Streamer Junkie

The roads were fine. Everyone was once again making a big deal out of nothing. Somewhere over the past few years people have forgotten that they live in Upstate NY and that this is just winter. We call school days on account of two inches of snow, we declare snow emergencies when there might be some lake effect coming, we broadcast winter advisories… when the first and only warning we really needed is that this is NY, and yes, it’s winter. Those of us who still fish how and when we can all winter view it as a huge farce mostly. I guess we’re a dying breed. Fine with me. We’re all dying anyhow. May as well do it with a fly rod in your hand. Let’s get this over with I say.

I stood at the Jeep, a fly box on the hood opened up displaying my tools to the fishing gods while I struggled to tie on a size 16 scud. A red squirrel sat on a rotten limb leaning against the base of a tree, watching me with indifference as it rolled something over and over in its paws, gnawing away feverishly and filling its cheeks. If the truth was told, we were probably both in the same frame of mind. Better get this done now while we still can. A forty-five degree day in December is nothing to take for granted. I rig up a fly rod. The squirrels search out and store away more food. We all have our priorities.

I tied on one more streamer, the same pattern, and made a few more casts. One more time I felt the tug and saw a glimpse of a hint of butter colored brown trout. But that fish wasn’t hooked solid, something I take full blame for as who could blame a trout for not hooking itself well enough? It was a quick chance meeting, more like the time it takes two people to pass each other on a side walk, and then it was over. And then I came to the realization that my fingers stung from the heat that the cold rain had removed from them, and I left the river.

He pulled up in an old gas guzzling 1970’s something car and lifted a brown metal tackle box and a cane fishing pole out of the trunk. I don’t remember what he said, I was preoccupied with doing something in the dirt. Probably playing with some toy, a matchbox car or a Star Wars figure I can only imagine. The car was big and brown, maybe green. I can see him getting out and walking to the trunk and my father sticking his shovel into the ground and walking over to the car. They talked, I played. When Johnny left my Father brought the tackle box and fishing pole over and set them on the ground. I remember him saying that Johnny said he couldn’t fish anymore and that he’d given them to us.

I had a 1955 Chevy hot rod once, with a hula pig on the dash. You know, just like the old hula dancers they used to stick on the dash in the ‘60s, except mine was a pig in a grass skirt. It just fit the car better. The streamers fit the Jeep and in the bigger scheme of things just as well today as that pig did twenty years ago. The pig was just there, goading me into another hard launch at a stop light to see if I could make it kiss it’s toes, while the streamers are there now tempting me to stop at the barge canal as I drive over the bridge above it, the rain hammering the surface like a million drum sticks trying to beat out a rhythm that ends up just being white noise.

Steelheading is a lot like trout fishing, as it should be. They’re just really big trout after all. Steelheading is a lot like trout fishing, except it’s nothing like trout fishing. The steelhead were holding underneath and in really fast moving water. Hard water. They’d find a place out of the current like any other trout to wait for food, except that out of the current meant a slightly easier current than what it was surrounded by, not exactly an easy current.