Last weekend, I fished in a cold drizzle while the trout sulked, unwilling to come out and play. This week, the temperature rose. After months of snow, sleet and freezing rain, I could think of nothing sweeter than casting a fly to a rising trout on a warm afternoon during the first week of May, except perhaps playing hooky from work to do so.
Twenty minutes later, I was tossing my tie in the back seat and changing out of my office attire into a canvas shirt and jeans. After snapping my hippers to my jeans, I tramped down a deer trail to the headwaters of a stream winding through a hemlock forest.
It had been more than a season since I’d visited this little rill, but my eagerness was tempered by what I found.
Hemlocks that had grown more than 100 feet tall had collapsed across the forest floor. In some places, massive limbs had snapped. In others, entire trees had fallen, their roots rising 20 feet or more toward the sky. Spindly branches stretched along broken limbs like the remains of ancient dinosaurs.
Rather than an asteroid or some other cataclysmic event, the destruction had been caused by the hemlock woolly adelgid, an exotic insect that over years sapped the trees’ strength, leaving them unable to withstand the extreme weather events we’ve experienced with increasing frequency.
It was a discouraging sight. These regal monarchs of the forest had sheltered the little brook, their shade keeping temperatures down and their roots reducing siltation. In this manner, they protected the habitat of the stream’s wild brook trout population.
The rill was no more than a yard or two wide, and putting aside my trepidation, I hopped from one moss-covered boulder to another. The current ran high as I picked my way around, over and through the downed trees.
The smell of damp earth was strong as I took a knee to catch my breath. It mingled with lichen, moss and the duff of the forest.
I cast my fly into sun-dappled riffles, but trout care little for an angler’s expectations and at first they showed no interest in my bits of fur and feather.
Rounding a bend, a brook trout no longer than my finger rose through the tannin-stained current to grasp my fly. The shoulders of the miniature trout were as dark as the gloom pervading the doleful forest, but its flanks were as bright as a maple leaf.
A few moments later, a second brookie flashed in a shallow riffle, but I struck too soon.
Over the next hour, a number of fish rose to my offering. They did so not out of ignorance, but from necessity, for there was little insect life this high in the stream and the spritely current required a fish to strike first and ask questions later.
At some point, the chaos of limbs and branches became an impenetrable barrier and I was compelled to hike in a wide arc around the tangle of decaying trees.
Returning to the stream, I straddled a fallen hemlock and inched my way across its trunk. After lowering the tip of my rod toward a pool deeper than the rest, I skittered a fly across the surface until it disappeared in a sudden boil.
With difficulty, I played the fish while continuing to hold tight to the tree. The brook trout, perhaps nine inches from nose to tail, carried all the colors of an autumn landscape across its side.
Eventually, the tangle of wood became too much, but before turning back, I approached a pool where three trees, their roots loosened in the soil atop a ridge high above the far bank, had fallen across the surface, their crowns reaching the near side.
Crouching between broken branches and split limbs, I tried one last cast.
The current sliding along the far bank carried my fly beneath the trees where another trout splashed through the surface. After a brief struggle, the 10-inch fish came to hand.
Although it was as brightly colored as the others, I noticed a wound on its back, a cruel reminder of the Spartan conditions these headwater fish must contend with. Whether inflicted by a mink, kingfisher, heron or snake, I had no way of knowing.
Releasing the little warrior, I hobbled back through the maze of downed trees.
Although saddened by the loss of the hemlocks and concerned for the stream they once protected, I still had faith in the wild trout abiding there despite the odds.