Even if I hadn’t been out in a week, the first cast felt like it was simply the next cast in a succession of fly fishing moments. It was like picking up where I had left off. Like I had never left. Never stopped fishing.

It is a great feeling.

I’ve had two such seasons in my life. Without looking at journals or photograph timestamps I can’t remember exactly when they were. That isn’t an indictment on the impact that those seasons had. I certainly enjoyed all the fishing. Circumstances just converged such that consistent fly fishing was interwoven with everything else. Nothing was sacrificed or brushed aside. Fishing just found its way into the melody of life.

Aside from a few exceptional fish (some of which I actually happened to catch) the angling all kind of blurred together. The few pictures I have a unremarkable. Perhaps the fish I snapped a photo of was noteworthy at the time. Perhaps I just happened to be close to someone with a camera. Perhaps it was simply an unremarkable fish that I decided to take a picture of. The journal entries are even less helpful. There was so much fishing that recording the ins and outs of catching a few and missing a few would have been even more mundane than describing not doing it.

The benefit of these seasons was the rhythm and the familiarity. There were small things: waders went on more quickly, fly choices seemed simpler, knots didn’t snap. There were much larger things. I’d get to know fish. I’d get to know pools. I’d get to know myself. While my most concerted efforts in mastering trout and rivers had mixed results, taming my own personal tendencies proved more effective with consistent attention.

Truth be told, it wasn’t all about becoming a better angler. I’m not alone in saying that I do some of my best thinking while fishing. It might all be coincidental, but on second thought both of the aforementioned seasons took place preceding pivotal life choices.  (I’d still have to  check the archives for dates.) That means I had a lot of time to be in my head. All of the important fly choices and presentation angles and wading decisions were technically contemplated, but the normalcy of it all allowed much of it to be done on autopilot. I could really think about a lot of other things.

And maybe that is why so much of the angling blurred together. I was fishing a lot. The rest of the time I was thinking, talking to myself, and praying.  But most of the fishing was being done from muscle memory. The only jarring moments involved particularly large fish or falling into the river. For me, life can’t always be like those seasons. But that is okay. Those seasons came at the right times: growing me as an angler and growing me as a person.