I sit on the river's edge and wait for the rise, but it hasn't shown up yet. The silence is broken only by bird calls, the hum of insects, or the cow in the field who hasn't stopped watching me since I stumbled through the vernal brush, flourishing and thorny. The warm spring evening sinks me deeper into the banks, banks that already lack space on them due to the high waters caused by the recent melt and the fluctuation of the dam across the border into Montana. It is here that I scribble down some words–a poem, a stream for my consciousness to meander about between the stones, through the blades of grass, to the tops of the evergreens. Yet, it all comes back to the river.

Jim Harrison writes in the opening page to his memoir Off to the Side, “moving water is forever in the present tense, a condition we rather achingly avoid”. As referenced in the past by numerous writers, the river is a verb, constantly in action, constantly moving, constantly alive. There is the movement of the water, the decaying dead things, the fish that feed our obsession, the change of sediment, the deer that drinks not fifty yards from me with its feet dug deep into the muddy bottom of the Kootenai. And under the slow moving foam, in the unclear and slightly brown waters, are trout waiting as patiently as I am.

I have been on the water’s edge for almost an hour at this point and have not laid out my line once, yet I have filled many pages. Maybe, I think, just maybe today I am fishing for words, and if that is the case, the words sure are biting today. I was hoping to match the hatch today, the end of my tippet still naked after all this time with a full fly box–elk hair caddis, Adams, BWO’s, ants–freshly tied and waiting for their maiden voyage into a smooth running seam. I could just tie on a #16 Adams and have at it but I decided today was a day that I would have patience and I would play the hatch. It gives me the opportunity to get out of the house, to sit in nature and absorb it, to work on one of a million different writing projects I have, to observe the early May that has decided to stay dry and warm.

Yet as the hands continue to race on my watch, I am drawn to the thought of my wife and my child. It is not like they need me at this moment, but every minute that I sit and absorb the beauty that surrounds me is another minute that the toddler could be causing mayhem for her. With a sigh, I decide it is time to pack away my Granger 8642 back into its tube and put my favorite reel I own, a pre-1958 J.W. Young Beaudex that sings so nicely when you pull the line out.

Then, a single rise ten feet from the shore.

I roll over and army crawl to the edge of the bank before it drops into the slightly overblown section of the Kootenai and I observe. There is a disturbance in the waters, little plops. The nymphs had hatched and something was emerging. Another. And another. More and more. Most make it out alive, but the trout have been woken and the feeding frenzy is on. I reach out my hand and, after the third attempt, manage to snag one of the flies. Upon unraveling my fingers, I see a small blue-winged olive #18 or smaller. I crack open the fly box I brought and quickly tie on the smallest BWO emerger pattern I have. On hands and knees, I crawl a bit down river with my bamboo rod in hand, net tucked into the back of my pants.

The banks are overgrown; the river high. There is no way that I could manage a good back cast in these conditions, but I had planned for this. One of the many things that this 8642 is good for is the roll cast. I get in about shin deep into the cold river and unfurl a good fifteen feet of line into waters while I pull out another ten or so to shoot out with the roll cast. I have one chance at this, I think to myself, even though I definitely have more considering how vicious the feed is.

The roll cast is done by using the water's surface tension to generate power to send the line out. With the line in the water, you lift the rod slowly and the line creates a sort of D shape as it hangs behind your rod. With a bit left in the water as an anchor, you perform the forward cast using a swift but smooth motion forward towards your target.

The fly lands perfectly into the foam (foam is home) and the drift is nice and slow with the current. As the emerger pattern gets closer to me, I prepare for another roll cast.

And then, an eruption–the fly gets slammed.

I set the hook and the fish takes off towards the middle of the river and then quickly downstream. I turn and play the fish. I fight it in the current, the bamboo bending down to the cork. It is not a big one, but it is one that is bigger than I have caught in a while. This way and that, I let the fish run. It jumps out of the water a bit, and I can see that it is a long but thin Kootenai River rainbow trout shimmering in the setting sun. The fish and I are the verbs in the river now as we tussle and tumble, fight and pull. It might not be the biggest fish I have had on the end of a fly line but it sure is fighting like it. I pull it back into the slower water below me, and within a minute, the nineteen inch native trout is resting in my net. I place it down on shore to unhook it as I will be taking this one home for dinner. It is a stocked trout as the colors are weak, the fish is thin, and the flesh is very light in color as I clean it.

You get to know a fish when you have hooked it, played it, and you cradle it in your hand and take notes of its markings, its eyes, its life–a loosely held moment between you and a small god. And though this trout was a stocker, he sure was a fighter. And he sure was hungry for a mayfly.

I scramble my way back up the hillside that I stumbled down earlier, pack up my gear, and drive out of this sacred, little known spot on the river. While I am gone, the river will continue. The cycle of life that allows me to step into a new river each and every time that I visit persists, and will always persist. Ted Leeson once wrote that “fly fishing is a matter of faith, and like all faiths, it contains a central miracle: the rise of a trout to a dry fly”. Hell, there is Maclean's opening line to A River Runs Through It, “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”

I arrive back home, prepare the trout, and I let my wife and son enjoy the fruits of my labor. But labor is the wrong word here. To the river, I am a supplicant, and my entreaty at the banks will provide fruit.

As long as they are biting, that is.

Tight lines out there, friends.