Mucking Around the North Branch Raritan

With the amber polarized glasses I used for redfish on South Carolina Lowcountry flats, I saw a swarm of trout near the timber photographed. I sat down to rig up my fly rod, when I saw a bald eagle swooping over the river between tree canopies. Naturally, once I suited up in waders to approach from the other side, I expected some action. I tied on an olive beadhead Wooly Bugger, since none rose. Temperatures cooled off today. The relatively heavy beadhead made casting with my 2 wt awkward, and none hit, so I switched to a little #16 beadhead nymph and casting improved dramatically, but no takers. None of the bait fishermen upstream had any, either.

I walked out, then went back in with my camera to get some shots midstream. And then I grabbed my stuff and headed downstream to a nice fast cut with enough depth to hold some trout. Nothing doing, I took a break with the camera. This got my juices flowing. I thought of the best time I've had on the North Branch Raritan here at AT&T World Headquarters, with my son during summer just mucking around, yet with a full presence of curiosity and many rewards in myriad discoveries of simple, ordinary nature, which--once we opened up to things--we found absolutely loaded with food for the senses.

This evening I got to thinking about the relationship between given nature and manmade development. I only touched on the thought. Since I landed a new job and today worked independently again at last, filling a role out there in the world, I naturally imagined what it might be like to be a developer, viewing land as something to clear cut and build on. And rather than my being a radical environmental type who feels this is always bad, I thought about how our need for taking nature and suiting it to ourselves also implies the need to know the nature we take.

I don't pity everyone who works behind walls all day, because some find plenty inspiration, challenge, and mental stimulus at desks, though I've witnessed many who don't. Get outside when you can, I offer. After all, everything we produce is nature rearranged, which isn't to say this is bad--as some radical types have claimed...want to live in a cave? It's to suggest that nature as is, is worth contemplating, immersing senses in and exploring. After all, studies show strong evidence that every original mind--the sort that finds ways to rearrange nature in new ways--spends time in nature just playing around with it, wondering and wandering randomly.

Dusk falling, I meant to pack it in and leave. I saw a second splash rise at the same spot, so I broke off the nymph and tried to tie on an Adams dry, failing to get the line through the tie loop without enough light. So then I packed out. Two youngsters stood where I had left them at the first spot I tried.

"Catch any?"

"No."