Bad News.

The Susquehanna on its northern most branch. Where I'd stay weekends in a small camper with my grandparents and cook baked potatoes and sweet corn in tinfoil under coals of cherry wood, waiting for the leaves to start turning on the silver maples and sycamores and fall off into the slackwater pools along the shore. That's where the legend of this river begins for me, in those first footsteps of mine through the end of summer sandy mud, footsteps I will hopefully continue to walk as long as the river runs.



Those memories I have of long summers on the river when I was young fishing for bass with my gramps is a tradition my friends and I still live within. It is, in a way, our own little piece of American passtime culture. Every afternoon we have free, every morning we're not working, every night that the water may somehow summon us to it's shores; we fish, drifting down the channel casting towards either shore in hopes that maybe this is the morning or afternoon or night when we hook into that fish you spend a lifetime chasing, a fish that will no doubt take a lifetime to catch.



I could get into the rigs we use, the color schemes and weights and rod action preferrable when considering the height and clarity of the river and the species being angled, but those details are mostly irrelevant to the experience of the water rushing around your waist as you wade out onto a rocky point, in the middle of July, feeling as though this very well might be the absolute middle of the world.





I constantly find myself wondering if fishing is really about catching fish. Is it really about the first, the biggest, or the most? Or is it about the time we rolled the canoe over on an unexpected boulder in the first rapid section through the Harding stretch, or the time I forgot my keys in Mike's truck at the access we launched (we couldn't unlock my truck at the access we landed at), or throwing horseshoes around lunchtime at the island just upstream from Coxton Yards. I think that the fish you catch may be something to talk about, but whether you catch fish or not hardly makes you a fisherman. It's being on the water or in the water laughing and collecting stories that you share when the waders are drying out. But somehow, as any fisherman knows, a good story is always one about a good fish, whether you caught it or not.













Spin-fisherman. Bait cans and jigheads and crankbaits and bullet sinkers and two-way swivels. If I don't show up with beer I get scolded. And when we fish, it usually turns out that we fight over how many everyone really caught. In our boat, the difference between twelve and thirteen is the difference between a ride and a long walk up the mountain. Now that's friendship. And even moreso, that's fishing.





We ran into a fly fishing guide once leaving a good smallmouth stretch to eat his lunch as we were backing down the ramp to drop our boat. He played the role perfectly--expensive rod (dark cane), expensive vest (fully loaded), expensive waders (rather stylish), fake bugs covering his floppy Rocky Mountain fly fishing hat, and a cool, serious swagger as he approached us unloading our vessel. He was a purist, and we were locals with a rickety ole' john boat. It was a balanced scene of confusion and territorial instinct.

"How'ya makin' out," we questioned him.

"Some good fish," he said, as if there are fish that aren't so good. "Do you boys know any other good stretches north of here that may be worth floating for the day?"

"Just about every square foot from here to the New York state line," we said, slamming the beer cooler into the boat.

He sneered, stuck his nose up in the air, tossed his split-cane 9-footer softly against his shoulder and thanked us for nothing as he walked up towards his truck. I believe he was from Allentown, scouting out some possible money-making tours of a river that has never whispered any secrets to him between casts.

"He buddy," I called out over the smoking growls of Mike trying to turn over the ole' Evenrude nine and a half. "You really shouldn't even waist your time any farther up this way."

"Oh, and why's that" he threatened.

"Cuz' we already caught every damn fish in this river anyway."