Creek

by Dick Donnelly

I have friends planning a two-week fly-fishing trip to Alaska. This is a dream destination, of course. A sort of Shangri-La for the angler, featuring huge fish, wild country and endless water. They asked if I wanted to join them.

I declined.

I said I was busy. I didn’t admit the whole idea wore me out. The list-making, the plane tickets to Anchorage. The connecting flight on a de Havilland, the packing and repacking of rods and reels and boots and flies and maps and anti-bear spray and emergency kits and God knows what else. All for two weeks on a river I will begin to learn and maybe fall in love with. Then never see again. It’s depressing.

Why go when I can toss my seven-foot 3-weight into the truck and 10 minutes later catch a pretty good-size trout in a bluff-country creek? A spring-fed Minnesota creek I already know and love? This is the sparkling Gilbert. My Home Creek.

It’s water as familiar as my wife’s long neck and speckled arms and the curve of her back and let’s end the analogy right there. But it takes time to know a woman. Or a creek. Two weeks isn’t enough. Two years isn’t enough.

e geology of my dingle and dell landscape is complicated. Even experts don’t understand why the glaciers encircled the Driftless Area in Southeast Minnesota and Southwest Wisconsin (with snippets of Iowa and Illinois), but never invaded it, leaving these valleys untouched by the bulldozing and piling up of gravel, or “drift.” Ancient rocky cli s soar above narrow creeks. e water, recharged by limestone aquifers, runs clean and clear year-round. While trucks are out plowing ice roads on the Mississippi, Gilbert Creek is plunging through chutes and gurgling between boulders just like July. is is some peculiar country.

Gilbert Creek is brook trout water. e brookie is our only native trout, and technically a char, or cousin of the far more common rainbow and brown trout. e char is a sort of tough northern trout and includes lake trout, Dolly Varden and arctic char. Instead of dark spots on light bodies, as with trout, the char has light spots on dark bodies.

A Driftless brook trout is a peculiar sh in peculiar country.

And rare. e brookie inhabits the coldest, cleanest creeks. is is my little Gilbert, where y casting is tough. e water is only 20 feet wide, and by midsummer the banks are overhung with that great y-snagger, foxtail grass. Nothing has ever been cut back or improved. You have to be good with the rod or you’ll spend your day in the trees. But if you pay attention there are “lanes” where cottonwoods tower above and approaching carefully you will catch sh.

A big brook trout is eight inches. But in my home creek I know where a pod of bigger sh lives, in a pool above a beaver dam. I once took a 15-inch brookie here. at’s a lot of sh in a little creek.

I had always passed up this pool. Walking by one afternoon I saw a splash. Casting from the branchtangled dam I let a light Hendrickson oat along that deep, oily-dark water. Boring shing. And standing in the sun, hot shing. en the explosion. A big brookie rocketed from the depths, seized the y, and splashed down. I almost dropped my rod. I didn’t think there were sh in there. Shows you what I know.

When you visit a creek every few days you change the way you sh. My home creek asked me to slow down and I did. I’ve found where deer bedded, the ground still warm. I’ve seen and heard the pileated woodpecker, a crazy, red-crested bird bigger than a crow. I watched ducklings snap up skitter bugs like popcorn, their mother paddling behind. I discovered the wreck of an old bridge, hidden by big cottonwoods, the limestone blocks tumbled into the stream, where there is good shing. I’ve had butter ies land on my hand and stepped carefully past lady slipper orchids and yellow touch-me-nots and I’ve watched ruby-throated hummingbirds feed on honeysuckle blossoms.

I never see anglers, but one day a pair of men wearing high-end waders and carrying expensive rods surprised me. I stood in the water over a bubbling run working a dry y, an Adams with barred wings. After 20 casts I had caught nothing. But the pleasure of seeing the y drift along, the unhurried pace of the water, the perfection of the drift kept me there. e men stomped right to the edge of the high bank and stared in. at isn’t going to help anything.

“Caught any trout?” one demanded.

“Can’t say I have.”

He took o a red baseball cap. at wasn’t helping him, either. “Nothing much going on here, is there?” He wiped his forehead with a sleeve.

“Nope.” I threw another delicate cast. “It’s pretty, though.” ere’s lonesomeness, too. Happiness brings it on.

“We’re going to the Whitewater,” he said, referring to a big, well-known river an hour south. His y rod looked about 10 feet long. “I’m tired of getting hung up in branches.” O they trudged, grumbling.

After a couple of more casts, I saw a splash, and my y vanished. I brought the rod tip sharply up and had him. Letting the sh run I checked for my neighbors, then led him into the net, a ne 12-inch, duskybacked brook trout. Nope, nothing going on here.

I don’t always sh. Sometimes I just look. Or sh and look. Or sit on logs fallen across the water and wait for something to happen. A hatch maybe, or the “roll” of a big, opportunistic trout. Sometimes you let the shing come to you.

Far upstream, tipped over in a glen of maidenhead ferns lies a big old log, bark long gone, white and butter smooth. Here I eat my peanut butter sandwich. I can stretch out on the log and with the buzz of ies and bees fall asleep. And I mean really sleep, and have dreams, waking beside my fairyland creek to the sound of running water, the sun ickering through oak leaves, a sort of dream in itself.

I made friends with the farmer who owns much of the land. Also with the farmer’s German Shepherd, although we started o on the wrong foot. One evening I heard him crashing around, enjoying himself. He burst through the weeds and seeing me in the water jumped about ve feet straight up. He ran o in an absolute panic and no amount of whistling slowed him down. Since then, we kissed and made up. Or he kissed me, I should say. If he sees my truck, he joins me creekside. He is very quiet, sitting well-away and watching me cast, tipping his great black face quizzically as I hook and release another sh. He’s a good trout dog.

I think of a lifelong friend now gone. Taken way too soon. We started together, two 10-year-olds catching bullheads with pistol-grip rods and push-button reels. He loved to sh more than anyone I ever met. An expert y caster, I can still see him holding a big trout. “What a trout!” he cries in that high voice, holding the sh up for me to see. So long, old pal.

Last June a hundred-year storm tore through Gilbert Valley, dropping trees, blowing out beaver dams, gouging new channels. I was heartbroken. All the old sweet spots were gone, the familiar quickrunning curves and sure- re pools. But the storm also ushed away mud the way miners uncover gold, through high-pressure hydraulics. e exposed gravel became prime spawning habitat. is fall I’ve been catching (and releasing) a ton of brightly colored brookies, spawning males. e color on dorsal ns has to be seen to be believed, a sort of neon orange. Call it Brook Trout Orange. ere’s a reason for everything, the storms, the color on a brook trout, which you might think would doom the sh to the rst heron that sees it. Yet he survives to spawn. e river takes care of its own. e river is taking care of me.

So no, I don’t want to go to Alaska. Not this summer. Maybe some day.

Right now, I like my home creek. It took a long time to get to know her. And I still don’t really know her. Every day brings another mood I somehow missed, another silken run I haven’t fully appreciated, another lovely curve.

Her essence remains an intoxicating mystery. We are still talking about the creek, aren’t we? S

Dick Donnelly has appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal, e Fly sh Journal, e Drake and others. He spends more days shing and hunting than working, and it shows.