Walking the river with a fly rod in autumn

The leaves are just turning color along favorite stretches of my home river; they're likely doing the same along your river, too.

Wherever you fish there's a certain feel to taking your fly rod for a walk along a river in autumn that doesn't come anywhere else at any other time.

It's meditative and can fill your soul with what it needs. You don't get that same sense at other times, or if you do, it's likely something you brought to the river yourself; the things that surround your senses and compel you to humility and wonderment can be overwhelming now.

There the itchy anticipation, the exploratory sense, that you feel on that first outing pre-runoff. You don't know for sure whether the river is warm enough to awaken some bug activity; it's barely warm enough to get real comfortable while you're out fishing, but you're out anyway. It's like dipping into the unknown in the midst of the familiar for the hundredth time.

The roaring torrents of salmonfly time that settle into the languid pace of summer days and endless hours have their own flavors, their own moods.

But this Indian summer season is different. Never is the world that surrounds the river more lit up and brilliant, more alive. Never is there the same sense of urgency to it. The urgency to get out from under a midsummer hailstorm is different.

The kind of urgency I'm thinking of here is more poignant. It's more an urgency to cherish and fully experience something fleeting and wonderful before it gradually disappears.

Summer slips away behind the lengthening shadows and shortening days that move one by one toward the solstice; the cool nights turn chilly and the days move from hot – maybe too hot – to crisply warm and pleasant interludes between the short storms that foreshadow the longer ones in their procession toward the inevitable shutdown of winter.

Call it autumn or Indian Summer, we're not fully arrived at winter's doorstep yet. We have this interlude. And while it's here, there will be days when I will have that compelling urge to take my fly rod for a walk along the river.

This morning, as I write, is not one of those days.

It's chilly, with rain predicted. It just doesn't feel like a fishing day and it might get colder. And besides – I have a writing deadline in front of me and I just brewed a fresh pot of my favorite Big Creek coffee.

I'm comfortable, maybe too comfortable where I am, and if the weather lifts just a little bit tomorrow I might take my rod for a walk then. Or maybe the next day, or the next. There is still time to dawdle, to pick and choose.

There may be a gentle high overcast on one of those days where the air is pleasantly nippy but not too cold, when the jacket you've chosen is warm enough but you don't break an uncomfortable sweat, when the hot tea in your insulated water bottle is ju-u-ust right when you take a break and sit on a log.

The warm and utterly clear days are so exhilarating that I'll go out on them, too. Never mind that the fishing can be slow on a bright and clear day. It doesn't have to be. The fish are still there and they have to eat – maybe not in a frenzy, but they still know that they have to fatten up for winter.

They stay in the shadows, wherever they find them. The shadow might be under a scattering patch of foam near the head of a run, or the more obvious shade of a cliff or a log's shadow. I'll plumb the shadows on those days with nymphs and streamers.

What to do on a day with high overcast and midday hatches of fall mayflies is pretty obvious. The low, clear and slow flows tell you to fish carefully. As you do, you connect.

I might have that kind of a day tomorrow – or, as I finish this journal entry, there still might be time today.

The sun just broke through, but only a little bit, maybe just enough to bring some bugs to the surface and with them, some rising trout. Maybe it's time to take my fly rod for a walk and see what's there.