Spring Valley Creek

On days like this it doesn’t matter whether or not you catch fish. Just being out on a spring stream, in the post-summer, pre-fall weather, clear and comfortable, blue sky and 70, light breeze – it’s enough. A multi-hued green stained-glass canopy shrouds the stream. The water, shallow as usual for this time of year, rushes over the moss-covered rocks, a hymn of small crashes, indistinguishable by themselves, but rising to a gushing chorus in its total. The sunlight off the riffles is like endless, bright, dancing diamonds, here and in an instant gone again and again replaced forever it seems, hypnotic, like soft fire, flames of reflected sunlight. Mayflies and butterflies hover like tiny rainbows in the stream of light. The songs and screeches of birds I’ve vowed in vain for years to be able to recognize rise all around me, invisible in the shadows of branches, taunting, cruel. Five miles above, a jet passes, a faint anachronism, a brief intrusion. And then, of a sudden, a 14” brown trout rises from nowhere, breaks the water, engulfs a #14 Elk’s Hair Caddis, and loses all but the fight in the moment of the water. Perhaps it does matter whether or not you catch fish.