The power of fly fishing lies not with its practitioners, writers, pundits, chest beaters, equipment manufacturers, or even its high modulus rods.

Fly fishing is something we engage in for reasons of fun or sanity instead of revenue or food gathering, so in other words, it’s an emotional thing, which allows us significant latitude when we talk about it.
Home waters are a state of mind – not GPS coordinates.

He lives miles away, but he’s on his home waters.

For example, the concept of “home water” clearly isn’t geographic in nature, but a matter of the heart.

One fly fisherman can tell another his “home waters” are literally halfway around the globe, and the second fly fisherman won’t bat an eye.

That’s because his “home waters” are a five hour drive to the north (the last ten miles on dirt roads), and while humanity is generally poor at accepting alien perspectives, fly fishermen do sometimes make worthwhile exceptions.

That’s why I tend to seek out smaller, wilder waters even though I live on a beautiful freestoner. It’s not because blueline fishing is “easy” (for the record, nothing’s easy when you’re fishing from your knees or crawling through bushes).

It’s because the fishing is – to leverage a pair of overused words – intimate and predatory at the same time, a combination I find irresistible.

A Brown Trout just after he made a mistake.

Which leads us to the latest small stream experience (not the fictional version posted here), where I invited an old friend along to serve as bait for the hordes of mosquitoes while I fly fished.

It only partially worked.

In fact, it didn’t work at all; the mosquitoes were on us like makeup on a politician the second we opened the truck doors, and I’m not even going to try and describe the horrific events that followed when I whizzed in the woods prior to throwing on my waders.

I’m having a flashback just writing about it.

Keith quickly doused himself in gallons of his vintage Muskol repellent – a product made from 100% Deet. A highly effective mosquito repellent, it’s become clear that DEET works by altering your DNA to the point that mosquitoes no longer recognize you as a mammal.

That reduces the number of bites by a considerable portion, but your friends will wonder why you’ve got another hand growing out of your elbow.

It’s a trade off, but when the payoff is a small stream, a lot of trick casts, and a few willing brown trout, I’ll take mutation any day.

The fishing itself wasn’t dramatic, but it was – for want of a better term – pure. The casting was difficult, the fish gorgeous, and the setting unreally pretty.

Can you see him?

I rarely see photographs of myself fly fishing (I’m usually taking the pictures), but when most every picture shows you hunched behind a bush or casting from your knees, you realize you’re reverting from “civilized behavior” (which isn’t very civilized at all) into a predator – without really noticing it.

The result was a fishing trip where you stop your pursuit of trout every few minutes to appreciate what you’ve submerged yourself in, and even then you still can’t quite grasp it.

Sometimes it’s almost as if you’re an actor in an unbelievably boring (to the world), wildly perfect movie, as if perfection can’t be achieved in every day life.

The fishing was largely good, though like most small streams, it turned on and off suddenly.

We arrived a little too early, and one run yielded exactly nothing. Two hours later we passed the same run, this time mining it for six pretty brown trout.

It’s easy to fall for the hype (anti-hype?) that small stream fish are dumb and easy – eating everything that floats by – but the truth lies pretty far from that statement.

Like anything almost perfectly in tune with their environment, they dance to a tune that us clumsy, smelly humans have largely forgotten (or are simply ignoring).

I can’t explain it in explicit terms, but it’s clear I’ve become fascinated with pictures of brown trout parts. Like most trout, they’re more colorful than they’d seemingly need to be, and while I won’t say I’m tired of rainbow trout, I can say the brightly colored brown trout offer a nice break from silver.

What color exactly would you call that?

Sure, he’s upside down, but check out the colors.

Wave good-bye.

The fishing itself was alternately too hard, too easy, too frustrating and too overwhelming to write about.

Befitting our shared status as geezers, Keith fished an old Fenwick HMG fly rod (8.5′ 5wt), while I dragged out my old-style Diamondglass 8′ 5wt – a rod so sweet you could descend into a diabetic coma just by waving it.

Authentic Geezer Gear (I’m starting a new fly fishing line by that name)

And I won’t even bore you with fly selection (though Humpies are our friends).

The bite was damned slow in the morning, but picked up midday. In truth, you don’t need high-end gear or boxes of flies to fish a small stream, but you’d better come equipped with a good roll cast and a great deal of accuracy.