At some point Mr. Schwiebert lived on Elm Ridge Rd in Princeton NJ. I’ve often wondered if he spent any time fishing Stony Brook Creek, which meanders through that immediate area. It’s a cheeseball Trout stream by anybody’s standards, but to a world Trout and Salmon traveler it must have been especially disappointing. Still, it was right there out his front door. I’d have to think that he must have been tempted to wet a line. I only wonder because I’ve poked around the stream as a kid and I still cross it every day. I guess I’d like to think that he fished it and maybe we stomped the same ground and shared a tidbit of local knowledge. Who knows, maybe he knew of a few holes with cold water springs that could maintain a few holdovers.
PuducahMichael, as for describing a fish on…. I like Haig-brown's descriptions too. I feel like I'm chasing the steelhead down the river with him. I fall out of my chair slipping on boulders.
This thread got me to pull Remembrances off the shelf. It’s been too long. Homage to Henryville is a favorite. Thank's for the reminder!
I posted this before but that was a while ago… maybe someone new will see it and like it.
"The following excerpt from the closing speech at 2005 opening ceremonies at the American Museum of Fly Fishing typifies the eloquence of Ernie Schwiebert and his writings.
I will conclude with a story.
My obsession with fishing began in childhood, watching bluegills and pumpkinseeds and perch under a rickety dock, below a simple cedar-shingled cottage in southern Michigan. My obsession with trout began there too, when my mother drove north into town for groceries, and took me along with the promise of chocolate ice cream. We crossed a stream that was utterly unlike those near Chicago, fetid and foul-smelling, or choked with the silts of farm-country tillage. It flowed swift and crystalline over the bottom of ochre cobblestones and pebbles and like Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” it mysteriously disappeared into thickets of cedar sweepers downstream.
And a man was fishing there.
The current was smooth, but it tumbled swiftly around his legs. It was a different kind of fishing, utterly unlike watching a red-and-white bobber on a tepid childhood pond, with its lilypad and cattail margins, and its callings of redwinged blackbirds. His amber line worked back and forth in the sunlight, and he dropped his fly on the water briefly, only to tease it free of the current, and strip the moisture from its barbules with more casting. It seemed more like the grace of ballet than fishing.
And then the man hooked a fish.
My mother called to the angler, and gave me permission to run and see his prize. I remember getting my feet muddy and wet, with a Biblical plague of cockleburrs at my ankles, but it did not matter. The fish was still in the man’s landing met, and he raised it dripping and shining in his hand. It was a brook trout of six inches, its dorsal surfaces drak with blue and olive vermiculations, and its flanks clouded with dusky parr markings. Its belly and lower fins were a bright tangerine, with edgings of alabaster and ebony, and it glowed like a jeweler’s tray of opals and moonstones and rubies. I had witnessed something beautiful, and I wanted to be part of it.
People often ask why I fish, and after seventy-odd years, I am beginning to understand.
I fish because of Beauty.
Everything about our sport (and our cause in terms of TU) is beautiful. Its more than five centuries of manuscript and books and folios are beautiful. Its artifacts of rods and beautifully machined reels are beautiful. Its old wading staffs and split-willow creels, and the delicate artifice of its flies, are beautiful. Dressing such confections of fur, feathers and steel is beautiful, and our worktables are littered with gorgeous scraps of tragopan and golden pheasant and blue chattered and Coq de Leon. The best of sporting art is beautiful. The riverscapes that sustain the fish are beautiful. Our methods of seeking them are beautiful, and we find ourselves enthralled with the quicksilver poetry of the fish.
And in our contentious time of partisan hubris, selfishness, and outright mendacity, Beauty itself may prove the most endangered thing of all.
Ernest Schwiebert - 2005[5]"
Statistics: Posted by One&Duns — 01/10/17 23:18