It’s nineteen degrees, the wind is gusting, and the blowing snow has covered the ski tracks I made yesterday. Christmas is just around the corner; the time has come to head over to the local tree farm and harvest one for our living room.
The route to Pleasant Valley Tree Farm could well have been an inspiration for a Currier and Ives print, and as I drive I’ll probably be in a Holiday frame of mind. Especially if Jingle Bells or Sleigh Ride is playing on the radio. But then the trout stream will come into view, darkly winding through the glen below the road and I’ll forget about Yuletide and remember instead eventful days during the season of the trout and fishing this stream and others, when Christmas and winter were nowhere in my thoughts. Like that warm April morning at Mill Creek in a light drizzle, busting brush along the bottom of the steep bank, approaching The Rock. Cold water and a strong current but feeling good about the onset of spring with no more snow on the ground; hearing the rushing water and seeing the beginning of buds on the trees and the poking up of the skunk cabbage. Feeling good to be fly fishing again after a long winter.
There was that short cast to the pocket water at the base of The Rock, the aggressive pull of the trout and the ensuing tug of war which denoted new beginnings as certainly as the other signs of life sprouting along the stream bank. That brown trout, speckled in red and black along its yellow flanks, a survivor of winter, surfacing from the drab water in a display of color, becoming a special harbinger of Spring. There was that feeling of elation found not so much in the physical act of catching a fish, although that is always part of it, but more so because of being witness to the simple miracle of the trout and the reaffirmation of nature’s cyclical continuity.
As the snow flies and accumulates on the banks of the streams, and as ice forms at the edges of shallow pools, I will think of The Rock as a symbolic sentinel standing mid stream guarding against winter’s pessimism, otherwise known as cabin fever or the shack nasties or the winter doldrums. Come springtime, trout will inevitably return to the pocket of still water at its base and to lies in other pockets and pools along the rocky stream. I’ll be reminded of that, whenever I pass it by this winter. Then again, winter is what you make of it. For starters, an outing to cut a Christmas fir or spruce tree is reason to be glad. And then decorated and standing near the window as the flurries blow across the yard, the Yule tree will be as fitting a symbol as any of optimism and good cheer.
