Opening Day

As traditions go, this one’s pretty odd. For about 15 years now, an old friend and I break in our new fishing licenses on New Year’s Day. We rig up fly rods, and fish for trout in liquid water. By mutual agreement, actual ice fishing is for dilettantes and would not count. This tradition, whose origins are lost to our respective memories despite the inarguable fact that 15 years isn’t a huge gulf of time, has at least a few idiosyncrasies that test our mettle. The idiosyncrasies of our winter fishing might also cause a less dedicated person to question our sanity.

For example…

As any idiot can tell you, New Year’s Day follows News Years Eve. Neither my old friend nor I have ever been mistaken for Mother Theresa, so you may assume that in the course of some of these expeditions one or both of us has perhaps not looked or felt his very best. There is also the immutable fact that the first of January in the northern latitudes is more conducive to indoor activities than to standing in a trout stream in a pair of waders. Finally, consider what awaits the angler. Fish are ectotherms: their body temperature assumes that of their environment. Critters with a body temperature in the 30’s don’t eat much or all that often. The result of this combination is, most years, a pair of uncomfortable and mildly ill men shivering in a bleak landscape for several hours while awaiting an occurrence that is not very likely to happen.

But we do it.

We do it because we are usually the only people on the water. This is a benefit not to be underestimated around here. My corner of the world is blessed with decent trout streams, and cursed with a large and dense population. The crowds during the fine spring weather and mayfly hatches, and the bad behavior that comes with them, are legendary. A stretch of quiet water around here is well worth substantial discomfort.



An accident of regional geology is also in our favor. My house, and the valley in which it is situated, sits atop a huge slab of limestone. From the limestone flows slightly alkaline water in bubbling springs that feed our local streams. This keeps many of these streams well above freezing in the winter, and less acidic than the mountain streams around us. Our fish aren’t as cold as their mountain cousins in the winter, so they’re a little more active and hungry. The higher PH also produces abundant aquatic insects and crustaceans, including clouds of small midges that hatch on nearly every warmer (40’s and above) winter day.

Thus our annual expedition isn’t always fishless, and even if it is, it’s usually relaxed and quiet, and what could be wrong with that? So maybe we’re not so dumb, maybe we’re getting smarter. Our winter fishing is always instructive, since any substantial amount of time spent in nature cannot help but teach you something.

The lesson of time spent in the sere, quiet, and subtle landscape of an Appalachian winter is that nature is not dead now, it is sleeping. The evidence is palpable, if not immediately obvious. In the quiet sipping of a trout taking midges in a slow eddy, in the chipping of a Cardinal in a leafless oak, in the rustling of snow landing on water, you can actually hear it breathing.


Happy New Year