Book Excerpt: Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!

Written by: Peter Kaminsky

Here’s a wonderful excerpt from the new book Catch of a Lifetime, edited by Peter Kaminsky, which presents the moving first-person stories of more than seventy anglers—including Carl Hiaasen, Joan Wulff, Charles Gaines, Mark Kurlansky, and John McPhee—recounting the tale of their catch of a lifetime.

There are fish I have caught that I remember more fully than whole years of my life—moments peaceful as the rhythm of a trout sipping Pale Morning Duns in a meadow stream, or as pulse-pounding as double- hauling into an acre of stripers in wind-whipped seas. At such moments, time, or its passage, seems to go away. To find something in this world that takes you out of time, when the seconds cease to slip through Life’s hourglass, is as close as I’ve come to a state of grace.

Flyfishing is by no means the only past time that has this effect on its devotees, but it always gets it done for me. Still, catch of a lifetime—how can you pick one? The truth of the matter is, every time you lure a great fish to your fly, fight it, and bring it to hand, you may find yourself feeling that you are waking from a dream state, truly believing “No question about it, that was the jackpot!”

But they can’t all be the one, can they?

For me, was it the 27 pound sea-run brown trout that took a size #12 Prince Nymph at nightfall on the Rio Grande in Tierra del Fuego?

Could have been.

Or the tarpon that ate my fly at sun-up in the Marquesas?

Possibly.

Or maybe, on a Labrador lake, the Northern Pike that crushed a popping bug which, in extremis, was tied to a leader made from the high E-string of our guide’s guitar?

All fabulous and all felt like the absolute pinnacle at the time, but if I dive into memory’s deeper waters—or if you do the same—there is often one special fish swimming there, as fondly recalled as your teenage self’s first romantic adventure.

It was a June morning in the Catskills. I stopped at Andy’s, the local bait and tackle shop, for my regular fishing breakfast: coffee-to-go and a Clark Bar. I continued on to Esopus Creek and the long pool known as Huddler’s Flats. I crossed over the Cold Brook bridge (it washed out some years later), and turned right, following the road to its end. I climbed to the overgrown tracks of the railroad that had ceased to operate in the mid-1950’s. Wild strawberries, no bigger than gum drops, shone ripe and red in the spaces between the railroad ties. I ate a few before entering the woods.

The undergrowth was a tangle of barely leafed-in raspberry bushes and game trails that didn’t seem to lead anywhere in particular. With no real landmarks, I wasn’t sure where I was headed until I heard the river song of rushing water at the tail-out of the pool. There were two boulders there that broke the current so that I could slide between them into the thigh deep water and make my way to the glide above the riffle.

The water had the glassy, pregnant, look that a river takes on before it picks up speed as it exits a pool and accelerates—first into pocket water, and then rapids. A layer of morning mist, like a half opened window shade, hung over the water, about ten feet above the surface, throwing an intimate glow on the scene. In half an hour, the mist would burn off, but for now it allowed enough light to see activity but not so much that it would put a wary fish down. A nearby cardinal wheet-wheeted as I waded a third of the way across the river and looked back toward the soft water along the bank, just upstream of the two boulders that bookended my entry into the water.

I lit up a Marlboro. Although I haven’t smoked a cigarette in nearly forty years, I remember how a few minutes standing in a stream, surveying the water, and having a leisurely smoke, would help me contemplate the river, alert to the ring of a rising trout, fixing on a target, and working out the angle of the cast.

Sure enough, I saw the kiss of a trout quietly feeding—perhaps a spinner from the previous day’s hatch of Dark Hendricksons. I waited until the fish came up again, tossed my cigarette, stripped out thirty feet of line and put an Ausable Wulff about about six feet upstream of the bank feeder.

Time slowed. The trout took the fly.

It wasn’t a very long battle. No heroics on the part of the angler. Nor, for that matter, was the fish a trophy. Instead, it was much more a case of when, where, and how it happened: my home water, at a bewitching time, on the type of fly that Lee Wulff had first tied on this very river. It felt inevitable. The world narrowed down until there was only me, flowing water, a single cast, and a wild brown trout, the color of light coffee, with lovely red spots in yellow haloes—maybe 15 inches and strong enough to take line off the reel. Beautifully plump too. It is still the angling reverie against which I measure all others.

Peter Kaminsky’s Outdoors column has appeared in the New York Times for thirty-five years. A recipient of the C.F. Orvis Outdoor Writing Award, Kaminsky has been a contributing editor at Field & Stream, Sports Afield, and Outdoor Life. Among his books are The Moon Pulled Up an Acre of Bass, American Waters, The Flyfisherman’s Guide to the Meaning of Life, and Flyfishing for Dummies.