“So, what’s your blood pressure?”
The fly fisherman talking to me from the opposite bank of the narrow trout stream was a stranger.
I’d laid eyes on him for the first time upon my arrival minutes earlier, noting a pandemic accessory, a face covering in dubious condition, wedged under his chin.
Perhaps he viewed my fly rod as evidence of some fraternal bond. But as I scanned the smooth pool for dimples of feeding fish, he began recounting life events of the last year, including his recent high blood pressure diagnosis: “I’m in the trades, and the trades are pretty stressful, you know. My doctors got me on this…”
I looked back at my truck hoping I’d forgotten to close the door.
This spring, as we all emerge from our COVID casings like rapturous mayflies, I’m discovering another form of metamorphosis underway along the water edges I haunt.
Trout streams are usually tranquil places – even on those early-season occasions when news gets out of a stocking truck sighting and for a day fishermen of all stripes line the banks, flinging shiny lures and fake insects under each other’s noses. You might glimpse a nodding of caps, but few words get exchanged.
But this spring folks are coming to the water and just unspooling whatever’s been on their mind.
More: Winter flounder, a Rhode Island favorite, are vanishing from the Bay
More: Narragansett Bay is changing forever. Here’s why one fish is never coming back.
The other evening, in the time it took my fly to drift the pool a few times, “Brian,” across the way, shared that he hadn’t fished in years and that his doctor told him to find something to relieve his stress; he had an ex-wife and a wonderful girlfriend but wasn’t sure remarriage was in the cards for someone in his 60s; his father’s wife never told him his dad had cancer, and when his mother died some sibling disagreement regarding estate items surfaced…”Anyways, it’s created some friction.”
I cast a fib in Brian’s direction.
I told him I saw a trout jump farther downstream and began my move.
He followed like a cloud of gnats, the questions still coming.
“Have you had your shots?”
===
More: Fishing Report: Trout fishing is low on cost, high on fun
I might have dismissed this encounter as just one talkative guy oblivious to the reverence often practiced in such lovely places, where wading into the water is like stepping into church.
But on too many occasions now I’ve been an innocent enabler of what in any other time would be considered streamside blasphemy: blathering.
There was that guy last week at one of my favorite local spots who — overly confident about his situational awareness skills — pronounced on my approach how futile my endeavor would be. “This isn’t a good place to fly fish,” he said. “Not enough room to cast with all these bushes.”
I chuckled at his audacious offering and did a little sharing myself, explaining he was standing beside the best fly-fishing pool on the river.
I sensed he didn’t care one way or the other but was really looking to chat: Had I ever saltwater fly-fished? Now that’s fun, he said. A couple of years ago he and some buddies took a trip down south where they fly-fished for red drum and small tarpon among the mangroves. “We had a blast,” he professed. “You should try that if you haven’t.”
“That sounds great,” I said, adding, “Hey, good luck, I might be back a bit later.”
Then, I was at a nearby pond a few evenings ago when a guy clomped up to me in muck boots, smiling like he had been up to something.
“Stocking truck came by here today and dumped 150 rainbows right where you’re standing,” he gushed, his eyes still lit up like he’d seen Bigfoot.
“I was here! That’s never happened to me. Best day I ever had fishing. Must have caught 40 of ‘em. Unbelievable.”
He thought he’d give it another try after dinner. “I wanted you to know they’re in here,” he said, then walked down the shoreline a ways to give me room. “Maybe you’ll get into ‘em, too.”
To be honest, at that moment I was envious, never myself having had the experience of witnessing the actual “barrel of fish” arriving just before the shooting started.
But I came close the other night.
On the warmest and prettiest day since we all started getting outside and mingling again, I drove by that favorite spot of mine with a coffee in hand and really no strong desire to wet a line.
I walked to the road bridge and looked down. The place was mobbed with people and trout jumping out of the water right below my feet. I hustled back to the truck and grabbed my rod and was lucky enough to find an opening beside a couple in their 70s who had set up lawn chairs and a cooler — and were eating sandwiches between casts!
Together, my fly and their bobbers and worms were floating tandem down the same current seam and none of us minded the close company as the fish fought to get onto our hooks.
“Some night,” I said softly to the white-haired man, sitting just on the other side of the bushes that separated us.
“You know, we’ve been here three other times and didn’t catch anything,” he said. “But what else could we be doing?”
There’s much we don’t know about this virus.
But it has confirmed the urge for human connection.
My fishing companions in their lawn chairs kept their fish on a stringer while I released mine and after they had their limit stayed for a while to watch me and enjoy the evening.
We talked about how timing is everything sometimes, and about the fish; how they had caught only brook trout, and how I had caught a couple of brown trout, too, which seem to excite them of future possibilities.
I almost shared with them how my blood pressure shot up when my doctor missed a common side effect to my Moderna vaccine. But I might save that story for when I see that Brian again.
Credit: Source link
