I recently found myself with an entire day unfettered by either schedule or responsibility. A day I could spend any way I pleased.
Naturally, I chose to go fishing.
I left in a hurry—gobbling breakfast, gulping coffee—before grabbing my tackle and hightailing it northwestward up the road, loath to waste a single moment of precious liberty.
My destination was the Stillwater River, the selfsame stream whose journeying waters flow past our old stone cottage.
Ten steps beyond the front door, I can descend a half-dozen stone steps and be at the river’s edge—a broad pool below a burbling riffle. Good holding water for rock bass and smallmouth.
So, why drive miles upstream just to fish the very same river?
I’m not sure I can clearly explain. But in part, I wanted to GO fishing…not merely go fishing. I know that sounds like a game of semantics. But my need for escape required active separation—an involvement beyond convenience. I also wanted to revisit a piece of water I hadn’t seen in over a decade.
Call it making a wellness check on an old friend.
The backroad pull-off looked the same, if maybe less used. The downhill path to the water was definitely fainter—overgrown and obviously seldom trodden.
Had this formerly excellent stretch of the upper river somehow deteriorated?
Streams change over time. High waters scour channel beds and topple shading bankside timber. Logjams wash away. Gravel-bottomed pools become choked by layers of silt. Holes fill in, riffles and gravel bars disappear, current-slowing boulders roll downstream—while bends, undercut banks, and fish-holding pockets are erased.
A stream once as familiar as the back of your hand becomes a stranger—transformed, barely recognizable.
Occasionally, too, a landowner might decide to redirect or channelize a portion—legally or not—and turn a hotspot stretch into an ankle-deep ditch.
Thankfully, when I arrived at the river’s edge, I looked looked upstream and saw the same sycamore-clad series of shady holes and fast runs as I remembered. None of the feared disasters had occurred.
I found a comfortable seat on a handy log and settled back, content to simply sit a spell and take it all in.
The old river ran low and clear, slipping quietly along, scarcely moving at all through the dappled pools. In the filtered light, the moving surface appeared as a kaleidoscopic mirror, doubling everything in sight—trees, rocks, a tawny weedbar with a sun-bleached log on one end and the still-present wealth of mostly green leaves, bankside and overhead. Only a few were just starting to show a dab of color.
The effect was so perfect it was often impossible to distinguish the real from the reflection, the corporeal from the illusion.
A pair of mallards paddled furtively along the far bank, seeming to ride atop their upside-down inverted images. A wedge of cobalt sky sliced overhead and shimmered at my feet.
Which one was real?
I’ve been fishing the Stillwater River all my life. Decades of stream time. Countless hours spent wading its pools and riffles, following its bankside pathways, floating its currents. As is so often the case with intimacy, familiarity and insider knowledge has produced a certain degree of inferred proprietorship. I often catch myself thinking of the Stillwater as “my” river. Yet the only deed I hold is the right to pay taxes on a 50-foot margin along the 200 foot stretch bordering our cottage property. Mucky bottom, underwater land; I don’t own a single drop of water flowing overtop—and don’t want to!
Frankly, I don’t think anyone should ever own a creek, river, or brook. Streams are geographic entities beyond ownership—ancient features flowing across the land. They’re not trespassers. Their claim to a particular right-of-way superseded any man’s “ownership” by eons—rights and privileges grandfathered in and guaranteed by an incalculable measure of time. We are the late-coming interlopers, not the flowing water—and the way I see it, we have an incumbent fiduciary duty to be a protective and thoughtful host.
In that sense, the Stillwater is indeed my river.
The older I get, the more I tend to think of creeks and rivers as complex living entities rather than simple blue lines on a map. Get to know a stream and you’ll eventually come to realize their absolute importance. While the seas may be our planetary wellspring, creeks and rivers are the arterial lifeblood. The North American continent was settled and civilized in direct relationship to nearby streams. Streams defined our political boundaries, determined the locations of our cities and industries, directed and shaped the progress and speed of our westward expansion.
Without streams, life as we know it in the USA would be drastically different. The course of a stream always marks and changes a land, while at the same time, the stream itself becomes marked and changed by the country through which it flows.
Streams have often been metaphorically compared to human life. Their bio-dynamics are eerily similar to our own. A creek or river has a beginning, a middle, and an end; birth, youth, middle-age, senior-hood. Both a source and a destiny—and a reason for passage. Fellow travelers on a finite journey.
Sounds a lot like our own transit through life, huh?
Streams move, their currents, volume, and energy shifting, swelling, ebbing, constantly reacting to features of landscape and the vagaries of weather and season.
Moving water can be opaque or clear; easily understood or impossible to fathom. All creeks and rivers have their own unique character, an individual personality both complex and many-layered, subject to various moods and dispositions, quirks and contrary attitudes.
The Stillwater River is as enigmatic and eccentric as they come—sometimes an open book, at others a flowing puzzle, inscrutable, incomprehensible, its secrets written in mysterious hieroglyphics. The logical and simple wrapped in the baffling and complicated. The duality of reward and challenge. The same thing you could say about many of my favorite people.
Perhaps this explains why some of us cherish creeks and rivers. Streams are a sort of magic window, a portal through which it is possible to view ourselves.
So I lingered a while longer beside my favorite old river, gazing upon its moving mirror, watching autumn’s first few leaves flutter earthward.
A visit with a wise old friend is always better savored than rushed. Because something else the Stillwater taught me, a sort of paradox—is that sometimes the best moments of fishing occur when you’re not fishing.
Reach Jim McGuire at [email protected].
