We’re all creatures of habit. If, like me, you happen to be a fly fishing creature, you probably possess a certain set of idiosyncratic habits.

One of my bad habits involves lacking the self control to break habits. For example: I often talk a big game about exploring new water. It’s fun, I say. It’s a challenge, I say. I say those things. But if I only have a few days to fish on a certain period of time I usually default to the same flies in the same pools in the same stream.

At a recent angling opportunity I was all ready to take a fun, yet cowardly turn to a tried-and-true creek. It would have been a safe choice. As I was plotting my course to the water (read: picking where I was going to get breakfast and lunch) I noticed another creek.

I had to have driven over this other creek dozens upon dozens of times in the last 25 years. It lay smack-dab, right in the middle between two Shenandoah Park waters that I’d fished consistently since I was a teenager. The fact that I had never fished there all the sudden caused my thoughts to suspend, like a backcast wrapped around a tree branch.

Around 7:30 the next morning I confirmed that I had never fished there. Nothing looked remotely familiar. Thick brush, gravel roads, and quaint homesteads clearly told me what part of the Appalachians I was in. Yet their configuration was foreign.

I was excitingly disoriented.

Quickly, I was into fish. The same flies worked in the same pools, albeit in a different stream. The colorful brook trout sped from below rock hideouts to pursue dries and small streamers. These little char could have been from anywhere in the park.

But the stream was unique. I anticipated what lay beyond the next bend. I found myself tracing one branch of the flow upstream, only to backtrack and see what lay on the other side. Feeder creeks held their own mystique. Rocks, trees, the topography was all familiarly new.

It was a great first day in a valley just a short hike from valleys I had hiked many times before.

Complacent consistency can be a bad habit; so too can reckless spontaneity. Somewhere, smack-dab in the middle there is a place where everything is ordinary but unique. In those points of simultaneous continuity and discontinuity there are fun challenges around every bend.