electric leaf blower or the snorts of distant tractor-trailers, if all I hear are the squawks of blue jays and crows and, below me, the constant rush of the stream, then I am in paradise, and I have paradise to myself.
The place looks so pristine and inviting, so constant and enduring, I sometimes feel unworthy of it, as if an intruder, a riparian peeping Tom who should just catch a quick glimpse and leave. There is nothing here but the real world of trees, clear water, rocks as old as time, flickering birds, dancing insects and rising trout. There is hardly ever any evidence of the world beyond the road where I park my car – the congested and trashy, confusing and crazy, coughing and fuming, fossil-burning, nattering, head-banging world of 24-7 news and non-stop noise. Not in Father’s Day Creek. There’s nothing like that here, only profound tranquility. To pull out a cell phone to take a call or to read a tweet from the human world would be sacrilege.
Bill Burton, one of my late fishing companions, gave me a little book of Native American wisdom, something he used to retrieve from his vest and read when the fishing was slow. There was a quote from Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce: “We were taught to believe that the Great Spirit sees and hears everything, and that he never forgets, and that hereafter he will give every man a spirit-home according to his deserts.” I have decreed Father’s Day Creek my spirit-home, in the hope that the Great Spirit will grant me a campsite along its banks in the hereafter. I am not kidding. I actually have these thoughts when I’m standing in the stream waving my fly rod. Another native expression, this one supposedly from Crazy Horse of the Lakota, goes: “Today is a good day to die.” While you could take that to be a warrior’s credo – the desire to die an honorable death for a worthy cause – I take it to mean satisfaction with having lived life well and a way of giving thanks for accumulating minimal regrets. I say it to myself when I arrive in Father’s Day Creek, before I start fishing: “Today is a good day to die.” I know it seems strange, but that’s my ritual. Holy places demand ritual.
Father’s Day Creek is a valley stream in Pennsylvania that I have visited two or three times a year for the last 25 years, but it lives in my imagination, too. It is always with me. I carry it in my mind the way a parent carries a picture of a child in a wallet. I take it with me everywhere I go, even to other trout streams. I can visit the creek anytime I like. I can relive the jaw-dropping moment, on that same Father’s Day in 2000 when I imagined my father watching me, when something happened that made my journey as a fly fisher complete.
You will find that story downstream of where we are right now, along with my accounts of other great times on the creek – for instance, the May afternoon when my son, who had just graduated from college, was with me for an amazing hatch of large mayflies that brought numerous trout to the surface for lunch, a primal, splashy feeding frenzy that went on for more than an hour. I also recall easily my encounter with a brawny buck crossing the stream, and a mute swan rising from it.
I can walk and wade along 2,000 yards of creek and not see anything that makes me angry or depressed – not a scrap of evidence of the human world: No beer cans or bottles or plastic shopping bags, no tires, cigarette butts or nests of discarded fishing line. The creek flows big and strong in the spring and carries with it loads of debris from upstream, but it is mostly natural detritus from fallen trees and uprooted bushes. Sometimes I spot evidence of human life – a piece of old barn siding, porcelain insulators from a farmer’s electric fence – but that’s rare. One time I discovered a busted laptop computer in the bottom of the stream, just below the one-lane bridge near where I park my car. I figured some CIA agent, having downloaded the contents of the hard drive, tossed it from his black SUV as he passed through.
Absurd as it might sound to title attorneys, I soon came to believe that Father’s Day Creek belonged to me. I was convinced that the happy circumstances of life had delivered me to this hallowed place: Marrying a woman whose parents owned a weekend-and-retirement home near the stream, having their neighbor invite me to fish there all I liked, and having other anglers give up on the place and leave it to me after the commonwealth stopped stocking the creek with hatchery-raised trout. The creek and I were meant for each other, and we hit it off almost from the beginning.
Fly fishing and Father’s Day Creek came into my life at almost the same time. They both revived my interest in fishing. I had taken a long hiatus from angling for a bunch of reasons: Once I moved from New England to Maryland, the Chesapeake Bay seemed like the obvious place to fish, but I did not own a boat, and you need to be on a boat to fish the bay. I also lost interest in killing fish – my father’s kind of fishing, fishing for food – so I took a pass on fishing the freestone rivers and creeks stocked with trout in the spring. Put-and-take fishing – the state puts the trout in rivers and, two weeks later, you can catch and take up to five of them a day – did not strike me as particularly sporting. I spent one Opening Day of the Maryland trout season standing practically shoulder-to-shoulder in a stocked stream with men and boys who used rubbery, chartreuse-colored fish pellets and Velveeta balls for bait, and I found the whole experience depressing. The other anglers were humorless, even a little surly, because they hated being crowded on the stream. I swore I would never fish that way again, and haven’t.
So I took a long break from fishing, accepting the occasional invitation to a charter boat that trolled for hours in the Chesapeake. I pretty much came to dislike that kind of fishing, too. The engines ran all day, a non-stop, headache-inducing chugga-da chugga-da chugga-da. The captain and mate would drop eight to 10 lines with all kinds of heavy-metal contraptions that bounced along the bottom of the bay as the boat moved. When a rockfish, or striped bass, got hooked on one of these rigs, we’d take turns reeling it in. It was all very mechanical, requiring nothing of the angler except the ability to crank the reel until the fish was in the skipper’s net, then stand back and open another beer. I no longer fish from trolling charter boats.
As glad as I was to discover fly fishing, I have no specific memory of how or why I got into it. I know it was 1990, the year my son was born, and four years after my father had died and my last severe experience with depression. But I cannot remember who introduced me to it, or where the idea came from. I signed up to take a few casting lessons and started buying gear from a local shop, and within a few months I had a vest, waders, boots, a Scott fly rod and Pflueger Medalist reel – nothing too expensive – and within a few weeks I had a set of new fishing companions, and I was catching brown trout on dry flies in the Big Gunpowder Falls, north of my home in Baltimore. I loved it. I went a little crazy, too. I fished about every three days for two hours at a time, until winter came, and then I fished occasionally in the snow. This kind of fishing – matching artificial flies with the real aquatic insects that trout eat, casting those flies without making a big, fish-spooking splash, and tricking trout into taking them – all of that got into my head and under my skin, and it’s the only kind of fishing I’ve wanted to do since.
I had learned a new skill, caught plenty of trout, and made new friends who also fished on the fly. When I started catching brown trout in Father’s Day Creek, near the weekend home of my in-laws, I allowed myself the selfish thought that life probably would not get better. I had become a father. I had become a fly fisher. I had discovered paradise.
So maybe you can understand why I think I found the Last Best Place on Earth, why I consider it my spirit-home, a good place to be on a good day to die.
– Father’s Day 2000, 6 am
I rose from bed, made some coffee, and drove from my in-laws’ house to the small parking area by the bridge over the creek. The drive to Father’s Day Creek takes you through farmland and forest, and then, for the last mile, down a narrow country road into an area that became a new, but not better, place during my years of fishing there. Old houses and barns on farmland that had appeared to be in full retirement gave way to sprawling ranchers with sprawling lawns, cul de sacs, and two to four cars and trucks per household. The farmers were mostly gone. By Father’s Day 2000, the biggest crop in the area seemed to be chemically-treated grass. The road had been graded – all the stomach-tickling dips removed – and paved to impervious perfection and to a smooth glide to accommodate commuters who speed out every weekday morning. Some drive an insane two hours to their jobs. The new development –