It wouldn’t be a bad shirt, once it went through the wash. I found it on an island in the middle of the river. The college featured on the front wasn’t far from the western Massachusetts river I was fishing. I wouldn’t dumpster dive or pick up clothes off the side of the road. But there was something seemingly pure about a shirt that had been in the tailwater’s gentle cycle for at least a weekend.

Plus, it wasn’t like I drank the unopened bottle of hard cider that I kicked up along with it.

I’ve discovered quite a few interesting items while fly fishing. Only a couple have managed to make it home with me. The aforementioned shirt did, although I never wore it. Once, off the cost of Boston, I was casting for striper when a thermos bobbed up towards me. I maintain that the saltwater and the dishwasher got is as clean as could be. Then there was the pocketknife that shone in the sun from the bottom of a Pennsylvania mountain stream. It was rusty, but it had promise. Like the shirt, the discovery felt too good to waste. But it ended up getting trashed instead of refurbished.

I’ve never found a fly rod. But I have snagged at least three spinning rods. That doesn’t include the Snoopy rod, caked in mud, that I extracted from the mud of a spring creek like a WalMart Excalibur. There have been coolers filled with rotten food.  Why I opened them? Curiosity, I suppose. There was once a backpack that I passed by but then returned to after the notion of a wad of bills wouldn’t leave my mind. Another time, a crumpled tent piqued that small part of me that wanted to be a forensic evaluator in high school. I didn’t want to find anything grizzly. Yet if there was something grizzly, someone probably should find it.

The fly fishing discoveries have been large and small, from totally worthless to kinda-sorta worth keeping. And then there was the time I found a car.

Fishing for brook trout took me deep into a Blue Ridge hollow. It was a day where a rhythm of pool, fish, pool, fish kept me moving further up and in. I followed the main river to a tributary. The hillsides got steeper on either side of me. The fish were plentiful and content with any kind of presentation as long as a bushy dry fly was involved.  The gradient increased to the point that the next pool was a surprise until scrambling over the one being fished. I pulled myself up over some roots and rocks and that is when I saw the Edsel.

The Edsel was an ill-fated Ford project that only lasted for three years in the 1950’s. The economy wasn’t great.  There was competition with Ford’s other brands. And they were objectively ugly.

Perhaps aesthetic repulsion led to this particular automobile to be abandoned in the forest. It was all rust. Anything fabric had rotted away. Most of the rubber was gone, too. Getting closer, I could see that the floor had mostly deteriorated. With the vehicle essentially parallel to the flow of the creek, the stream travelled from trunk to front bumper. There was a little moss on the body and some other vegetation sprouting from crevices here and there. It actually wasn’t too ugly, if you could overlook the gross volume of littering it represented.

But then I had questions. How did a large sedan get all the way out here? It was a tight little valley. At  the moment, it was surrounded by mature trees. When it made it’s final journey had the area been clear cut? Was it dropped via aircraft?  Assembled in situ? Was the original owner a Jerry Clower fan? There had to have been a story.

The story is essentially this: Someone lost something and I found it. I was looking for trout, but I found a car instead. I didn’t take it with me, so it was effectively another example of catch and release. There was an entire existence and experience represented by an object, and I happened to intersect with it at a very peculiar time. Like  a partying student’s shirt or a child’s Snoopy pole, I came across this car at the tail end of it’s journey. Since they’re all just things, there isn’t much more than that. Just an interesting anecdote. So I suppose it is good that a series of interesting moments is worth hanging on to.