my bits of feather and wool. A chipmunk chatters from high up a tree, a kingfisher complains from a low-hanging limb.

As the afternoon progresses, a great-blue heron swings out of the shadows, a mink slinks silently through the exposed roots of an arborvitae, a muskrat weaves against the current, a clump of reeds clutched in its jaws.

There is time to linger beside a small stream. Seated on a lichen-stained boulder or moss-covered log, I may look down at a toad no bigger than the button on my shirt, watch a redstart flit from one bank to another.

In the end, I suppose it is a sense of intimacy not found on larger rivers that draws me back to these rills and runs. For along the banks of these hidden waters an angler can experience a type of “beautiful aloneness.” It’s a feeling rarely found in the hustle and bustle of modern life, except perhaps in the finest haiku such as those written by Hanshan and Basho.

Bob’s latest work—the novel “Return to Rangely” and the short story collection “River Flowers”—are now available at MidCurrent Marketplace.