Shows what I know.

Months ago I was crestfallen about the perceived state of one of my favorite trout streams. A small, spring-fed, brook trout oasis in and amongst suburbia has been messed with. Not by man. By rodent. By  castor canadensis: the North American beaver. The darned things had dammed up the creek. A fragile ecosystem had been thrown into utter chaos by the insensitive gnawing of a buck-toothed, paddle-tailed,  ne’er-do-well.

I had reason to be concerned. The creek, as previously stated, is unique. It exists in a region that has been farmed, developed, paved over, or all three. Yet where other streams run sterile it thrives. The cold, clean spring water nurses an abundance of vegetation, insects, and brook trout.

Now? Beavers. The headwaters were no longer  running cold, clean, nor clear. For they had stopped running. They now sat beneath a tannin-stained pond, covered in pine needles and maple seeds. Things looked dark. Things looked stagnant. Things looked different. That first cast was made with much emotional apprehension.

Then I caught a  few dozen fish. Again, shows what I know.

This was not my first up-in-arms for nothing moment in fly fishing. (Moreover, it was not my first hasty judgment about something in general… but that is not the point of this website.)

Years ago I loved to fish beneath a great tree. At some point, erosion had pulled the soil rug from under it. After a particularly nasty storm, it fell into the river and ambled downstream some 50 feet before settling on a low head dam. Crews were able to get all but the bottom 20 feet cut up and hauled away. The diameter at the base of the trunk, plus it’s precarious location, kept the job unfinished. That worked out for me and for the fish, who loved to hide in the half-exposed roots and dart out for food.

Then, one day, I saw caterpillar track ruts leading down to the water. By the time I got there, the giant waterlogged tree was already on the bank. It was an eyesore, but the fish loved it. Even had I made it to the river before the crew, my opinion wouldn’t matter. All could do was lament the loss of a sure-fire spot.

A few days later I came back to fish again. I popped out of the tree line and the giant stump’s absence still startled me. Agitated, I cast where I would have only a week prior. Now, instead of fish-sheltering roots, there was just water. The fish that charged from the depths, from behind the falling water, didn’t get the memo that this wasn’t a good spot anymore. It was a large brown that tried it’s best to get back into the sub-aquatic divot it came from. The divot was assuredly the product of  the great tree’s years of sitting astride the dam. Many other fish came from it over the years.

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Sometimes good things to get ruined. Most often, what really gets ruined is our expectations. When our expectations are very narrow, specific, and inflexible, they are easily shattered. In fly fishing (and in life), that is a fragile way to go about things. Try as we might, we can’t control anything outside of our heads as much as we think  we can. Adjusting expectations and attitudes is all we can do when faced with a lost tree or some busy beavers. Sometimes things do get ruined, but sometimes good things become great.