A Day in the Stream
珍妮弗·奥尔松 / Jenifer Olsson
I stepped out of my four-wheel drive to meet my client and his wife.
He was strong and solidly built. He looked like a model for an outdoor catalogue. The fishing vest was stiff with newness; all of the correct hardware, shiny and untested, hung from his chest, like tools in a toolshed. The felt on his wading boots was as white as snow. A handcrafted net swung on his back. The rod had never gotten wet, much less caught a fish, and the line was shiny from lack of use. The reel was on backward.
“Typical beginner,” I thought, rich and, like many rich people in my experience, probably demanding.
I reached out to shake his hand. A firm grip grabbed back.
His wife, an attractive woman brimming with confidence, took a photo of us, then waved goodbye with an arm heavily weighted with turquoise bracelets.
First I turned his reel round. He smiled and shrugged. Then we began his casting lesson on the lawn behind the main ledge.
To my surprise, he was one of those rare people who connected with a fly rod almost immediately. It just looked right from the beginning, and he was charmed by the way the line seemed to magically flow above his silhouette on the lawn.
“I could just stand here all day and cast.” he said, smiling.
We did not have to travel far to the water, since a perfectly sweet little creek ran along the last nine kilometres of the rutted dirt road I had travelled that morning. The warmth of the sun raised the water temperature enough to awaken the rainbow and cutthroat trout that slept, and the caddis flies were dancing their erratic dance, here and there, over the water.
Even in hip waders we were overdressed for the ankle-deep creek, but we stepped in, waded out to the middle and faced upstream. My client cast, and I pointed to the place the fly should land.
“Oh, hey! Look at that,” he said when the first fish struck. He was truly awed. The second time a trout struck, his shouts of surprise and joy rang up and down the creek, and we happily reeled in a sparkling, 20-centimetre wild rainbow.
“Isn’t that beautiful? ” he said softly, and every trout after that was beautiful, incredible, amazing, fantastic. A little brook trout took the fly, and I held it so my client could see the blue rings around the bright-orange spots.
“That’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said with sincerity.
To be with someone who was able to treasure the moment the way he did made me feel like I was exploring fly-fishing for the first time. I showed him how to keep his fly from dragging, how to fish in the deeper pools. He was absorbed by the whys and the hows and the execution. And the fish, whether 15 centimetres or 25, were praised like precious stones.
In the late afternoon, about the time the skin began to feel sore from a fresh sunburn, my client stopped fishing. His shoulders dropped, and he paused to look at the water, the trees and, finally, at me.
