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They say if you get tired of the
weather in Iowa, just wait a couple of hours and it
will change.
Here in the southwestern portion
of what's called the Driftless Region, we have the
perennial opportunity to experience all four seasons,
whether we necessarily like them all or not. Having
lived in locales where the seasons are more or less a
blur, I've always felt our climate to be one of the
area's more charming attributes, though I admit that
some of our January and February days can push the
envelope in terms of "charm." If one isn't careful, a
few of our sultry July and August afternoons and
evenings can wilt one's spirit and the garden both.
And so on. Yet regardless of weather anomalies, I've
spent most of my adult life in Iowa, and it's the
most comfortable place I've ever lived, rather like
an old pair of jeans or a comfortable shirt I
suppose. Iowa is not particularly fancy.
I was born in central Minnesota,
and the Minnesota border is only twenty miles north
of us. I like that, too. Wisconsin, just forty miles
east across the Mississippi River, is brimming with
thousands of miles of trout water. And the Black
Hills of South Dakota, another area with excellent
trout water and spectacular scenery, is but a short
ten-hour jaunt to the northwest. The last two times
we've been there, we left early in the morning and I
was fishing Rapid Creek by late in the afternoon on
that same day.
The population of Iowa does not
quite exceed three million people. Some years ago we
lived in California, and we had three million people
living on our street. I guess it would be safe to say
I prefer Iowa's more generous dose of open spaces and
fewer inhabitants.
Fly fishermen often talk about
"seams" in moving water, those areas just alongside
riffle stretches in trout streams that aren't really
in the current, nor exactly out of it. Seams are the
little "in between" slots on the borders of fast and
slow water where trout often lie in wait for
something good to drift along. They're in range of
the current, which is generally carrying the food
sources, but they're not exactly in the
current either, the quieter seams being the
middle-ground, a much easier and less strenuous place
to hold.
Northeast Iowa is a seam of the
United States, but that's another subject.
If you fly fish regularly
throughout the year in the Driftless area, you'll
notice seams between the standard four seasons as
well. If you wanted to select a particular month that
seems most like spring, you might choose April. July
would be a common choice for summer, October for
autumn and perhaps January for winter. Yet there are
many variables and conflicting seasonal weather
patterns that blend into and out of each of the four
seasons, and these unusual days and weeks are
sometimes as interesting as the definitive seasons
themselves, if not more so.
At present, the trout fishing
season in Iowa is open year-round. For the record, if
I had to pick the very best and most reliable fly
fishing months of the year in northeast Iowa, they
would be April, June and October. August would be a
close fourth. If the trico mayflies are hatching well
on early August mornings, you can land a lot of trout
before you fish grasshoppers in the afternoon. This
past season, on the other hand, late summer floods
almost entirely took out the season's trico hatches,
so one never knows for certain what any given year
might bring along. T.S. Eliot says that "April is the
cruelest month," but Eliot was not a fly fisher.
April is the month of the Hendrickson hatch, arguably
our best mayfly hatch of the season. And just a few
short weeks later, June brings out the March Brown
and Gray Fox hatches. In October, the Blue Wing
Olives can be spectacular, as they were this year, in
many years a kind of grand finale to the
mayfly season before the advent of another Iowa
winter.
Aside from the high points, there
are times in which I can't catch a trout to save my
life. February, for example, has got to be one of the
most difficult months to catch trout in northeast
Iowa that I've ever experienced. I've experienced
February fly fishing in northeast Iowa for eighteen
years now, and I haven't changed my mind about it
yet. One February not long ago, I went fishing three
times and caught two trout. I caught the two trout on
one outing, and got skunked on the other two. The
reason I only got out three times was because the
roads were so bad I couldn't get anywhere, much less
park in a safe location. The water is at its coldest
point of the year in February, and even on balmier
days the fish can be quite torpid.
Even so, it was great fun at least
trying.
A couple of weeks ago, in
mid-November, I went out to a nearby stream to try my
luck. It was cold and windy, though it didn't quite
feel wintry yet, in part I suppose because
we haven't had any snow. That will come soon enough.
Nonetheless it was a far cry from the balmy and
rather pleasant Blue Wing Olive afternoons of
October, when it occasionally reached sixty or
seventy degrees, you could fish until 7PM if you
liked and the trees were in their autumn beauty, as
the poet William Butler Yeats once wrote.
I had a heavier cane streamer rod
with me that day, not really built for dry flies,
much less diminutive ones. I caught a number of nice
trout on a streamer pattern, but continually saw
trout rise here and there to a very few
baetis on the water. I felt caught between
two worlds, or two seasons to be more accurate, not
really knowing whether to keep throwing streamers or
switch to a dry fly. Eventually I tied my leader down
to 7X and put on a small #20 Blue Wing Olive pattern,
and though the heavy rod was somewhat awkward, I
managed to land two rising trout on the only two
strikes I had on the dry fly. I guess I thought that
was fair enough, and as it got colder and the rises
stopped I went back to the streamer and caught a few
more fish. It was cold enough that the guides on my
rod were iced-up all afternoon long, and I was
pleased about the two trout I managed to catch on the
dry fly, not an easy task in cold, windy conditions
with a heavy rod.
And an outing or two after that
I'd again wished I'd brought along a lighter dry fly
rod, as there were enough rising trout to fish the
dry fly in earnest. I had already cleaned, waxed and
stored my three favorite split-cane dry fly rods away
for the winter, not wishing to expose them to
freezing conditions. I have a couple of heavier cane
rods for winter fishing, and that's the way it is.
The same thing often happens to me late in February
and early in March, but I make do with the rod I
happen to have along then, too.
I have divided the following
essays roughly by way of seasons, though I haven't
thought at all so much of "odes" to the seasons. It
just so happens that I enjoy fishing all year long,
and certain occurrences and thoughts simply fall into
various seasons by default. On two or three
occasions, essays are placed within certain seasons
for no other reason than that's when I happened to be
thinking about them.
Winter is a great time for
thinking in northeast Iowa, along with its sister
arts of tying flies and reading.
This volume also contains a short
group of poems, most of which have something to do
with moving water or things experienced and
considered while out on the water. I believe that
they were all written, without exception, at our
kitchen table overlooking the woods along our
neighborly stretch of the Upper Iowa River. Last
summer I landed a seventeen-inch smallmouth bass a
couple of hundred yards from that same kitchen
window. I hope the reader will not mind the
occasional abstraction within the selection of poems,
perhaps at times a result of the fish outside the
window.
When I got home from the river
that evening, darkness had fallen and there wasn't a
breath of wind in the humid Augustan Driftless air.
We left at two in the morning for Rapid Creek near
Silver City, South Dakota, with brimming mugs of
coffee and hardly a care in the world. Every now and
again I think that's perfectly all right.
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