Growing Gills

by David Joy

  With the April sun slowly vanishing behind the ridge, we headed to the truck with our tails between our legs. The fish were there, but they wanted nothing to do with our feathered hooks. Trout:1 – Us:0. We left it at that.

  On the way back, I found my truck keys stashed in the back of my vest. We said our goodbyes, tried to come up with a decent excuse, and vowed to fish again. Then, as if things couldn’t get any worse, Ron drove off toward his home in Clemson, a solid hour and a half away, with my reels safely in his trunk. When I hadn’t been able to find my keys, I had stashed my valuables (a Fly Logic 2-weight reel and a Ross size 7) in his trunk. By the time I realized it, his car was winding around curves toward South Carolina. One of us (and I don’t know which), or maybe both, was karma’s bitch for the day.

  Driving home, I began thinking about that broken rod. I hadn’t let it show when Ron was around, but I was devastated, heartbroken, depressed. When I had time to think about what had happened, I felt sick, close to vomiting. I thought about that rod, broken and unfishable. It wasn’t so much the rod in its entirety, but the cork grip that I held so close. That cork, originally manila-colored and dusty from sanding, had been worn to a beautiful brownish green. It had been smoothed to a slick and shiny finish. More than that, my hands had held that grip when I reeled in the biggest trout of my life. It was more than a grip; it had become an extension of my hands and a symbol of my devotion to fly fishing. I hadn’t told Ron, but that model rod had been discontinued, and there was no way I’d find another one. That rod would never fight a fish again.

  Ron emailed me shortly after that trip to let me know he had my reels. I don’t remember exactly what he wrote, but he jokingly said there was no way I’d take him fishing again. Despite our previous bad luck, we went again, and on that trip Ron, his son, and I all caught native brookies out of a tiny mountain creek. The fish were gorgeous, but more importantly we enjoyed seeing each other in our element. Bad days come with the territory, but we are, after all, fishermen.

  *****

  Some folks are into buying the nicest rod on the market. They’ll spend thousands of dollars on a Hardy, Scott, or Sage, all the time believing that the most expensive equipment will make you a fisherman. As for me, I want a rod worn with age, a rod that has seen water, a rod that has held strong while bowing to the weight of fish, and the cork grip better be right.

  I’m addicted to rods. I find them in yard sales, on eBay, or in antique stores. I see them tilted against a back wall like Granny’s, begging to be fished. Something in me can’t resist and I buy them. I don’t have a use for all of them, but I can’t stand to see the legacy of a fisherman waste away amidst cobwebs and dust. I imagine those rods being given to some unappreciative family member after the owner has died. I imagine the inheritor having no understanding of what that rod means, being blind to the stories hidden in the cracks of the grip. When I see these rods, I know, and I will not let them die. Those bought fishermen can have their thousand-dollar rods. They can believe that expensive equipment will catch them more fish or, if nothing else, make them look like they know what they’re doing. As for me, give me a handle with teeth marks embedded from when I climbed a waterfall without a hand to spare. Give me a cork grip with mica pushed deep in the crevices from the times I laid the rod on the ground to admire a native brookie. I want a rod that changes just as I do, the cork slowly molded into hand, finally fitting perfectly, as man and grip fuse in partnership. The cork holds the imprint of hands, imprints only left by time spent casting, imprints that define the time invested by an artisan, and they are beautiful.

  The Piscatorial Picasso

  On hands and knees I crawl stealthily across rocks worn round. I snake my way to the next hole, dissect every inch of water, and constantly question, “Should I come from the right or left? Am I going to spook the guard fish if I take another step? Where is the prime feeding position? Will the alpha trout be lying there—or maybe there?” It’s a game of becoming animalistic. I revert to my reptilian psyche and contemplate only the necessary. These moments rarely come and then dissolve quickly, but during those brief glimpses, I transcend humanness and become one of them. We humans are still animals; it’s just that most of us have forgotten, redefining the human experience and slowly destroying the innate instincts that once made us who we were.

  When I become wild, I am no longer a fisherman in the general sense of the word. At these times of complete connectedness, I am to trout as bears are to salmon; I am to fish as ospreys are to herring. My senses take over: perfect cast, hold it there, mend the line, invisible tension, wait, strike, hook set, fish. When it all goes perfectly, the fly is no longer simply chicken feathers tied to a piece of chemically sharpened metal. The fly becomes a caddis, a stonefly, a mayfly, a beetle, a bug caught in the current—completely helpless, fish food. There is no evidence that I am there. The fish do what they do, and I exploit their vulnerabilities. Predatory, I use brains rather than claws or teeth to catch trout, but the instinct is the same.

  True fly fishing is not dumb fishing. There is no chucking worms and waiting. There is no cooler sitting, beer drinking (at least not during), hooks in drunken fingers. This is an art, an art that I may never fully master, an animalistic medium, one that, unless experienced, cannot be understood. Yet, if people are privileged enough to witness it, they’ll know they are in the midst of a piscatorial Picasso. I’ve seen it; a few times I’ve been part of it; but every time I was there I was enamored, ensconced in timelessness.

  When I see a trout rise to a fly or turn on a nymph, pressure builds in my chest nearing explosion. This is when the artist knows to wait: oftentimes I do, but at other times the urge becomes too much, always resulting in a missed fish. When I’m patient, I raise my rod tip at just the right moment, feel the tension, and play the fish, always careful not to play them too long (extended fights build lactic acid resulting in death), but just enough to let the smile creep up my shaggy cheeks. I wet my hand in the cold current to avoid removing the fish’s slimy coat, remove the hook, marvel in the piscine beauty, kiss the trout on the nose, and release it.

  I never drop a fish into the water; this completely ruins the experience. Holding a trout loosely in my hand, I lower the fish under the surface and face it into the current, forcing oxygen through the gills, thereby allowing the trout to catch its breath. Fully recovered, the fish fins away, sinks into the pebbly bottom, and disappears among the riffles. After the release, I sit there, smoke a cigarette, and wish that I could stay there forever, euphoria never dissipating. Then the uncontrollable desire rekindles, and soon I’m off to the next fish.

  *****

  Through my evolution as a fisherman, I’ve come to respect certain species more than others. I don’t know why exactly, but certain fish are higher on the totem than others. More so, some fish transcend all other species and deserve their own totemic monument. These fish are trout. I’ll never intentionally kill a trout. Plenty of other fish (catfish, bream, crappie, croaker, whiting, spots, pompano) I’ll catch, kill, and cook with regularity, but I could never inflict that same fate upon a trout. A wild trout swimming in untainted water is so perfect that I regret disturbing the scene, much less taking from it. Holding a native brookie, watching its mouth rhythmically open and close in the current, I am completely aloof from the human experience.

  The green marbled back, burning red spots scattered like glowing embers, golden stomach, and fire orange pectoral fins tipped with white of a spawning brook trout cannot be fully captured by words. I have never seen colors so magnificent. Not to say the coloration of other trout is not equally astonishing, but the brooks are the only trout native to Appalachia (kindred to my own Carolinian blood), so we have something in common. Trout are the most well-dressed fish in the world, and the brook trout is the Armani of them all.

  I didn’t start off catching trout. In fact, I had never caught a trout—besides seatrout—until I was nineteen years old. As with most freshwater fishermen, I began
my journey casting light spinning tackle for sunfish, bass, and catfish in farm ponds and rivers. Freshwater trout remained a mythic creature that swam in cold mountain brooks and were wary of any angler’s offering.

  Around the age of twelve, I made the progression to fly fishing. This decision came as a natural stage in my angling development. I was merely an artist in search of his medium. I didn’t know the technicalities of the sport (often using straight monofilament as a leader and tippet), but there was something poetic about throwing tight loops from bank to bank. I had no one around to teach me the techniques, so I spent a lot of time hung up in the oaks and hickories, eventually learning most of the methods out of necessity rather than from teachers. As Emerson wrote, “We thrive by casualties.”

  I can still remember the first fish that I ever caught on the fly. Fishing what I had dubbed a “Bumblebee” (actually a McGinty), I cast into the middle of Johnston Pond, and let the fly slowly sink into the clouded water. Suddenly the fluorescent orange floating line leapt forward. I had no clue how to set the hook; I just started reeling. Luckily, the juvenile bluegill hooked itself and, after a short retrieve, I held the feisty sunfish in my hand. Its dark blue sides like a late evening sky faded into blackish orange around the belly. My fly held firm in the side of its jaw. I let the fish swim, but I was hooked. I’ve spent the last thirteen years trying to perfect my art, fly rod practically glued in hand, cork grips worn bare.

  *****

  I still use spinning equipment occasionally to entice certain fish (I’ve crossed bridges, but never burned them), but I refuse to catch trout on a spinning rod. Bait fishing or any other type of spin fishing is sinful in regards to trout, blasphemous to a fish so divine. These fish are too aesthetically beautiful to be caught in such a barbaric, bungling way. Trout are pieces of natural artwork, like glowing auroras or changing leaves, and the only medium deserving of such beauty is a fly rod.

  I came to this conclusion after the first time I caught wild trout on the fly. A friend of mine, Zac, one of the few true artisans that I’ve ever fished with, opened my eyes. A tall, slender-framed highlander, Zac was born and raised in the hills of Burke County, and his roots were evident in his thick Appalachian voice. Watching his long arms shoot bow-and-arrow casts under overhanging rhododendron, throw upstream mends to keep the fly steady in shifting currents, and sweep hook sets just below branches is breathtaking. Showing me the ways of trout, he took me up a tributary of Caney Fork Creek named Piney Mountain Creek, in North Carolina’s Southern Appalachians. On that creek, he taught me to read water like words from a page, scan currents like poetry, and dissect pools like Faulkner novels.

  Wading through the cool ripples, I was completely aware that I had never entered a place so wild. Aside from the abandoned, overgrown logging road, there was absolutely no sign of human passage. Pines towered from the peaks, rhododendron blanketed the hillside, foliage shattered the sunlight, and the tiny creek ran through it all. I instantly started searching the water for likely spots, planning to use my lifetime of pond knowledge on wild trout.

  “Cast right there,” Zac said. “There’ll be a fish there.” His 8-foot rod pointed at a small pocket at the edge of a plunge pool. I thought that he was out of his mind. I didn’t see any way that a fish would be holding in that sliver of water. Still, I dappled a cast into the clear, swirling eddy, keeping the line taut, rod raised high. Within seconds, the size 14 Stimulator was sucked under. The rod tip pulsated as the native brook trout used the current for heightened propulsion. I lifted the fish to the surface as the brookie tried to dig back to the unseen. Dipping my hand into the stream, I brought the fish into my palm.

  I held the small brookie in my hand, its head extending from my loose fist, and removed the hook from the fish’s mouth. I released my grip, palming the trout’s fleshy, tender body, and witnessed all of the magnificence of its beauty: eyes like copper coins with shimmering black pupils, deep sunset orange lining the bottom of the fish’s gill slits and covering the featherlike pectoral fins, goldenrod yellow visually erupting along the fattened belly. The sea green color of its back with darker pine-colored segments ran through like veins in marble, and the blood red spots dotted the trout’s sides like shimmering planets.

  Struck by its splendor, I held the brookie almost too long, but snapped from my trance and let the eight-inch native shoot from my fingertips back into the masking sheen. I was in love.

  That first native fish is seared deep into my memory more vividly than any other experience; it plays back like a movie I can’t help rewinding and watching again. We caught fish the rest of that day, all beauties, but nothing comparable to the excitement of that first encounter. From that day forth, for me, there has been no other way to catch a trout.

  *****

  Since that first native trout, I’ve spent thousands of hours on the water in search of those fish. I’ve traded my elementary Johnston Pond education for a doctorate in trout water. The fish that were once mythical have become so real that I can smell their sweet, earthy aroma emanating from my hands, even on days that I’ve not touched water. I am haunted by their existence and by knowing they are holding steady in the current just out of sight, waiting for a meal to be brought into their feeding line. When I am left to my own thoughts, nothing else swims through my mind but trout and ways to catch them. I daydream of drag-free drifts over rising trout and of watching the slow methodic ascent of a feeding fish.

  I haven’t found any other fish comparable to trout: brown trout with pitch black spots covering the colors blending down their bodies from raw umber to a buttery yellow like the top of a perfectly baked biscuit; rainbows with rosy cheeks, moss green backs, cherry red lateral lines, and black specks sprinkled like pepper; and the brookies resembling marble slabs delicately brushed and speckled with brilliant yellows, oranges, and reds. These fish are masterpieces of the natural world, paintings that do not need another stroke. Every encounter is an art show; the stream is my Louvre.

  Yet, the only way to experience this artwork is to catch a trout. In some crazy way, when I fish I feel involved in the process of creation. Without my participation, I would never see the beauty in its entirety, only brief flashes of color beneath the mirror of water as fish turn, one-second glimpses as trout burst through the surface and engulf emerging mayflies, or short-lived glances of red fins spooked upstream. Throwing silent loops across the surface and laying the fly delicately over holding fish, I bring what is unseen to light.

  The water remains humbling. As soon as I think I’ve finally found all the answers, I walk away dumbfounded by the mystery of the unattainable. Fly fishing is a medium that never can be fully mastered, just as the greatest artists will never grasp every technique. Hoping for the unfeasible, the final masterpiece, keeps me committed.

  I dream of a twenty-inch native brook, hooked mouth rimmed in red and gaping. Russet brown eyes, broad emerald back, red and yellow spots lustrous as jewels, flaming orange stomach with fins lined in white—it will all be there. I will devote a lifetime to mastery. This fish will be my magnum opus, my reason to cast. With the sun fading purple behind hemlock peaks, I brush curving strokes of fly line across the velvet May sky in hopes that the trout will rise. When the fish remains a ghost, I take a deep breath, lift my rod, and cast again—just one more stroke toward perfection.

  Throwing Tight Loops

  I sat on a large mat of moss under branches of overhanging laurel as Zac made his approach in Piney Mountain Creek. The pool he’d noticed probably held a trout, but most fishermen would not have given it a second glance due to its location. The birdbath-size pool gathered along the opposite bank beneath a thick tangle of rhododendron branches.

  Thick cover and tiny pockets was a standard scenario in the North Carolina high country. Anyone who’d been there knew that traditional overhead, sidearm, and roll casts were out of the question. These types of casts would certainly lasso the tippet and fly around limbs like Indiana Jones’s whip. A bow-and-arr
ow cast might get the fly in but keeping the offering steady would still be impossible. If it had been my lead, I would have kept tromping upstream, but not Zac. He was different.

  Zac was tall and lanky, much like me, and strangers often asked if we were brothers when we ordered a round of beers, shot pool, or ate coarse-chopped barbeque at Dillsboro Smokehouse. His hair was lighter than my dark brown stubble, but through the haze of mountain fog we probably looked pretty damn close. The biggest difference was clear to me: he handled a fly rod like I dreamed of doing. Sometimes I think Zac must have been born with a fly rod in his hand.

  Zac held the cork grip of the 5-weight Sage in his teeth as he slowly crawled toward the overhang, careful not to spook any fish. Water pushed around the patched knees of his waders, and his hands gripped the slick stones covering the creek bed. A large, flat piece of limestone forced water to the far side, the barrier creating the current of the pool.

  He sneaked onto the smooth boulder, sat up on his knees, detached the dark, size 12 Hendrickson from the hook keeper, and pulled just enough line from the spool to give him some play. Tugging on the bend of the dry fly, he began to bow his rod, the added tension creating a load of potential energy. He bent down, took aim, and fired the fly just beneath the spearhead-shaped leaves of rhododendron. Then he balanced one hand on the rock as the dry fly landed calmly in the center of the pool.

  Zac bent down further to watch and began flicking upstream mends to keep the fly steady, the 8-foot rod reaching beneath the limbs. I’d never questioned whether or not he could shoot a cast into the tiny pocket, but I did wonder how he’d manage to hold the fly there long enough to tempt a trout. As he rolled continuous curves through the line and leader, it became clear that he knew exactly what he was doing.