Fish Tales

“Why’d you come all the way down here, baby?” The waitress at the Waffle House asks as she sets down eggs, biscuit, and bacon.

“I’m fishing for brook trout, ma’am,” I say blushing at my Yankee accent that sticks out in the North Carolina mountains like an old rail jutting from a streambank.

“It got down into the 30s last night and sun’s not even up, baby.” She raises her eyebrows as two men in camo jackets open the door, letting the morning air scuttle down the counter to us.

“The buddy I’m meeting works at eleven.” I want to tell her I know that it’s not the best time for brookies. That I’ve been fishing mountain streams in my home state of Pennsylvania since before my voice dropped. That I’ve spent my August, September, and October in the cornfields of Indiana attending graduate school, and I would’ve fished at midnight if it meant wading cold water.

I meet Matt, the buddy of a buddy, in the parking lot of the Ingles and follow his tail lights up a winding road. The logging trucks are already dragging trees down the dirt track and we skirt around their ruts to park next to the stream.

We hike in the half-light of morning, casting to deep runs so as to not catch our dangling droppers. Matt talks about silt, the trout in the Watauga, carp and flathead in the local lakes, and his reggae band. His voice and stories fill the space left by unresponsive trout.

We each catch two brookies. One male colored and cold. We find another trout dead on a rock. Frozen parenthesis of missed jump. The ice on its eye cracks when I pick it up.

Matt leaves for work, but before he heads back down the valley, he drops me off at another stream. “It looks private, but it’s public. Don’t let the bear hunters give you any grief.” 

As if summoned, a truck squeals around the curve with radio antennas bent like willows. Hounds call through the circle holes cut in the plywood boxes. I nod and start up the cobble.

My grandmother is from the Virginia mountains. My grandfather, Kentucky. My family was lucky enough to land in the Appalachia of south-central Pennsylvania. The brook trout I’m chasing here in the Smokies are of the same strain that swim beneath my rhododendron in Pennsylvania, and the bears the hounds are chasing are the same that destroy our bird feeder every spring. While I bow and arrow cast to the soft water behind rocks, I find that the bulb of memory I plant deep in my chest each time I leave the ridges of my home is swelling in these folds. Each brook trout I bring to hand marks the place more familiar. I’m lost in the rhythm of climbing and casting. 

At first, I mistake the hound for a deer as it slinks through the laurel. No baying betrayed its approach, and it doesn’t bother to pause and watch my motion. Uninterested or too focused to look up from the trail, its ears flap back and forth beneath the chin like small, leather wings. I don’t know how the hound was separated from the pack, and I hear no barking in this hollow. I have seen no bear tracks in the sand or gravel. The hound heads over the ridge, leaving me alone again in the water.

A pileated woodpecker works an oak while I sit and eat an apple and some trail mix. A leak has sprung in my left boot, but I’m not worried. The sky is a blue only October can bring and the temperature has risen to 60. I move the water in the neoprene sock back and forth with my toes, a respite from the heat of chest waders.

The occasional wild rainbow panics my line and I find myself comparing the red stripe on their sides against the bellies of the native brook trout. The rainbows pale. A trout brought here from across a continent from Pacific rivers. Beautiful in their own right, like all wild things, but still not of the place where they now linger. I can find the red of the native brook trout’s belly mirrored in the red of tea berries, or in the fruit of trillium that grow on the banks.

When the light is finally squeezed out of the hollow, I turn back downstream. In these steep ravines, the moment day becomes night is sudden, like pouring water out of a bucket. I’ve found yet another place that holds the tiny fish I hold so dear. Another place that can hold me tight to its soil and streams.

At the car, I peel off my clothes soaked wet by creek water and sweat. The sun has settled at the tail of the hollow and as I bump down the two track to the macadam road, another Plott crosses the stream and stops in my headlights just strong enough to yellow the brown hide. We stare at each other until some sound I can’t hear, but understand, pulls the hound into the brush and up the other ridge.