It was a damp fall morning. The kind of morning where the weather wasn’t great but at least it wasn’t damp and summer. There wasn’t any humidity to speak of, just a little wet. You could see it on the changing leaves, sense it underfoot, but not feel it in the air.

We had gotten a late start getting out to the mountains. Those kind of mornings are fun, in that you get a little bit more sleep. They aren’t so fun when you start to worry that you’re going to be the third or sixth car in the parking lot. That is the kind of despair that will awaken you to how bitter your gas station coffee really is.

Brook trout don’t take kindly to being fished over a few times.

By some providential set of circumstances we rolled in at the late hour of 8:30 to an empty gravel pull off.

-Wow. Didn’t expect to see that.

-Yeah, looks like we don’t have to hike before we can fish today.

We would hike anyway. Because we, like most fly fishers, assumed that all the fair-weather anglers only and always pound the pools immediately upstream from the parking lot. No longer rushed by hypotheticals, the ritual begun. Always in the same order: waders, boots, vests, rods, reels, lines, flies.

-What are you fishing?

-Something fluffy. They only care about hackle.

-What are you talking about?

-Hackle. They only care about hackle.

-Then why do flies have bodies and wings and tails and all that?

-Because anglers feel like they need to be fancy? I suppose because they’ve seen pictures in old books? Because they want to make fishing for brookies harder than it needs to be?

-Oh. Well, I’m going to fish a stonefly nymph anyway.

I am not anti-fly tying. Personally, I’m pretty mediocre at it. But I respect the heck out of those who are artful in their pursuit of creating museum quality Catskill dries. And from experience, I know that there are plenty of fish in lots of rivers that are incredibly discerning. But I also think that most trout out there just want to see something that looks buggy.

It isn’t just fish that are opportunistic from living in high gradient mountain streams. Tailwater rainbows and spring creek browns have fallen prey to glorified Griffith’s gnats. Tan or grizzly  hackle palmered around a light wire hook is deadly in the employ of a skilled angler. To whit, I’m not that great and I still catch a lot of fish that way.

-See?

The first fish hit. A typical brook trout for this part of Appalachia: eight inches, colored up, and aggressive to its own detriment.

-And my fly was riding with the tail sticking straight up and it still took it. There was way too much floatant on it, but that brookie didn’t care.

-Hmm.

I could tell he was skeptical my thesis was falsely equating correlation with causation. Dumb luck, basically.

We finished fishing the first few pools. The rising sun brought that unspoken suspicion that more fly fishers were inevitably coming. We would hike up further into the hollow. Leaving fish to catch fish and a firmer guarantee of mutual solitude.

Feather proportions, numbered wraps, and precision-measured wing tips can be a lot of fun when you’re behind the vise. Moving through dense underbrush and probing rhododendron tunnels for brook trout is a different place. It is more about making that backhanded, over the shoulder, under the branch but over the boulder maneuver. Casting and mending in an obstacle course of moss and waterfalls. The tip of the fly rod is more important than the name of the pattern.

We moved quickly but methodically, weaving up and across the braided water. The mind has to calculate the complicated cast while at the same time contemplating balance and traction and whatever song from that morning is stuck in your head.

I caught trout on my dries. He caught trout on his nymphs. Plenty of fish come to hand to those who fish flies like they are flies.

-So why does your fly even have a tail on it?

-Because I guess I feel like I need to be fancy and I’ve seen pictures in old books.