CONVERGENCE
WORDS BY JOHN GIERACH PA I N T I N G B Y B O B W H I T E
Self-Taught My friend Vince and I had split up along a stretch of river we both like. Right at the turnout where we’d parked, there’s a long, broken run with small mid-river slicks and fishy eddies against the banks. A short walk upstream past a featureless riffle, there’s another run with broad, glassy slicks and narrow channels where the trout never seem to hold in the same place twice, so it always seems like new water. In our personal mythology, the lower run is easier to fish than the upper one, although that doesn’t always prove out in practice. Each spot can be worth a few hours if the trout are biting—and if they’re biting in one place, they’re likely to be biting in the other—so it’s the ideal setup for two fishermen who like to fish alone while fishing together. We could see a few rising trout from where we were standing above the river, which suggested that once you got down there for a closer look, you’d probably spot others. Sometimes there’s more discussion about who should start where, but this time Vince took charge with a firm, “Why don’t you start here and I’ll go upstream.” Fine with me. Our unspoken agreement has always been, whoever has the stronger opinion wins. Once I’d picked my way down to the water through a stretch of ankle-twisting riprap, I saw that there were, in fact, more rises than we’d seen from the road; a few tight to bankside rocks and a few other quiet takes in broken water that were hard to spot even up close. The trout were picking at a sparse mixed hatch of small mayflies, both about a size 20, that I took to be Olives and Red Quills. I’ve come to believe that trout key on size first and then on behavior, with silhouette and color coming in last, so I thought a size 20 Adams parachute would be nondescript enough to split the difference. T R O U T
F A L L
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