Top Five of ‘24
In the spirit of High Fidelity’s Top Fives, here are the Top Five essays I posted on my blog in 2024.
This website platform has a variety of site and page analytics that I can browse (they’re not too creepy, I promise) so I determined this list based on the average time spent on my each post. In other words, the following essays were the ones that readers looked at the longest; I assume this means that folks liked them enough to read them but maybe they were just so boring that whoever was reading just got up and walked away from their computer with the page still open.
In any case, here’s the list. Thanks so much for reading and/or leaving the page open.
Inspired while at home during Thanksgiving, I pieced together a collection of memories from the small brook that runs near the home where I grew up. This could be the single piece of water that I have spent the most time on in my life.
Not far from the house I grew up in, where my parents still live, is a small stream. It’s hardly a half-mile away, down the dirt road and slight hill that heads south out of the driveway. As a kid, I could race to the stream on my bike in a matter of moments, and be standing in front of, or in, the pool below the bridge a few seconds later. I’d love to know how many hours I’ve spent in, on, and around that stream, Jam Brook. Every time I see it, or hear it mentioned, or think of it, a flood of memories wash over me. In looking back on it all, I can now see how lucky I was to have such a ‘playground’ so close to home, just how formative the brook was for me, and how I’m still doing a lot of the same things now that I did in that stream as a boy…
The High, The Hangover & The Healing
Returning home from a four-day float on the Rogue River in southwest Oregon, I was faced with a sobering day of work but then a mid-week holiday. It was an up-and-down week, to be sure.
As an angler, I am extremely wary of absolutes but as a writer, I often work in the ambiguous, and instances when these two schools of thought collide are most intriguing to me. I think we all come across such moments but it could be that I’m especially disposed to discovering or discussing them. If it wasn’t clear by now, the title of my email newsletter is a direct play on this.
Having said all that, I will now say this: multi-day, overnight river float trips are the best thing you can do on the water. These trips have it all and bluntly challenge the assumption that too much of a good thing is a bad thing…
I’ve thought a lot about the particular moment in swung fly fishing when a fish takes the fly and what to do about it but never ‘researched’ it in a formal sense. This piece describes a recent encounter, what I did (and didn’t do), and what ‘the literature’ suggests.
We almost didn’t fish it, almost didn’t even get out of the truck and walk down the path to see what it looked like.
But we did.
It was our last spot of the day and for a reason I can’t quite remember - most likely the continued generosity from Andy - I fished it first. If we could’ve added 40 or 50 CFS to it, I think we would’ve but still, it look really good.
I started high in the run, with a short line, knowing that I’d be able to cover the whole thing pretty well and intending to do just that. Soon, I was casting to the other side, and started taking small steps downstream. Then, I reached the bucket…
Sometimes my stories come days, months, or even years after they actually happen. But other times, an idea for a story coincides with an upcoming trip; maybe the trip and the idea fuel one another. In any case, this was a fun day on the way, not only for the fishing itself but in the experiment of documenting my thoughts while they happened.
2:34 am: I wake and open my eyes. Looking at the window, it’s black outside, so I know that it’s before my alarm and before I need to get up. I roll over and crane my neck to check the time. It’s definitely too early to get up so I roll back over. Will I be able to fall back asleep? That’s always unfortunate when I wake up too early and then lie in bed trying to fall back asleep and then eventually start thinking about getting up and then start thinking about how I’m not sleeping and…
4:50 am: My alarm goes off and I immediately turn it off. I fell back asleep, so that’s good. Now I just need to get out of bed and I’ll be on my way. Which of the several tasks will I do first? Boil water for coffee. I get out of bed and head into the kitchen…
For years, a fishing friend and I have exchanged the phrase “You don’t know if you don’t go” over text or while chatting but it was a recent text from a different friend that sparked this piece.
If you don’t go fishing, you don’t see the water.
You don’t see the river, the creek, the stream, the bay, the flat, the pond, the riffle, the run, the pool, the hole, the chop, the cut, the bank, the bucket. You don’t see if it’s low and clear or if it’s in shape, if it’s glass-calm or frothing, if it’s nervous or if you are. You don’t see if it’s blown out, and you don’t get blown off, if you don’t go fishing.
If you don’t go fishing, you don’t see the slow rise in the bubble line on the far seam in the shade, or the forked tail wiggle in the humid air in the sun over the golden sand. You don’t see the splashy eat just at the edge of your line of sight and you don’t see the refusal on your favorite fly in front of the boat. You don’t spot the shadow of the fish you wanted to see, as the fish swims away, if you don’t go fishing…
